Toyota changes course, offers to share hybrid technology with rivals

2016 Toyota Prius, Catskill Mountains, NY, Dec 2015

Over the past six months, Toyota has made some remarkable decisions about its present and future car technologies.

After years of staunch opposition to battery-electric vehicles, it committed to launching one by 2020.

Now, the company has decided to offer its proprietary hybrid technology in volume to other automakers.

That decision, announced two weeks ago as part of a wider announcement of powertrain strategies by the company, marks a clear change of course.

Since 1997, when the company launched the first Prius hybrid model in Japan, it has fiercely guarded its hybrid-electric technology.

It has signed a few licensing deals, among them to Nissan for the 2007-2011 Altima Hybrid sold in the U.S. and to Mazda for a hybrid Mazda 3 compact sold only in Japan.

2011 Nissan Altima Hybrid

But those deals were limited and fairly low-volume.

Now, as described last week in an article by Reuters, Toyota plans to work with its suppliers at a much earlier stage to standardize components, making it easier for future generations of its hybrid technology to be used by other automakers.

Selling its signature hybrid system to other makers will not only give Toyota greater economies of scale, but likely prolong the life of that technology.

Toyota launched its fourth generation of the Prius last year, and while the car is considerably better to drive and more fuel-efficient than past versions, its sales in the U.S.—a major market—have lagged.

That is likely due to a combination of several factors, including continued cheap gasoline, the ongoing shift in buyer preferences from passenger cars to utility vehicles of all sizes, and perhaps the extreme styling of the latest Prius.

The company also made an unexpected choice in the 2017 Prius Prime, its latest plug-in hybrid Prius: it defaults the car to run solely in electric mode if the battery has charge remaining, unlike most other plug-in hybrids except the Chevy Volt.

2017 Toyota Prius Prime and 2017 Chevrolet Volt with Green Car Reports editor John Voelcker

That may indicate an increasing understanding of the benefits of all-electric propulsion by the company whose green-car technologies previously stretched from hybrids and plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, while jumping over battery-electric cars.

The hybrid-sharing strategy is a long-term one, and will involve changes to parts specifications and technical standards that will be largely invisible to buyers.

"Toyota suppliers produce a lot of technology which can only be used by Toyota," the president of the company's powertrain unit, Toshiyuki Mizushima, said to reporters, as quoted by Reuters.

"We want to change that to a system where we develop technology with our suppliers at an earlier stage," so that non-Toyota customers can have buy those components and systems directly from suppliers.

But whether the hybrid technology it hopes to sell to other makers carries the company's name or not—"Toyota Inside," anyone?—it will lower the cost for all users.

It may also reflect a realization that almost 20 years after launching hybrids, Toyota is the sole global automakers dedicated to propagating the technology across all its product lines.

2001 Toyota Prius Sedan

As much simpler battery-electric vehicles slowly gain market momentum, they are likely to surpass the continuing low penetration of hybrids in the overall global market.

Which suggests that, just possibly, Toyota's two-decade bet on hybrid technology to offset its continuing sales of otherwise not notably fuel-efficient cars and trucks may not be paying off as it anticipated.

Either way, expect to see more hybrids with Toyota technology inside even as that company scrambles to catch up with General Motors, Tesla, and other unlikely competitors in electric cars it didn't envision back in 1997.

BMW's Ominous Black i8 Fuel-Cell Prototype: What It Sounds Like - VIDEO

Very, very few people on the planet have ever seen a car powered by hydrogenfuel cells, much less ridden in or driven one.

But if you've wondered what they sound like in operation, now's your chance.

At a recent technology presentation, BMW showed off two different prototype vehicles powered by hydrogen fuel cells, part of its technology partnership with Toyota on advanced powertrains.

Now a recent video on the YouTube channel Cars demonstrates what a fuel-cell powered vehicle sounds like when it comes whooshing past you.

And given the mysterious, even ominous, flat-black paint on the heavily modified BMW i8 prototype car, the sounds somehow match: The vehicle sounds almost as unusual as it looks.

2016 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell car, Newport Beach, CA, Nov 2014

As we learned from our drive in a pre-production 2016 Toyota Mirai hydrogen vehicle, the low-speed behavior is pretty similar to that of an electric car.

Both types of vehicles use powerful electric motors to turn the wheels; it's only the source of the electricity that's different.

At lower speeds, the Mirai sounds pretty much like a Prius hybrid in all-electric mode. Tire noise and a bit of background whine are the dominant sounds.

But at higher speeds, Toyota's hydrogen sedan adds a variety of additional noises as the compressors and pumps increase the volume of hydrogen fed to the fuel-cell stack to increase the power output.

BMW hydrogen fuel cell technology

The "whoosh" you hear in the BMW video is matched by a similar sound, though less pronounced, in the Mirai. It comes from water vapor being expelled out the tailpipe.

The Toyota also manifested a high-pitched whir (we called it a "wheeze") from the air compressor that feeds oxygen into the fuel-cell stack.

No hydrogen fuel-cell car will generate anything like the powertrain noise of a vehicle powered by an internal-combustion engine which, after all, is producing thousands of tiny explosions to move itself along the road.

But we rather like this video because it shows off the alien nature of hydrogen fuel-cell powerplants.

Electric cars are quiet, perhaps with a little whine; hydrogen fuel-cell cars add an element of different, almost otherworldly, audio to the experience.

2015 Toyota Prius Five (not V)

When Toyota dropped off the Barcelona Red Prius Five, I was a bit confused that I wasn’t going to be driving the Prius V. “I thought you were dropping off the van one,” I said to the driver. “You know which one I’m talking about? The Prius ‘V’?”

“That’s what the last guy (who drove it) said, too!” he chuckled.

So, here we are. Instead of the still relatively new-and-different Prius V people-mover, we have a 2015 Toyota Prius. A nice car, but a nice car which- apart from snazzier headlights and some swoopier sheetmetal- didn’t seem to be all that different from the wife’s 2nd-gen Prius.

Or, was it?

Inside the 2015 Toyota Prius Five

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  Still slow, though.

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The biggest visual difference between the 2nd-generation Prius and the newest 2015 model is in the dashboard. New for 2010, the third-generation Prius introduced the more organic, “swept” look for Toyota interiors (above) that has since influenced the designs of the new-for-2014 Corolla, 2015 Camry, and the upcoming 2016 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel-cell car. Comparing the 2015 car to the 2nd-gen, then, would be tough. Luckily, my mother-in-law’s 2012 Prius was also handy- and it was here, with a visually similar interior, that the improved plastics, textures, and leather seating materials of the Prius Five really stood out.

In the 2015 Five, the dash and door plastics have a sort of “wave” pattern etched into them. The effect is almost invisible at a casual glance, but is tactilely rewarding to the touch and gives the whole interior a very artsy, Japanese sort of feel.

Also worth noting was the LATCH-placement in the rear seats of the third-generation car. For some, non-obvious reason, these easily accepted my daughter’s rear-facing Recaro seat, which is something that the second-generation car simply won’t do.

Driving the 2015 Toyota Prius Five

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  The energy monitor said we were doing well …

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Despite the many detail improvements over the 2nd generation Prius, the 2015 Toyota Prius Five still drives like a golf cart. An under-powered golf cart, in fact, and not in the same sort of giddy fun way that the Chevy Spark feels like a golf cart. In EV mode, the Prius leaves the line slowly. It gets up to speed slowly, too, without any hint of the “on demand torque” that EV enthusiasts (myself, included) often cite as the best thing about driving an electric vehicle.

That’s not to say that the Prius is a bad car. Sure, it’s a slow car, but the Prius effectively took my family all over the Chicagoland area for some early holiday shopping in reasonably-spacious, climate-controlled comfort. So, while the performance was a bit of a let down, that’s forgivable in a car that is definitely not about performance.

What wasn’t forgivable, in my case, was the Prius’ fuel economy- since I never got close to the car’s claimed 51/48 MPG figures (according to the car’s “ECO Savings Record” dash function).

We never took a trip- even around town- that returned better than 46 MPG. That was surprising, given that the last high-MPG Toyota products we tested all exceeded the manufacturer’s claimed fuel economy figures in my real-world testing (as much as Oak Park is the real world, anyway).

Final Thoughts on the 2015 Toyota Prius Five

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If you put a sporty-car enthusiast behind the wheel of a new Prius for a few days, then ask him/her what they thought of it, they’d report a miserable, slow, and insipid driving experience. This isn’t a car for enthusiasts- and that’s OK, because enthusiasts (and journalists) don’t buy new cars.

The people who do buy new cars- the people who matter to Toyota, in other words- can’t get enough of the Prius. Further, the sales manager at my local Toyota dealer told me that the pricey, top-of-the-line Five model was the fastest-selling version of Prius. “We can’t keep them on the lot,” he said, more-or-less confirming that people who buy Prii don’t necessarily do so to save money.

So, the big question: should you buy a 2015 or wait for the new 2016 model? As for us, when it came time to buy her next car, the wife picked out one of the new, AWD Volvo wagons for its all-wheel-drive, bigger cargo capacity, and its superior performance and horsepower. So, make of that what you will.

Source: Gas2