Toyota Motor Corp. will produce a small fleet of plug-in hybrids by 2010, the Japanese automaker's chief said Sunday.
The plug-in hybrid will go head-to-head with US rival General Motor Corp's Chevy Volt, which is also expected to hit the road in 2010.
The test fleet of plug-in hybrids is part of a broader environmental sustainability plan, Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe announced at the Detroit auto show.
Toyota also plans to introduce two all-new dedicated hybrids at next year's Detroit auto show, one under the luxury Lexus brand and the other under the Toyota mark.
They will be based on the same technology which runs Toyota's popular Prius.
“These two introductions will move us closer to our goal of selling a million hybrids per year in the next decade,” Watanabe said.
Toyota is also planning on introducing clean-diesel versions of its Tundra pickup and Sequoia full-sized sports utility vehicle to the US market “in the near future”, he said.
These new vehicles will help Toyota comply with new rules requiring automakers to ensure that the vehicles they sell in the United States have an average fuel economy of 35 miles per gallon by 2020, he said.
“Toyota strongly supports this long overdue legislation,” he said. “We will not wait until the deadline to comply. I have issued a challenge to our engineers to meet the new standards well in advance of 2020. I believe it can be done, it should be done and that Toyota is capable of doing it.”
Toyota is also working on developing cleaner and more efficient methods of producing ethanol from wood-waste rather than food crops, he said.
Toyota plans on introducing flex-fuel vehicles capable of running on fuel with up to an 85 percent ethanol content to the US market in 2009.
But there is not sufficient ethanol production capacity for most owners of these vehicles to use the fuel and it is also not yet available in many markets.
Furthermore, the current methods of producing ethanol require large energy inputs and have resulted in sharp increases in corn prices.
General Motors, which currently produces more than a million flex-fuel vehicles a year, also announced plans Sunday to develop more efficient biofuels.
It has partnered with an Illinois-based company, Coskata Inc., which will open a test plant in the fourth quarter of this year capable of producing ethanol from practically any renewable source, including garbage, old tires and plant waste.
Toyota delivered the first two Prius plug-in hybrids in November to universities in California to be tested in real-world conditions, Watanabe said.
It is currently in the planning phase of expanding a battery factory it operates as a joint-venture with Panasonic to build lithium batteries for automotive operations, he added.
A fleet of hundreds of the plug-in hybrids will be delivered to “a wide variety of global commercial customers, with many coming to the United States,” he added.
