In past decade Hybrid vehicles were considered as slow, boring, dull and low performance eco-mobiles but in today’s world of automobiles, hybrids have proved their presence in the market as high performance and economical environmental friendly cars. Some of those high performance Hybrids are Porsche Spyder 918, BMW i8, Nissan ZEOD RC are highly efficient performance cars with world’s smartest engines, even Ferrari and McLaren, HyperCar manufacturers, are taking on the Hybrid technology. These are the new hybrids that are ready to swap out the traditional cars from market very soon. According to Toyota Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada, “though, we should see an even bigger increase in the number of hybrid vehicles in the coming years.” He further added, “I foresee hybrid models pretty soon reaching 20 percent of global sales from about 13 percent to 14 percent now.”
Uchiyamada is the man at the back of the success of inventive Prius, which gives him some degree of authority on making calculation based forecasts about the adoption of Hybrid cars. What’s astonishing, though, is that the 20 per cent figure for increase in forecasted sales doesn’t include plug-in hybrids, but only includes petrol-electric and diesel-electric models. Uchiyamada said, “Suppliers need higher volumes to slash costs of components specific to plug-in models, including batteries that should be bigger and more capable than the ones used in traditional hybrids,”
Those comments run counter to those of Volkswagen’s CEO, Martin Winterkorn, said, “Plug-in hybrid has the greatest potential.” For what it’s worth, Uchiyamada isn’t discounting PHEVs, saying his company is “closely watching what our competitors are doing.”
What do you think about this story? Should Toyota be placing a higher focus on the technology? But before you go further just remember that Toyota only builds one plug-in hybrid alongside 25 hybrids, Have your say in Comments.
