Toyota Will Offer Plug-in Hybrid by 2010

The national coming-out party for the Toyota Prius was a television commercial during the 2005 Super Bowl. The narrator bragged, “Low emissions, high mileage, and you never plug it in.” In those early days of hybrids, Toyota marketers felt compelled to portray charging up your car via the electric grid as an evil to be avoided.

Three years later, Toyota announced that it would build its first plug-in hybrid by 2010. Katsuaki Watanabe, president of Toyota, made the announcement at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show. The announcement represents a change of direction on plug-in hybrids for Toyota—and a victory for tech-savvy hybrid drivers who have been asking, cajoling, even begging carmakers for the ability to recharge bigger batteries via the grid. Toyota’s answer up until now essentially has been, “No thank you. Our Prius is selling like hotcakes.”

Just when Toyota thought it might rest on its 45-mpg laurels, along came someone hotter than hotcakes—a small non-profit called CalCars, which demonstrated that plug-in capability could boost fuel efficiency to 100 miles per gallon. The outfit of envirogeeks waged a public relations war by hacking Priuses, ripping out OEM control systems, adding extra hybrid batteries, thus proving the benefits and feasibility of plug-in hybrids.