Toyota has been thoroughly knocked around over the past few months, with an epic PR crisis brought on by recalls for myriad problems in its cars and trucks. The news has been so bad about a company once seen as almost invincible that many may have forgotten how Toyota gained its enviable reputation.
But on April 22"”Earth Day 2010"”the true Toyota faithful will be celebrating one of the events that enabled the company to command a cult-like devotion to its vehicles. It was on Earth Day in 2000 that Toyota announced the Prius would be coming to America. No one really grasped the implications back then. The Prius was a new kind of car, motivated by a new kind of propulsion system: a gas-electric "hybrid synergy drive." It ran on a combination of internal-combustion and electric power. The mileage was phenomenal; in an era of 14-mpg SUVs, the Prius routinely averaged 40 mpg. It also emitted far less pollution than anything else on the road"”with the possible exception of the much less versatile Honda Insight, which had arrived in the United States a year earlier. The first U.S. Prius owners were an early-adopting few, numbering only about 6,000. And the vehicle itself was something of an anomaly, in no way resembling the vaunted car of the future. But over the next decade, it would change everything. And in the process, become the most important car ever created.
The automobile has been with us for more than a century now, but its development has traced two distinct trajectories: There are cars that improve the conversation, and cars that change it. A good example of the former was the Miata, which hit the streets in 1989. There was nothing disruptively innovative about the model, but it advanced on its antecedent, the simple, sporty British roadster. But the Prius is a different story. The Miata was easily recognized for what it was by auto-enthusiasts"”it made the heart beat faster. The Prius, on the other hand, arrived in stealth mode. It looked like a very boring little sedan. But once it did what the Miata and countless other tweaks on the car couldn't"”engage the mind"”the Prius showed it was a game-changer.
In a manner of speaking, it was the iPad of its day. In much the same way that the iPad will redefine the way we read books, newspapers, magazines, and their 21st century successors"”not to mention the way we surf the Web, watch movies and TV, and play games"”the Prius reshaped what we expect from a car. This matters far more than pure sales figures. The Prius has sold relatively well, but it hasn't displaced larger sedans in the Toyota lineup, like the Camry. The current market-share for all hybrids, a decade after the Prius' introduction, remains in the low single digits.
But so what? The important thing isn't that the Prius became a runaway success as a car. No, its ultimate victory is that it created a new category of vehicle. The problem with "advanced mobility""”the term that futurists apply to products that break with the past"”is that in the 1990s there was no easy way to get from evolutions of gas-powered cars to the electric and alternative-fuel vehicles that many observers insisted we needed to move toward.
In the 1990s, battery technology wasn't good enough to deliver serious mileage. Gas was also cheap, with no end to the cheapness in sight. The gas crisis of the 1970s was a distant memory. There was no compelling reason, at the time, to consider a major shift away from vehicles that were powered by old-school internal combustion engines.
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