As Toyota ramps up Japanese production on the Prius and projects a seven-month wait for new orders, it is now anticipating a similar reaction to the U.S. release of the model and searching for local capacity to fill orders in the model’s largest market.
Toyota is boosting production—and the image—of its star hybrid, the Toyota Prius. As the company celebrates big sales numbers for the just-released third-generation Prius in Japan, it is also fighting a publicity campaign in the US against competing green car technologies.
Are hybrid cars shedding their nerdy image, and moving into the automotive and cultural mainstream? If the comic writers and producers at The Casual Mafia have anything to do with it, the answer is yes. Steve Lutsk, an actor in the company, said, “Hip-Hop music is flooded with lyrics about Escalades, Hummers and Benzes. We thought it would be funny to have a song about a car that many would consider to be polar opposite."
Japanese carmakers are widely recognized as leading exporters of hybrid cars to the United States. But their key strategic advantage may become their ability to sell hybrid gas-electric vehicles to Japanese consumers.
The dismal economy is forcing companies, and individuals, to make tough decisions about what is essential, and what can get tossed aside to save a buck. In the past, car companies might have shelved green car technologies as nice-to-have but too expensive and not really critical. However, this time around, the world’s major automakers are holding firm to plans for hybrid gas-electric cars, pure electric vehicles, and other fuel-saving programs.
Toyota has confirmed its plans to produce a smaller less expensive hybrid car. "We are developing a low-priced hybrid vehicle like Honda's Insight," said Akihiko Otsuka, chief engineer of the third-generation Toyota Prius. "We are going to compete by expanding our hybrid-vehicle lineup to smaller hybrids, in the class of the...Yaris.
Seventy-five-point-three miles to the gallon! That was enough to win the 2010 Toyota Prius fuel economy competition that stacked 28 auto journalists against one another in Yountville, Calif. Akihiko Otsuka, the chief engineer of the 2010 Prius, was on hand to watch the contestants break way past 50 mpg. The journalists averaged 69.9 mpg on the 33.8 course.
“Hybrid affordability” is the catch phrase for the week. Just days after Honda announced a base price of $19,800 for the new 2010 Honda Insight, making it the least expensive hybrid to be sold in the US, Japan’s Nikkei business daily reports that Toyota plans to counter with a cheaper new hybrid model of its own.
Toyota announced today that combined sales of Toyota and Lexus gas-electric vehicles in the United States topped the 1 million mark. This comes just one day after Ford announced that the 100,000th Ford hybrid SUV rolled off the assembly line of the company’s Kansas City assembly plant—and one month after Honda announced that it had sold more than 300,000 hybrids worldwide.
A new study conducted by Carnegie Mellon University says that plug-in hybrids with 40 miles of all-electric range are less cost-effective than hybrids with smaller battery packs. This follows other recent reports of disappointing mileage from plug-in hybrid testing fleets.
When gas prices spiked above $4 last summer, Toyota couldn’t keep up with demand for the gas-electric Prius. When the company begins selling the third-generation 2010 Toyota Prius in a few weeks, the price will be about half the level of last year’s peak. Does this worry Jim Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales USA? That’s what we asked him last month in Detroit. See our exclusive video interview.
Toyota is probably preparing to roll out an advertising campaign to promote the new 2010 Toyota Prius. But based on our retrospective of the coolest, most outrageous and sometimes offensive Prius ads—real and spoofed—Toyota will have a tough time outdoing past commercials.
President Barack Obama will fulfill a campaign pledge today by telling the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its rejection of California’s rules to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions. In practical terms, if the waiver is now granted, automakers will have to comply with new, more stringent rules that cut fuel consumption across the vehicles they sell in California and other states.
On January 12, 2009, Toyota unveiled the 2010 Toyota Prius to journalists at the Detroit Auto Show. That night, Toyota threw a party for 50 of the world's biggest Prius fans, who took their first look at the third-generation 2010 Toyota Prius. The Prius fans literally threw themselves at the vehicle, testing each feature, crawling underneath, and heaping praise on the new design.
In the first half of 2008, the Toyota Prius was selling like hotcakes. But sales considerably cooled off as gas prices dropped in the last months of the year. As a result, Toyota is now offering tried-and-true dealer incentives, and customer perks, to stimulate sales. This could be one of the best times to buy a Toyota Prius.
While major carmakers have dragged their heels on delivering the next big breakthrough on fuel efficiency, the plug-in hybrid, a small group of California entrepreneurs and innovators have made it possible for consumers to convert existing hybrids into plug-in cars running mostly on electricity. Yet, later this week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) is expected to adopt new regulations that could put many of those conversion companies out of business.
The 2010 Toyota Prius, officially unveiled this morning at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show, will break the 50-mpg mark. The third-generation Prius is bigger and more powerful—but will become the only vehicle in the United States that offers combined mileage greater than 50 miles per gallon.
Toyota is secretly developing a car powered by solar cells mounted on the vehicle’s roof, according to a report today from Japan’s Nikkei newspaper. The report said the automaker hopes the vehicle will eventually be totally powered by the solar cells—but that would take many years.
Visual details of the 2010 Toyota Prius are revealed in a new video posted on YouTube. The video depicts Blue Man Group, the idiosyncratic trio of performers, exploring features of the redesigned quintessential hybrid.
Even the mighty Toyota Prius has fallen victim to economic chaos and plunging gas prices: Toyota said today it was postponing its plans to build the Prius at a new factory under construction in Blue Springs, near Tupelo, Mississippi—indefinitely.
The EPA and Energy Department this week issued its 2009 fuel economy guide. Hybrids, once again, dominate the top of the list with five of the six most efficient vehicles. The 2009 Toyota Prius is the leader with ratings of 48 mpg in the city and 45 on the highway.
Last week, HybridCars.com took a drive through Reykjavik in one of 10 hydrogen-fueled Toyota Prius hybrids, offered as part of Hertz’s Reykjavik rental fleet. Available for around $300 a day, the hydrogen-powered Priuses make for an intriguing drive through the spectacular landscapes around Reykjavik.
As new hybrids from Honda and General Motors vie for a future piece of the growing green car market, rumor has it that Toyota could counterpunch by launching a family of Prius-branded automobiles.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has come under fire from the United Auto Workers over his daughter's Toyota Prius—and how exactly she paid for it. McCain originally told The New York Times that he had purchased the imported hybrid sedan for daughter Meghan, but recently changed his tune in an interview with a local Detroit newscast, saying that she "bought it, I believe, herself."
Toyota has always been a patient company that plans for the long term. After 10 years and countless billions of dollars, its efforts to dominate the market for hybrid cars continue to pay off.
Less than a month after a dealer starting taking deposits for delivery of plug-in hybrid Priuses, that dealer is now returning them to the customers. Toyota clamped down on the plan, which the dealer—Magnussen’s Toyota of Palo Alto, Calif.—said was simply a way of responding to customers who wanted to make sure they were first in line for the promised plug-ins.
Magnussen’s Toyota of Palo Alto, Calif., took the bold step of starting to take $500 deposits for 2010 plug-in Priuses—even before a grid-capable Prius has been announced as an official product. Eric Doebert, business development manager for Magnussen’s, said, "It makes sense that people should get in line now in order to have a shot of even taking delivery in the first year that the vehicle is available."
Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe told reporters in Tokyo yesterday that fleet tests of an experimental Prius, modified to be rechargeable, will be moved up to late next year from 2010. Bob Lutz, General Motors product czar, told reporters at a press event that its plug-in hybrid, the Chevy Volt, “wasn’t even comparable” to a Prius converted to plug into the electric grid. The race continues.
In recent years, the State of California has become the unofficial capital of plug-in hybrid technology. But proposed certification standards from the California Air Resource Board (CARB) could create an obstacle for small companies selling plug-in hybrid conversion kits.
In early July, various print and online media announced that Toyota would offer a rooftop solar panel as an option on the next generation Prius due in 2010. Some hybrid fans got excited about the possibility of on-board solar energy generation, while solar power and automotive experts cast the news aside as fluff.
The American automobile industry is very large and very complex. In a recent conference held in Las Vegas, David Kiley of BusinessWeek and Peter De Lorenzo of Autoextremist.com tried to make sense of it. They talked about cars that run on green beans, vapor and tinsel marketing, and dying roses.
A sobering reminder of the hazards in adding plug-in capabilities to hybrids comes from reports that a plug-in Prius conversion was destroyed in a fire. The news spread quickly through the online community of plug-in enthusiasts, bringing calls for all known information to be publicized as quickly as possible.
With gasoline topping $4 a gallon, hybrids are so hot that the auto industry can’t produce enough to satisfy demand. Carmakers point to a shortage of battery packs, but auto battery expert Menahem Anderman told HybridCars.com that the real shortage is a “shortage of planning.”
Despite the current mad rush for fuel-efficient vehicles, sales of the most popular hybrid car, the Toyota Prius, are unlikely to mushroom this year. In fact, most dealers in Toyota’s western region are out of stock. “Unless Toyota sends a lot more cars, we’re going to see Prius wait lists spin out again to about six months,” said Toby Parks, sales managers at Toyota of Berkeley, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Unless you have limitless amounts of money to spend on gasoline, buying an SUV recently has proven to be a losing gamble on oil prices staying low. And the pain doesn't end at the pump—resale values of SUVs and light trucks have dropped precipitously with the increase in gas prices. Hybrid owners on the other hand, have seen their used Priuses' residual values go up just as dramatically as those of the gas-guzzlers have fallen.
For years, sporadic anecdotes about hybrid battery failures have been reported by individual hybrid drivers. But finally, the automakers are reporting the first numbers about the likelihood of batteries failing after the warranty expired.
This week, Toyota will raise the price of a few of its cars, including a $400 hike on the Toyota Prius and a bump on the Camry Hybrid by $300. But in the past four weeks, the average price of regular gasoline increased by almost 30 cents a gallon. Therefore, in actual ownership costs, the price of Toyota hybrids is cheaper this week than it was a month ago. Welcome to the new hybrid math.
In a personality shift that would make Madonna jealous, the hybrid gas-electric vehicle is being transformed from ecoweenie-mobile to lean green crime-fighting machine. Law enforcement departments across the country are considering the use of hybrid vehicles as police cruisers.
After speaking with a “well-placed Toyota source,” Edmunds’s Auto Observer is reporting a few details about the third-generation Prius, due out in 2009. The quintessential hybrid will be bigger, faster, and more fuel-efficient.
When Jim Press was the top executive for Toyota USA, he said that the Japanese government never directly aided the company in the development of the Toyota Prius. Now, as president of Chrysler, he says that the Prius had 100 percent government backing. Why would Mr. Press flip-flop?
Toyota and Honda plan to significantly step up production in order to keep up with the global demand for hybrid vehicles.
ZAP, the California-based electric car maker, is teaming up with Colorado-based Hybrids Plus to offer plug-in conversion systems for the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape Hybrid.
A mock ad for the Toyota Prius depicts a hybrid driver soliciting the services of a prostitute. The clever piece of "culture-jamming" simultaneously mocks the self-righteous tendencies of hybrid drivers and subverts the do-good jingoism of corporations pushing their so-called green wares.
Lexus will introduce a hybrid wagon, based on the hybrid architecture of the next-generation Prius, at the 2009 Detroit Auto Show, according to a report from Motor Trend.
California-based OEMtek says it can outfit a Prius with a bigger battery pack and double its fuel economy to more than 100 miles per gallon—for a cost of $12,500.
One of the industry’s top contenders in the race to manufacture more powerful next-generation batteries for the auto industry has integrated a lithium ion battery into a Toyota Prius. EnerDel, based in Indianapolis, Ind., exhibited the research vehicle with the new battery pack at the International Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS-23) in Anaheim, California.
In an ironic twist, one of the cleanest running cars on the road, the Toyota Prius, is having trouble passing the Georgia emissions test. This problem was first reported in April, 2007. Prius owners have become dumbfounded and frustrated over the ordeal.
via Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 28, 2007
Toyota unveiled visual design concepts for their next hybrids at the 2007 Geneva International Motor Show.
When an unknown musician becomes an overnight sensation with a runaway hit album, expectations for the follow-up release often rise to unrealistic levels. Toyota faces similar anticipation from loyal fans waiting for the next-generation Prius.
The Toyota Prius will be celebrating its 10th anniversary later this year. Looking back to the birth of the Prius, the engineers behind the vehicle were apprehensive about being able to achieve what appeared to be an impossible goal. But that task may be child’s play compared to the next 10 years for the Prius.
