New Toyota Prius

Suffering from the lack of new car sales worldwide, at Toyota, about 2200 employees at the managerial level are planning to purchase a new Toyota car before the end of March. This is “not on a mandatory basis but on a voluntary basis” and there is no restriction on types of cars or price ranges. Originally some CEOs decided this at their discretion but some managing directors and other executives joined in. A few of them have already bought the latest “IQ” which just went on the market last year or their compact car “Vitz” and some have even bought 2 new cars.

One of the CEOs said: “Unless we use our cars ourselves, we cannot fully appreciate them, we cannot recommend them to others either”. He was emphasizing that they are doing it to help sales recover but it also helps to share the feeling of the crisis together

By the way, I have a friend who works at “Sharp” the electrical appliance manufacturer. About 20 years ago while the company was struggling in business, he received a “voucher” to buy their own products instead of the usual bonus payment. Around that time, without any strong selling goods, Sharp was ranked lower than Toshiba, Sonny and Matsushita (Panasonic); then they made their name in flat-screen liquid-crystal products. Look at them now. Letting their employees buy their own products might work towards sales recovery.

In the meantime, Toyota officially unveiled their new Prius at last. They channelled all the company’s energies in it. In the hybrid system, almost 90% of the components were newly developed and the engine size was grown from 1.5L to 1.8L. Because the engine displacement was low, it used to give the drivers a headache when its engine revved faster and raised the fuel consumption at high speed. This was solved by expanding the engine displacement to keep the engine revs low to improve fuel consumption at high speed.

At the same time, the motor performance has been improved with maximum output of 80ps (58.8kW) raised by 12ps and with a maximum torque of 21.2kg-m (208N-m). The same as the previous model, it uses a Nickel-metal hybrid battery as the secondary battery. It was said that “the power this engine and the electric motor produce together is as powerful as a 2.4L petrol engine”.

The new Prius has 3 different driving modes: “EV Drive Mode” uses only its electric motor to reach zero emission, “Power Mode” is for a sporty run using the engine and “Eco Mode” is for reducing fuel consumption. I cannot wait till they finally go on the market in April.

There was usually only Prius when it came to hybrid cars, but now Honda has introduced “Incite”. This is Honda’s first hybrid car and it is obvious they thought about the Prius a lot in its development. Pricewise it is going to be under JPY 2,000,000, JPY 400,000 cheaper than the Prius. The mileage will be quite similar at 30.0km/L. Its design is incredibly similar to Prius, I have to admit. From this Spring, we might see tough competition between these two latest cars.


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