Toyota aims to sell one million hybrid automobiles annually
Posted by: in Products and ServicesFiled under: Good news, Products and services, Toyota Motor Corp. (TM)
Even though Toyota Motor (NYSE: TM) basically invented the popular notion of hybrid automobiles years ago by making the Prius compact passenger vehicle the spokescar of the hybrid world, the automaker now has its sights set a little higher. Toyota wants to sell at least one million Hybrid automobiles every year shortly after 2010 gets here.
Although Toyota wasn’t the first automaker with some form of hybrid vehicle on the road, it’s been the most aggressive marketer of such technology and resulting automobiles by far. Even though the hybrid Prius has sold only 1.25 million units since first being introduced in 1997, Japan’s largest automaker thinks that mark can be hit annually within a few years. Are those plans too ambitious?
If fuel prices stay at the level they’re at now, it’s not inconceivable to think Toyota can’t hit that mark. The automaker has publicly said that it wants a hybrid drivetrain in every vehicle it sells come 2020, so to get that kind of expertise ramping, it needs to move quite a few hybrid automobiles this year and increase that amount every year going forward.
The internal combustion engine still isn’t perfected, so transitioning millions of vehicles to a hybrid drivetrain in a tiny over a decade sounds like a risky plan to many. If Toyota can start selling a million of them per year long before that, though, it just may have a chance.
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