The venerable Toyota Prius will be redesigned for the 2010 model year, and we’re beginning to hear rumors about the future of the green car icon.

Left Lane News reports, “Whispers of a highway rating anywhere between 60 and 80 mpg have been heard.” The car will feature “a slightly larger motor, moving from a 1.5L to a 1.8L motor,” but probably not the Lithium-ion batteries that Toyota is said to be developing.

The current Prius may still appear in dealerships even after the 2010 model arrives. The U.K.’s Auto Express reports, “The latest Toyota is expected to be more expensive than the outgoing model…However, Auto Express has learned that bosses plan to keep the current Prius on sale - and to compete with Honda’s forthcoming Insight, it will be at a new low price.”

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2010 Prius gossip was silenced today when Toyota’s Open Road Blog editor Jon F. Thompson confirmed that the photos revealed here yesterday, and here again today, are the real thing.

“We thought we’d take a moment to confirm that the car shown in these unauthorized photos - at least the ones we’ve seen so far - is indeed the new Prius,” stated Thompson. “Sorry, we’re not able to provide details,” he added. “Those will be forthcoming when the car is formally introduced at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January.”

The validity of the design was questioned at first because it looked to be about the same size as the current car, and previously in an interview between Micheline Maynard of The New York Times and James E. Lentz, president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., he stated that the new 2010 Prius would be “larger than the current model.”

While it might grow in exterior dimensions it appears that most of the gains will be felt inside, with Thompson’s blog entry stating that “it’s about the same size as its forebear, but with more interior room and better fuel economy.”

And those who love the current Prius will no doubt be happy that Toyota is only making conservative updates to the world’s top-selling hybrid, at least on the outside, with a slightly sportier look featuring more interesting details that overall falls in line with Toyota’s more recently updated models.

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Toyota Motor Corp., the world’s largest seller of hybrid-electric cars, said a version of its Prius hatchback due next year will be roomier and more fuel-efficient.

Images posted on the Internet on Thursday show the 2010 Prius, Allison Takahashi, a spokeswoman for the Japanese automaker’s U.S. sales unit, confirmed in an interview. The car is to be unveiled in January at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, she said. She said Toyota didn’t post the pictures.

The new vehicle “is about the same size as its forebear, but with more interior room and better fuel economy,” the company said in an e-mailed message.

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I think That interior are real picture.

Source:Priuschat

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Toyota Motor may create a separate brand for its Prius hybrid car and could add both larger and smaller Prius models to the lineup, the head of Toyota’s American sales division said Thursday.

James E. Lentz III, president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said he had proposed the idea to senior company executives in Japan. Lentz said he did not know when they might approve the project, but said he would meet with executives in Japan next month to discuss future models.

Toyota officials first discussed the concept of a separate Prius brand at the Detroit auto show in January.

Lentz, who spoke after the dedication of Toyota’s new safety and engineering center in Ann Arbor, said the Prius brand would be similar to Scion, Toyota’s brand of lower-priced cars aimed at younger buyers.

The brand would include the original Prius as well as new models bearing a Prius nameplate that Toyota is said to be developing.

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Several companies have begun converting Toyota Priuses and Ford Escape Hybrids to plug-in vehicles. Having watched this aftermarket industry develop, we have had our Prius Touring converted to a plug-in for evaluation, sacrificing a factory warranty for science. Toyota, too, has taken notice and developed its own plug-in Prius, which it showed at the Los Angeles Auto Show last November. The company plans to offer a production plug-in Prius based on the next-generation car by 2012.

Like today’s hybrids, plug-ins improve gas mileage by using both electricity and a gasoline engine to power the car. However, plug-ins have bigger batteries than ordinary hybrids, and the batteries can’t be recharged by the engine alone. They have to be recharged by being plugged in, much like a cell phone or laptop. Automakers and automotive engineering organizations say that electricity is a much more efficient power source for a car—as much as three times more efficient than a gas engine. So when the cars run on electricity, they can save money on operating costs compared with burning gasoline. To be truly green in terms of emissions, however, the source of your electricity also needs to be “clean” (that is, not from a coal-burning powerplant)

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Honda has unveiled a new hybrid family car at the Paris Motor Show to challenge the success of rival Toyota.

Honda Motor Co. said today the five-door Insight gasoline-electric hatchback will go on sale in Japan, Europe and North America next spring.

President and CEO Takeo Fukui said the Japanese automaker aims to sell 200,000 of the cars worldwide each year.

Honda said its response to Toyota Motor Corp’s hybrid-only Prius “will be priced significantly lower than any other hybrid car on the market.”

Honda described the car shown in Paris as a concept version of the production model that will be unveiled in January.

Honda said the Insight is the first of three new hybrid models it will introduce within the next four years.

Source:Freep.com

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Toyota Motor Corp is “confident that by 2020 we’ll have hybrid models in each of our product lines”, said Justin Ward, advanced powertrain programme manager at the Toyota Technical Centre.

Toyota estimates its sales of more than one million hybrid vehicles have saved about 7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, Ward told a seminar in Traverse City, Michigan. “You can have a positive impact today through hybrids,” he said.

Toyota’s latest fuel cell vehicle - the FCH-ADD, for Fuel Cell Hybrid-Advanced - has a cruising range of more than 800km, double that of Toyota’s previous-generation model.

Toyota had set a goal of having the fuel cell function in temperatures as low as -15.6C. “It was far below that last winter” when the car “survived three freeze/thaw cycles” in cold-weather testing, Ward said.

He said Toyota has made “huge progress” in fuel cell stack durability, but “we’re not anywhere near where we need to be”.

The fuel cell stack is heavy, and costs are high, he said. And questions remain, such as where does that hydrogen come from? How do you store it and move it around?

Ward said that diesel engines, even with the coming Euro 5 and Euro 6 standards for nitrogen oxide reduction, are “not going to be as clean as” the Toyota Prius in terms of nitrogen oxide emissions. He also said hurdles remain with plug-in hybrids, an area where General Motors is placing a huge bet with its Chevrolet Volt.

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TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp. denied on Wednesday it had received any funding from the Japanese government to develop its hit Prius gas-electric hybrid car.

Japan’s top automaker rejected a March 24 Business Week report that quoted Jim Press, vice chairman and president of Chrysler LLC and a former board member at Toyota, as saying, “The Japanese government paid for 100% of the development of the battery and hybrid system that went into the Toyota Prius.”

Press worked for 37 years at Toyota, including the years of research for the Prius, which went on sale 10 years ago. He left Toyota for Chrysler last September.
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