2008-08-15
Toyota and GM Competing to Market Plug-in Autos in 2010. By Tom Krisher, AP, August 15, 2008. "As Toyota, General Motors and other automakers race to bring rechargeable electric vehicles to showrooms.... Toyota [posits that] its approach is the least costly way to get great mileage and performance in the near term. Toyota Motor Corp. plans to bring a plug-in hybrid vehicle to market sometime in 2010... the design will be similar to that of the current Prius... The plug-in will have new lithium-ion batteries and can be recharged from a home outlet. Yet unlike General Motors Corp.'s planned Chevrolet Volt, it won't rely completely on an electric motor to turn the wheels. While it can run in electric-only mode, Toyota's plug-in will have a small internal combustion engine that can assist the electric motor in a 'blended' mode... The Volt [also scheduled for marketing in 2010] will have an internal combustion engine, but it will be used solely to recharge the batteries... Bob Boniface, the Volt's design director, said he could not comment on Toyota's system, but he said GM is building the Volt because of expertise it learned from building the EV1 electric car in the 1990s... Adding the small internal combustion engine to recharge the Volt conquers the EV1's limited range problems, Boniface said."
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