Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus announced this week that combined the two automotive brands have sold nearly 2,000,000 hybrid vehicles in the United States. The specific number according to Toyota is 1,951,243 hybrid vehicles sold. Toyota also recently announced that it has sold 5 million hybrid vehicles globally.
Toyota estimates that its global fleet of hybrid vehicles has resulted in a reduction of about 34,000,000 tons of CO2 emissions. Toyota also says that its fleet of hybrid vehicles have saved owners over 3,000,000,000 gallons of gasoline compared to traditional vehicles. Currently Toyota and Lexus hybrid vehicles make up 70% of the United States auto industry’s total hybrid sales numbers.
Hybrid models for Toyota and Lexus also account for 16% of both companies overall sales. Recent figures show that for the automotive industry as a whole hybrid sales are approximately 3% of the US car market. Currently Toyota and Lexus offer 19 hybrid models along with one plug-in hybrid in 80 countries and regions around the world.
In the United States, Toyota and Lexus offer 12 hybrid models. A few of those 12 hybrid models are actually manufactured in North America including the Camry Hybrid, Avalon Hybrid, and RX450h. Toyota currently plans to build a fourth hybrid model in North America, the Highlander Hybrid. Toyota intends to introduce 18 new hybrid automobiles between now and the end of 2015. The automaker also expects to increase its sales of hybrid vehicles to at least 1 million units per year during the same period.
Some of the top automakers in Japan have been embroiled in the middle of major recalls having to do with the airbags in some of the vehicles they produced. Honda, Nissan, and Toyota have all recently issued recalls due to an airbag fault that could lead to improperly inflating airbags in the event of an accident. All three automakers use components for airbags produced by a Japanese manufacturer called Takata Corp.
Takata is a Japanese manufacturer of safety equipment and the defective airbag inflators were manufactured between 2000 and 2002 according to a company spokesman. Toyota has already said that these malfunctioning airbag inflators could cause the airbag to deploy abnormally during an accident. Improperly deployed airbags could lead to injury or possibly even death.
Toyota, Honda, and Nissan combined will be recalling over 3 million vehicles due to the potential airbag issue. This is the largest recall Takata has been involved with since 1995 when automakers using its seatbelt products were forced recall almost 9,000,000 vehicles. Honda also recalled over 430,000 vehicles in 2010 due to a faulty airbag module supplied by the same company.
In this latest recall, Toyota has recalled 1.73 million vehicles around the world, Honda has issued a recall on about 1.1 4 million vehicles, and Nissan says it’s looking at recalling 480,000 vehicles. Mazda has also recalled 45,463 vehicles. Toyota says that the vehicles covered in the recall were equipped with front passenger airbag inflators that may have been assembled with improperly manufactured propellant wafers. The Toyota vehicles covered in the recall include the Corolla and Camry built between November of 2000 and March 2004.
Toyota and Ford are battling over numbers, each claiming to have the top numbers and the bestselling global nameplate. First Ford published its numbers, which put itself in the top slot, only for Toyota to follow up a short while later with its own numbers, which trumped Ford’s and bumped the latter company down to second place.
The problem stems with deciding whose numbers are correct. According to Ford, which is going with data by R.L. Polk & Co., its Focus is the top-selling compact car at 1.02 million sales in 2012. Toyota disagreed, and stated later that same day that its Corolla is top, with sales clocking in at 1.16 million, a fairly substantial jump over the 872,774 sales pegged by R.L. Polk & Co.
This isn’t the first time Ford and Toyota have butted heads over which manufacturer’s vehicle outsold the other, with both having claimed top 6-month global car sales last fall. That time around, Ford used data from IHS Automotive, which neglected to include certain derivative varieties of the Corolla in its report. Not surprisingly, Toyota took issue with the data and claim.
According to Toyota’s US Vice President Mike Michels, “Corolla registrations attributed to Polk come up short by nearly 300,000 units. This discrepancy is glaring and we have requested clarification.” No response has been provided yet, however. Until things are clarified, Ford is maintaining its claim as being in the top position, something that is no small success in light of Toyota’s long history of domination in the car market.
One of the things that you never really expect to say in the same sentence is Prius and racecar. Toyota designs its Prius specifically for fuel efficiency, not for speed or performance. At least Toyota doesn’t design the Prius streetcar for performance, the Prius endurance racing car on the other hand is made to go fast.
Toyota calls its new Prius racing car the world’s fastest Toyota Prius. The car is a GT300 spec racing car that debuted last year in Japan in the 2012 Super GT series. The car hit the track again last weekend at the Okayama, Circuit in South Japan. It’s very strange to see a Toyota Prius racing against the likes of Audi, Lamborghini, McLaren, Porsche, and other racecar and sports car brands.
There’s very little similarity between this racing spec Prius and the road going car other than a slight similarity in the profile styling. Rather than using the street cars 1.8-liter engine, the racing car uses a 3.4-liter V8 race engine. That V-8 engine delivers its power to the rear wheels using a sequential manual gearbox. The racing powertrain does use the original Hybrid Synergy Drive electric system using a slightly larger lithium-ion battery pack sourced from the Prius+ MPV.
The V-8 engine under the hood of the racing spec Prius is the same engine that Toyota uses in some of its other racing vehicles. However, the V-8 engine was detuned to meet the regulations of the GT300 class. Toyota’s racing car uses all sorts of aerodynamic features to improve downforce including a carbon fiber front splitter, rear diffuser, and a large rear wing. The racing car also has wider wheel wells and arches to handle fat racing tires.
Optimus Prime, Hot Rod, and Ultra Magnus. These are all robot cars from the Transformers franchise rooted in early 1980s Japan. Somewhat disappointingly, here in realityland it looks like Japan’s real robot cars will have names like Nissan, Toyota, Fuji Heavy Industries, Honda, Mazda, and Hitachi.
Assume gravelly cowboy voice: “Hitachibots, transform and roll out!” Yeeaaah… umm, nope.
Okay, sadly Japan’s big automakers aren’t yet churning out sentient, anthropomorphized, purely good or purely evil all-male robot warriors. But they are very hip to developing and deploying practical versions of so-called robot cars in cooperation with domestic government agencies (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism – MLIT), one another, and given their global reach, international partners as well. Domestically, the current aim is to deploy highly autonomous, self-driving cars on freeways within 9-10 years. If the system proves successful, a global brand like Nissan or Toyota would surely find additional markets in other, much larger national freeway systems (ex: the massive national networks of China and the United States).
Concepts and proposals for robotic automobiles have been around for almost 80 years, and functional experimentation has been ongoing since the early 1980s. Actually, when breaking it down by individual features, 0ne can see that cars have been gradually roboticizing for a long time, e.g., power steering, power windows, power mirrors, anti-lock brakes, etc., etc.
So naturally, big J-Auto’s development of self-driving, partially autonomous, and arguably robotic feature sets isn’t novel. The 2003 Toyota Prius (Japan only), for example, was the first car available with a sonar-based Intelligent Parking Assist System (IPAS) wherein the driver operates the brake and the car calculates optimal steering angles for automated parallel parking (this option didn’t make it to the U.S. until 2009). Robotic features aren’t limited to driving, as here with the 2006 Mazda Miata’s Transformer-like power sunroof:
So what else is there with the Japan/robot car special connection situation? Well, geography, as it is so often want to do, must also insert itself into this macro-cultural equation. Insofar as: Japan’s approximately 130 million residents are shoehorned onto a mere 30% of the country’s land area – and not by choice, the other 70% is either too unstable, rugged, or topographically crazy to be inhabited. So, if one imagines all those people in contiguous urbanization on an island nation about the size of the U.S. state of Ohio, or just a bit larger than Portugal, one can appreciate the extreme population density and everyday challenge of very close-quarter driving and parking.
Another big deal for robotic cars here is the very long-term continuous habitation of the habitable areas. See, when one gets off the modern, 1st world-standard, highly developed roadways, in most cases one will quickly find oneself winding through very narrow streets with little if any standardized configuration. Human beings have been living along the same trails-that-became-roads-that-became-streets for many hundreds, if not thousands of years – long before there was much regard for large-scale municipal planning or an even vague anticipation of the motor vehicle. The analog compensation here is that nearly every non-arterial, non-grid-like intersection in Japan has an array of fish-eye mirrors at each corner, and drivers either use them or risk having no idea what’s coming. A networked robotic car, however, would be able to “see” around the corners, which would be nice when navigating this Tokyo neighborhood:
And then there’s the demographics. We mentioned assistive robots’ role in Japan’s aging society a few weeks back; this country has a big-deal labor shortage coming up in a generation and a half or so. In addition to the role robotics will very likely play in augmenting a dwindling human services labor force, a day spent in any Japanese city futilely looking for taxi or bus driver under 45 will clearly reveal another pending labor shortage. Who’s going to fill those jobs in 25 years? Yep.
Japan is approaching a perfect-storm state of necessity for practical robots, and if proven effective, reliable, and safe, increasingly robotic automobiles are likely to get an early foothold here. Besides, piloting a car in Japan is objectively difficult, licensing and compulsory driving schools are quite expensive, and despite its world-class public transportation system, Japan does experience considerable roadway congestion (networked, self-driving cars are anticipated to greatly reduce traffic jams and the effects of human error). Add in safety benefits, a potentially positive environmental impact, and POW: if it can, big J-Auto will put J-robots on the road ASAP.
Japan’s current repertoire doesn’t include anything ready for public consumption, but there are some very advanced and promising projects underway. Nissan’s modified Leaf, introduced last October as the NSC-2015, as in the year 2015, is an ambitious and innovative offering – complete with smartphone connectivity:
Toyota is also keeping pace with the Lexus-branded Advanced Active Safety Research Vehicle that debuted at CES in January:
Bringing things down to the personal, Hitachi recently unveiled their latest version of the Robot for Personal Intelligent Transport System – Ropits. This autonomous, obstacle-avoiding, user-friendly personal transport is intended to one day assist the elderly or disabled:
Japan’s MLIT was scheduled to produce an update to their ongoing robo-car feasibility studies by the end of last month. While not yet public, it’s safe to assume that their assessments and directives probably won’t result in big J-Auto’s production of a transforming robot car that will protect you, your family, and the galaxy from those other, eeeevil robots – but within a few decades, it’ll probably be reasonable to expect one’s very own private chauffeur to be… well, basically just software.
For now and the near future, think of robotic cars as you might think of powered robotic exoskeletons, i.e., they’ll help you do what you need to do with greater strength, precision, and efficiency, but they aren’t going to walk out to the driveway and help you up the stairs all by themselves.
The robots are coming, but for now and a while to come, humans are still going to have to push a few buttons. _________
Reno J. Tibke is the founder and operator of Anthrobotic.com and a contributor at the non-profit Robohub.org.
Okay, so what’s an assistive robot? Well, they’re a lot more cool and useful and tech than it might sound. Think of them more like… social robots, or maybe cybernetic enhancements, or, some years down the road, but not too many, complete physical entities capable of semi-autonomously moving about and taking action in everyday life on behalf of their owner. As tools, assistive robots passively or actively bridge the gap between what we might refer to as “normal” everyday …
Toyota’s Executive Program Manager Sheldon Brown took to the Expand stage to discuss how the automaker developed its fully-electric RAV4 and what the future of driving looks like. After chatting with us in front of the crowd, Brown slipped backstage to dive a little deeper. Brown and Myriam discussed the Rav4 EV’s development and aerodynamics, and how electric cars have evolved over the past decade or so. Check out the full video interview after the break.
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Toyota is no stranger to the hybrid realm and it has already introduced the fully-electric RAV4 EV SUV. Join us for this session where editor-in-chief Tim Stevens chats up Sheldon Brown, executive program manager of the product development office, Toyota Technical Center, USA, Inc. There’s sure to be some talk of hybrids and EVs — and perhaps a glimpse that what the future holds for us road warriors.
March 17, 2013 12:00 PM EDT
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We’ll be joined on stage by Toyota’s executive program manager, product development Sheldon Brown to discuss the car’s company’s presence in the hybrid market, and the RAV4 EV, which furthers its focus on electric vehicles.
March 17, 2013 12:00 PM EST
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Toyota has recalled a huge number of its popular FJ Cruiser SUVs – 310,000 to be exact. The recall was made due to a safety hazard posed by the driver and passenger seat belts, which could potentially fail due to how they are positioned in the vehicle. Most of the vehicles being recalled are in the US, but some of them are located elsewhere.
Toyota announced the recall in a press release, stating that the driver and front passenger seat belts are fixed to the rear doors, which have panels that aren’t strop enough to handle them. If the driver of an FJ Cruiser repeatedly closes the door “forcefully”, there’s a chance the panels may crack, resulting in a weak seat belt that may not hold up in the event of a crash or rough braking.
The FJ Cruisers being recalled including the latest 2013 model all the way down to the 2007 model-year. The majority of them – 209,000 – were sold in the United States, while a fairy hefty 52,000 were sold in the Middle East. The remaining SUVs were sold throughout China, Australia, Canada, Latin America, and Oceania.
Unfortunately, a solid method of correcting the problem has not been determined, with the manufacturer still considering its options. Once it decides on a repair method, owners of the affected models will be notified and can take the vehicle to the dealer for a cost-free repair. This follows other recalls Toyota has suffered, including one earlier this year where it recalled over 1 million vehicles due to problems with wipers and airbags.
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