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Toyota Launches New Luxury Hybrid
Tokyo (AFP) May 17, 2007 Toyota has launched what it called its most advanced hybrid vehicle yet as part of a drive to roll out more eco-friendly cars, which have helped it become the world's top-selling automaker. Toyota, which earlier this year overtook ailing US giant General Motors in global sales, unveiled the latest hybrid model of the Lexus, its luxury brand that has enjoyed immense success in the key US market. "Without protecting the environment, there is no future," Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe said as he showed off the new sedan in Tokyo. "Our top priority is sustainable mobility," he said. "We are aiming to make the system smaller and lighter so that hybrid systems can go into smaller cars." Toyota said its new Lexus is the world's most advanced hybrid -- cars which use less gas by running partly on electricity -- by bringing together a 5.0-litre V8 engine with full-time all-wheel drive. Existing Lexus hybrids have 3.3 to 3.5-litre V6 engines. Toyota said it has designed the four-wheel braking system to recover energy and lead to a more substantial reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions. Toyota put the new Lexus LS600h and LS600hL on sale initially only in Japan, an unusual approach for the automaker, which first launched the Lexus brand in the United States, 16 years before its debut here. Despite its popularity in the United States, the Lexus has been a tougher sell in Japan, where customers looking for luxury brands have historically picked German brands such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW. The new Lexus will go on sale in 37 countries or territories in Europe, North America and Asia starting next month. In Japan, it costs between 9.7 million and 15.1 million yen (80,500-125,400 dollars) before tax. Watanabe reiterated the company's ambitions for higher sales both of hybrids and the Lexus brand. "We aim to double the number of hybrid models by the early 2010s and want to sell one million vehicles annually," he said, adding that the global sales target for the Lexus was 500,000 this year, up from 475,000 in 2006. But the hybrid boom has shown signs of saturation in the United States, which has led growth as customers tire of gas-guzzlers in an age of high oil prices and wider eco-awareness. US sales of Toyota's pioneering hybrid Prius, which for years sold out of stock in the United States without any advertising, fell 0.5 percent last year, although they bounced back in January. The Toyota president said that the company was looking for other ways of improving fuel efficiency, saying that engines were not the only way. "The hybrid technology is the core of vehicle production as it can be adaptable for any type of car," Watanabe said. "We have a principle of production of the fittest. For example, in Brazil, where a lot of sugarcane production enables a lot of ethanol, we'd like to provide cars powered by ethanol fuel," he said. Toyota has set an initial sales target of 7,000 of the new Lexus hybrid models globally in the six months after their launch, 4,000 of them in Japan.
Source: Agence France-Presse Related Links Toyota Car Technology at SpaceMart.com
The Driving Force Behind Electric Vehicles
Bonn, Germany (SPX) May 16, 2007Cultural differences between countries run right to the heart of government, thereby influencing technological innovation. This is reported in a comparative study by David Calef and Robert Goble published recently in the journal Policy Sciences. The authors outline efforts taken throughout the 1990s by both the US and French governments to adopt legislation fostering technological innovation to improve urban air quality by promoting clean vehicles, specifically electric vehicles (EVs). |
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