We brought you news yesterday of the new Honda Insight, which Honda is launching in to the European market. Honda has made big noises about the Insight being significantly cheaper than the Prius, which seems to have got Toyota thinking.
The next generation Toyota Prius (unveiled recently at Detroit) is due out before too long, and is a bigger, better equipped car than the outgoing version, and therefore more expensive. Now you wouldn’t expect Toyota to have a market that it’s made its own just disappear over to Honda, and it looks like they have an ace up their sleeve.
Current Toyota Prius - could be kept in production to challenge the new Honda Insight
Nikkei in Japan is reporting that Toyota intends to keep up production of the current generation Prius and drop its price to undercut the new Honda Insight. Now this could just be a knee-jerk reaction to Honda’s announcement, but it could prelude a whole new range of Hybrid cars from Toyota.
‘Car Wars’ are getting interesting, and this is a big move by Toyota to hold on to their market dominance. But how what is essentially a 5 year old car (the current Prius) will fare against the new Insight we will have to wait and see.
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