September 12, 2005
Toyota is putting the pedal to the metal on its wildly successful hybrid program. The company has created an executive vice presidency for hybrid and fuel cell vehicles. A second executive vice president was assigned to oversee product development, design and vehicle engineering.
Previously, one executive was in charge of all of Toyota's engineering except for matters involving production.
Toyota eventually plans to sell 1 million hybrid vehicles globally but has declined to say when it expects to reach that goal. Last year Toyota says it sold 134,690 hybrid vehicles in global markets. For the first five months of this year, hybrid sales surged 58.4 percent from a year ago to 82,580, the company says.
Next year Toyota plans to double global production of its gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles to 500,000 units.
The world's second-biggest automaker aims to meet strong demand in North America for the fuel-sipping vehicles, available through the Prius sedan and the Lexus RX 400 SUV.
Toyota plans to build 180,000 Prius cars this year, and is targeting combined annual output of 62,000 RX 400h and Toyota Highlander hybrid cars, both launched earlier this year.
