The Toyota Motor Corp. said last Thursday that global sales of its hybrid vehicles, which were first introduced a decade ago, have topped one million – a landmark record for the fast-rising Japanese automaker.

Toyota’s cumulative sales of hybrid vehicles totaled 1.047 million as of the end of May. Of those hybrids, nearly 345,000 were sold in Japan and 702,000 abroad, the company said in a statement.

The Prius is the apparent hybrid leader, with a total of 757,600 units sold since its launch in 1997 in Japan. The Japanese automaker began selling the Prius in North America, Europe and other places in 2000. In 2006, the model made up more than 40 percent of hybrid sales in the United States.

The Prius is the first mass-produced and marketed hybrid car. It went on sale in Japan in 1997, and worldwide in 2001. By the end of 2003, about 160,000 units had been produced for sale in Japan, Europe, and North America. The Pri [Read more...]

In an increasingly competitive auto market, automobile manufacturers are always on their toes to look for that opening which would take them to the top of the mountain. Asian automakers like Toyota, Honda and Nissan read the future clearly and have come up with products which they see will be popular in the future.

Decades ago, Japanese automakers foresaw that the price of petroleum fuel will increase sharply. Their response to this is the development of fuel efficient vehicles. And to make sure that they will have a loyal buyer base in the future, they added reliability to their vehicles.

The result is what we see today. Japanese automakers continue to rack up sales and increase market share in the United States while the Big Three closed down plants, reduced the number of their employees, and are now in the middle of their turnaround plan.

Today, what all automakers have in common is finding a way to produce [Read more...]