Toyota Hybrid Minivan
Toyota has clearly hit a car industry nerve with the Prius, its gasoline-electric hybrid, whose popularity was reflected in the company’s earnings report Friday. Toyota seems to be defying an industrywide slump triggered by soaring gasoline prices, which have hit its U.S. rivals particularly hard.
Toyota said net profit in its fiscal half-year, which ended Sept. 30, was ¥570 billion, or $4.86 billion, while sales rose 10.3 percent from a year earlier to ¥9.95 trillion. Toyota said net profit slipped 2.3 percent in the six months as it raised spending on new factories to meet robust demand for its fuel-efficient vehicles.
“We think we can keep a high level of profitability,” a Toyota senior managing director, Takeshi Suzuki, said Friday, describing the rise in factory costs as a one-time hit to earnings. “We have to add this spending to keep up with the expanding market.”
Toyota is building new factories and GM has achieved junk bond status.
Sales have remained relatively strong for all major Japanese carmakers despite rising fuel prices, partly because of their reputation for building reliable, high-mileage vehicles. Their performance has contrasted with Detroit, where General Motors and Ford Motor have posted huge losses in the most recent quarter amid tumbling sales of their main breadwinners, gas-guzzling pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles.
Toyota’s announcement Friday also showed that the company remains on track to overtake General Motors as the biggest producer of autos, a position that GM has held since 1931. Toyota, No. 2 worldwide, raised its production forecast for its full year, which runs through March 2006, to 8.03 million vehicles, up 8.4 percent from the previous year.
GM still has their brain in 1931.
Toyota hopes that the runaway sales success of the Prius will allow it to push hybrids into large volume production. Next year, Toyota plans to increase worldwide Prius production to 400,000, from 300,000 this year.
By the end of the decade, Toyota expects to be selling one million hybrids worldwide. By increasing production of hybrids, Toyota aims to cut costs for batteries, electric motors and other parts. In turn, Toyota and Honda say they hope to reduce the cost of a hybrid car to that of a standard, gasoline-powered car in the same time period.
“To make it really work, the cost has to be cut in half,” said John Mendel, a senior vice president at Honda’s American subsidiary. “The cost of the batteries is very high. We fortunately control the cost of the CPU, the electric motor.”
These guys don’t think like American auto manufacturers. Fortunately.
Once again Japan is on the cutting edge of auto tech, while American flounders with business as usual.
To be fair, GM has invested in Hydrogen-fueled vehicles – so they aren’t in a “1931” mindset entirely.
The biggest mistake made by Toyota’s competitors was in thinking the hybrid would only be a “transition” technology. They were willing to let Toyota have that supposedly temporary market, while they were working on Hydrogen and fuel-cells – the real, long-term replacements for gasoline. The new paradymes.
Now that those technologies are farther in the future than they thought, they find that Toyota has sewn-up most of the Hybrid-related patents – as Ford has found out, when it was cheaper to license them from Toyota than try to work around the existing patents.
Few things can be more painful than having to pay licensing fees to a competitor. 🙂
Even with fuel prices near or at $5 per gallon, hybrid technology remains more environmental than economically friendly. By driving smaller vehicles and reducing nonessential driving you can approximate the savings without the premium cost of a hybrid. Fossil fuel alternatives will never be mainstream until fuel prices are much higher, and shortages occur. Economics has to drive it. Hybrids are trendy, and trendy is what sells cars.
Don’t be fooled. Toyota’s inventment in hybrid tech is just a way of passing their CAFE fees onto the customer. If you don’t know what I mean, wait until the 475v battery dies in your Prius. I’d imagine the cost will be…about the same as the gas guzzler tax on a Toyota Highlander.
Toyota has a worse CAFE than they did 20 years ago. This is not progress. What’s worse, as a company they are far more boring than they used to be. There is no more MR-2, Celica, or Supra, and the Corolla is a pathetic joke compared to the rear wheel drive version they made in the 80s.
There will never be any real progress with alternative fuels until gas hits $8 in the US…and to be honest I’m sick of waiting for it, so I’ve actualy started love SUVs simply because they are hastening the revolution.
It will be a great day when all the Suburbans, and Blazers are abandoned on the side of the road with the number filed off because it takes $1000 a month to keep them on the road. The shells could be converted to low income housing too…
As a chemist, I’ll tell you that hydrogen fuel is a lark. The most common mistake is to insist that there is hydrogen in water, there is, but it’s a low energy form. It’s like looking at all the water in the oceans and believing that there is plenty of hydroelectric (ignoring the ocean currents). It’s the water at higher elevations that the source of energy.
Hydrogen’s only hope is water splitting from nuclear power, something that isn’t likely until we’re desparate, given the current status of public feelings towards nuclear.
Typical 3 column blog,
bottom articles are awash in a sea of left & right white.
Note: italics are used for emphasis or contrast.
(that is, to draw attention to some particular part of a text)
You blog master has ‘relentless italics syndrome’.
Please sign him into a relentless italics syndrome clinic
as soon as possible.
R Taylor — your essential suggestion makes sense. Since my recent retirement to full-time curmudgeon status, my honey and I sat back and reorganized what driving we could. We’ve started right off saving about $30-50/month. With my share of household expenses coming from an essentially fixed income, that feels good. But, over the next few years and further out, we’ll have to replace either my wife’s 20-year-old Volvo or my 11-year-old pickup. Keeping a vehicle well beyond society’s accepted foibles always pays off.
We’ll definitely replace the Volvo with a hybrid. We’ve thoroughly researched the nut-and-bolt costs. Keeping that sort of vehicle out to 6 or 8 years — or beyond — brings us well beyond payback, well beyond self-discipline. Folks who live more for style than substance will continue to make uninformed choices. I just wish they’d stop saving them for elections.
I’m hoping that by the time “Ruff Boy” stops being capable of hauling firewood and making that bi-weekly run to the dump — there will be an affordable mid-size hybrid pickup or two to choose from. Maybe even secondhand.
hybrid technology remains more environmental than economically friendly
Which is what I like about the Prius the most – the extremely-low emissions. Any gas savings is frosting on the cake, to me.
But the premium in up-front costs on such little “econo-boxes” has been off-putting to me.
When my current cars are ready for retirement, I will take a serious look at the various hybrid cars on the market.
Mike Voice,
Try a diesel running on 100% biodiesel. Better mileage than a hybrid, better performance, and ZERO net emissions. All carbon and nitrogen released in the tailpipe was recently part of a plant…. and will be again soon.
Try a diesel running on 100% biodiesel
I have also been considering biodiesel, until I read a do-it-yourself magazine article, written by a guy near Seattle (Vashon island?, Bainbridge island?).
Granted, he REALLY gets into the chemical aspects of it, but the protective equipment he was wearing during procesing – to keep from getting skin burns, or lung damage from the caustics mixed with the vegetable oil – was a little off-putting. That, and the other by-product is large amounts of glycerin (open a soap factory?).
American car makers didn’t understand during the Oil embargo, and they still don’t get it.
Fuel hogs don’t do well when fuel is expensive or unavailable
“Try a diesel running on 100% biodiesel. Better mileage than a hybrid, better performance, and ZERO net emissions.”
I totally agree about better milage Link and performace, Another Link but as for emissions…that’s just not true, sorry.
Just standing next to a diesel, any diesel, without your nose covered will tell you that isn’t true. The EPA, for the most part, doesn’t monitor diesel emmisons at all, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
They passed new diesel restrictions for trucks and off-road vehicles in the last few years.