You have to hand it to Toyota: It had the balls (and the money) to develop a car with an innovative gas-electric hybrid powertrain even though there wasn't actually a market for one, and it wasn't likely to make money on the project for a good many years. Imagine GM or Ford -- even back in their glory days at the height of their wealth and power -- deliberately deciding to build a money loser to prove a technology. You're right: Wall Street (ironically, the very guys who now eulogize Toyota as the auto-industry benchmark) never would have allowed it.
What we've been up to...Ed Loh gives new meaning to the word "headlight."
Now, of course, the Toyota Prius is the poster car for middle-class greenies. It doesn't matter whether you're a soccer mom or a Hollywood superstar, driving a Prius establishes your eco-cred the moment you wheel it out of the driveway. Hey, it works for Leonardo DiCaprio, a high-profile Prius driver who flew all the way to Iceland with celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz and entourage just so he could stand on some real ice for a single photo used on the cover of Vanity Fair's so-called "Green Issue" earlier this year.
We like the Prius here at Motor Trend. A lot. You may recall we made the second-generation version our 2004 Car of the Year, probably one of the most radical choices in the entire history of the award. But -- and let me be crystal clear about this -- despite what the likes of DiCaprio, Al Gore, and Vanity Fair would like you to think, the Prius is not the car that will save the planet.
Here's why: 41.6 mpg. That's the average fuel consumption we achieved over 22,000 miles with our Prius long-termer in 2004 and 2005. The absolute best we got out of it was barely 47 mpg. And we weren't the only ones to get less than the 55-to-60 mpg Prius boosters brag about: The Department of Energy managed 44.4 mpg out of two cars over 102,000 miles.
Ron Kiino and his new bride, Diane
Sure, the Prius makes a Hummer H2 look like a dipsomaniac. But the truth is it's no world-beater when it comes to gas mileage. By my count there are probably 30 cars on sale in Europe right now that would almost certainly use the same amount of fuel, if not less, over the same duty cycle and at least another 40 or so that would come close. And none has the Prius's expensive and fiendishly complex powertrain.
The Prius excels in one particular driving environment: stop-start city driving, where the internal-combustion engine generally shuts down (as long as there's enough juice in the battery) instead of idling uselessly in the traffic, wasting fuel, and pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. But Mercedes-Benz has just announced it soon will have engines that'll shut themselves down instead of idling and start automatically when you press the gas pedal. No, you won't have zero-emissions electric drive for the first few seconds, like you do in the Prius, but the net reduction in fuel consumption and emissions will still be significant. Meanwhile, at 65 mph on the freeway the Prius is actually less efficient than any number of similarly sized European small cars with a modern four-cylinder diesel engine and a six-speed manual transmission, many of which will nail 50 mpg or better with ease.
The point is, whether your goal is to make your paycheck go that bit further, to send fewer petro-dollars to regimes that basically don't like us anyway, or to do your bit about global warming, the reality is there is no silver bullet, no magic technology that solves all our problems all at once, all the time. And that includes hybrids.
Every kind of camera known to mankind takes a shot at our guest test-driver Danica Patrick
Chips, soda, and kicking back in a luxury motorhome, courtesy Fleetwood