Toyota rules the hybrid world with the Prius, the best-selling hybrid on the planet. It’s the car that changed our minds about hybrid technology. But Toyota is far behind in the race to get a PHEV plug-in electric car to market.
The New York Times says Toyota does not want to place its bets—and its considerable reputation—on the unproven technology of a plug-in electric PHEV. But that’s exactly what Toyota did a decade ago, when it introduced the Prius. The 2010 Prius is the third generation and the best one yet, with more power and better miles per gallon.
Toyota showed its little FT-EV electric city car concept at the New York Auto Show, but since then, there’s been hardly a word about it. It’s pretty much vanished off the radar screen.Examiner.com
Mitsubishi Motors started leasing its all-electric vehicle, the i-MiEV, in June. Next year, Nissan Motor is set to release its electric car, the Leaf. But Toyota does not plan to introduce an all-electric car until 2012. Instead, later this year, it plans to introduce a plug-in electric-gasoline hybrid, and only a few hundred initially.
“The time is not here,” Masatami Takimoto, Toyota’s executive vice president, said during a factory tour this year.
Electric cars “face many challenges,” he said, adding that “to commercialize pure E.V.’s, we need a battery that far exceeds the current technology.”
If Toyota is right, its competitors will have spent billions on a technology that will be slow to take off.
Toyota would like to profit all it can from the current technology before shifting to a new one, analysts say, especially because the company is facing a second down year after a loss last year of about $4.4 billion.
Executives also say that Toyota’s reputation for reliability could be tarnished if the company forged ahead with an unproven technology.
Even when electric cars are sold widely, the company says, they will be suitable only for short trips and serve a decidedly niche market.
Both Nissan and Mitsubishi have their own reasons for rushing out an all-electric car. Having invested little in hybrids, they hope to leapfrog straight to the next technology.
The California-based start-up Tesla Motors has also been selling electric cars on a limited scale. In late 2010, General Motors plans to release the Volt, meant to travel nearly 40 miles on batteries before a small gasoline engine starts up to provide electricity.
Meanwhile, Toyota’s new president, Akio Toyoda, has become a big promoter of the company’s fuel cells, which he calls the “ultimate” technology. But fuel cell cars, which produce electricity from hydrogen, would take even longer than battery-electric vehicles to commercialize.
Some experts predict that the auto market will soon be divided among competing technologies. “Small electric cars will be used for short distances within cities, with hydrogen cells powering big buses,” the Development Bank of Japan forecast in 2008.”
Others say that once automakers commit to mass production and drive costs down, electric cars could dominate the market. That could require Toyota to speed up its electric car plans, they say. New York Times
