Barrier to entry has just been lowered drastically by open sourcing those patents. It's not about charity at all, it's about creating a market. By opening these patents to possible competitors, they are helping other companies enter the EV space. Toyota wants to dominate the EV vertical, but there needs to be more people buying them long-term for them to make a crap-ton of money. This is their way of helping create the market for the future.
It's not exactly customer acceptance they're after. Cars are a market where there will always be some kind of competitor. Toyota knows it's one of the few great automakers in the world; they're not sweating that someone might out-Toyota them. But there needs to be advances in technology and manufacturing to lower the cost of EVs, so more people will buy them. Toyota could try to take the brunt of that gamble (assuming they even succeed), or it can open up its tech and let rivals try to build better tech, which they can then reverse-clone, like IBM making a clone of an IBM PC clone. Once the tech is more widespread and cheaper (and other people have paid for this to happen), they can swoop in and reap the benefits of an even larger share of people to whom they can sell cars.
It seems a little strange as well, but maybe it's something like this:
I know I will dominate in an environment where EVs are popular, the only problem is, there isn't enough infrastructure for them to be popular yet. Therefore, I will facilitate an environment where they are popular?
It being a way to make standards is definitely possible. And the cost to using the standards is you can’t patent troll one another like apple/Samsung. It sounds like a kind of patent troll firewall. It’d probably be difficult for a troll to sue them for anything related to these patents.
