They innovated with the Prius but long ago decided not to go the pure EV route and have pushed hydrogen. I had a chance to ask Obama's former secretary of energy Steve Chu about this about 12 years ago and he says Toyota engineers privately told him a major concern was that BEV require too much behavioral chance from consumers. We've grown accustomed to a process where the energy to travel 300+ miles can be added at a convenient time and take no more than a few minutes, and they concluded it was too risky to commit their business to a technology that requires drivers to change their habits. Even "fast" DC charging can't match the rate at which filling a vehicle with hydrogen or a liquid fuel adds range.
Chu felt this concern had merit and Toyota's response was to develop hydrogen rather than BEVs, which would at least be perceived as helpful to meeting climate goals (like every automaker their goal is to sell cars at a profit and not "save the planet," so whether or not hydrogen is fossil fuel in disguise is somewhat immaterial to their corporate calculus).
At the time Chu's own response to this specific concern was to back research into advanced battery technologies that might result in breakthrough increases in charging rate.
At this point, it looks like we've neither seen a game-changing improvement in battery charging time or truly "green" at-scale generation of hydrogen as an energy carrier, so neither way of trying to bypass that limit of BEVs has so far panned out. So for Toyota, there's a self-interested motive to generate analyses that portray hybrids as a wiser choice than BEVs in order to portray their decision not to develop their own line of BEVs as the true "green" option.
This is why independent analyses are more trustworthy than breakdowns given by a corporation selling a product or promoted by their surrogates.
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