Toyota Presents Its Plug-In Hybrid Prius

To its everlasting credit, Toyota changed the transportation world forever when it introduced the Prius – the first production hybrid electric, making use of a battery to improve a car’s gas mileage. But that was over ten years ago — a different epoch – maybe even an era – in automotive time.  What has Toyota done since?

I hate to sound unkind, and I know I’m oversimplifying. But the truth is this: very little.

Now, in reaction to the rest of the auto world’s having leapfrogged Toyota several times, we see the introduction of the plug-in version of the Prius, slated for 2013, and perhaps available in 2012. Its highlight? A tiny battery that will provide drivers with 13 miles of battery-only range before the internal combustion engine kicks in and starts burning the gas in its tank. In fact, the battery holds just seven kilowatt-hours, the energy equivalent of less than a quart of gasoline.

The result? A marginal improvement in gas mileage, more than a decade later.  I’m not sure that qualifies Toyota as the “visionary leader” it claims to be.

In fact, here’s your new value proposition, Prius loyalists: unless you live close enough to everything that you really don’t even need a car in the first place, now you have to BOTH fill your car up with gasoline AND plug it in at night.

This is, by all odds, a very unattractive proposal.  And Toyota seems to know this.  How do I know that they know?  Methinks they dost protest too much.

Their presentation this afternoon at the AABC (Advanced Auto Battery Consortium) was built around the findings of their market research which pretended to show that consumers are going to love the car.  But the study was such an obvious sham that its only possible purpose could have been to convince us of something that is impossible to believe: that consumers, two years hence, will want a plug-hybrid with a 13-mile battery-only range. 

We sat through tons of bar charts that showed that the very leading edge of EV early adopters don’t mind plugging in their cars. (Didn’t we already know that?) And therefore, the Toyota plug-in hybrid is bound to be a hit. (Isn’t this a totally irrelevant conclusion?)

I could see heads in the audience near where I was seated nervously turning around, anxiously trying to see if others had grasped a point that they might have missed. Could a legitimate study possibly have shown that car buyers really are anxious to inconvenience themselves to buy this car?  No.  It was nonsense, and many of us knew it.

How did AABC select Toyota to present this outrageous propaganda?  I don’t know. Does a market cap of $130 billion and the power behind it buy anything in today’s world?

Hold on, let me check on that.