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Toyota Chairman Expects Hybrids To Make 20 Percent of Global Sales

Hybrid cars are on the market for about 17 years. It all started with the first Toyota Prius and now almost every automaker tries to push its own electric-aided vehicle on the market.
Takeshi Uchiyamada and Tow Prii 1 photo
Photo: AP
Some of them manage to do it, others fail, but it’s a good thing to know that around 13-14 percent of global vehicle sales are represented by hybrids, be it gasoline- or diesel-electrics.

Yes, they’re good for the environment and enables people to trick a bit the continuously-rising fuel price, but it seems like European hybrid sales are somehow idling. To put it straight, Toyota’s 2013 US sales for the Prius as an example (234,228 units) topped the overall volume in Europe last year.

Europeans are not that into hybrids right now due to the fact that efficient diesel engines are still providing about the same fuel consumption of a hybrid at a considerably lower price.

Despite Europeans’ opinions about hybrid vehicles, Toyota chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada sees a bright future for the niche he created and that electric assisted vehicles will soon rise about 7 percent.

“I foresee hybrid models pretty soon reaching 20 percent of global sales from about 13 percent to 14 percent now,” Uchiyamada told Automotive News Europe.

These numbers probably seemed incomprehensible 20 years ago when Uchiyamada was put in charge of a small Toyota Motor Corp. group called Project G21, which was tasked with creating a vehicle that achieves double the mileage of a normal gasoline-powered one.

Full story at Automotive News
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