Toyota, under new environmental targets, will be selling hardly any regular gasoline vehicles by 2050, only hybrids and fuel cells, to radically reduce emissions. The chairman of Japan’s auto manufacturers association said this month that Volkswagen’s rigging of diesel engines with software has damaged trust in the industry.
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Hybrids switch back and forth between a gasoline engine and an electric motor to deliver an efficient ride. “When we first announced the Mirai, we said we were at the start of the age of hydrogen”, senior managing officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. There is widespread consensus in the industry that gasoline and diesel vehicles will gradually be replaced by alternatively powered vehicles, but consumers haven’t adopted them on a large scale, partly due to charging infrastructure hurdles.
Toyota is betting heavily on fuel-cell-powered cars in a rush to develop environmentally friendly vehicles, according to a Reuters report. A lack of infrastructure is the main issue facing these vehicles-it’s easy enough to plug your EV in at home, but finding a hydrogen refueling station in the United States is much trickier. The maker of the Volt plug-in hybrid has targeted putting 500,000 vehicles on the road in the USA that are at least partially electric by 2017, from 180,834 previous year. About 14% of the cars and trucks it sold worldwide past year were hybrid or plug-in cars. Toyota wants to nearly completely eliminate emissions from its vehicles by 2050. It ultimately hopes to take that to a 90% reduction by 2050, the auto maker said. Annual sales of hybrid automobiles will attain 1.5 million and by 2020 Toyota would have offered 15 million hybrids, practically twice what it has bought to date all over the world, it mentioned.
Toyota projects that it’ll sell a total of 30,000 vehicles by 2020, suggesting a sharp rise in popularity in a short amount of time.
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The Toyota Prius, which went on sale in 1997, is the top-selling hybrid, with about 4 million sold globally so far.
