You mean American consumers. Toyota still has to consider the rest of the world while America is basically a shrinking market now.

The US market is still large enough for Toyota to build several models that are sold only in North America. The Japanese market is also slowly shrinking due to demographic changes.

Yes, the famously meaningless US consumer…

The US is roughly 30% of the world’s car spending, and if Toyota made a car only for the rest of the world, it would be more expensive than a competitor’s platform which is sold in EV and non-EV forms everywhere. An EV is still more expensive than the equivalent ICE and it would be even more expensive if it doesn’t share a platform.

An EV built on a dedicated platform doesn’t become more profitable than the shared platform version until it sells about two million copies. That’s because it costs $1B more in fixed costs for a dedicated EV manufacturing setup. If that car isn’t going to sell that many, it’s not worth making dedicated. In Europe EVs are still outsold by ICE 4 to 1. Even if I did sell two million copies, all you have done is recouped your $1B, not made any more profit than if you did the shared platform.