Toyota Prius – sales double

As we reported last month, the Toyota Prius – the new, 3rd GEN car – took the top sales spot in Japan in its first full month on sale, knocking April’s big seller – the Honda Insight Hybrid – in to second place. For the fist time the top two spots in Japan were taken by petrol-electric Hybrids.

But now the new Toyota Prius has trounced the Honda Insight in June’s sales charts, retaining its top spot and more than doubling its sales to over 22,000 cars, whilst the Honda Insight slipped down to fourth place.

Much of this is due to the tax breaks that the Japanese Government is giving to Hybrid cars, effectively making them tax free. But it also has to do with the Japanese people’s ‘Early-Adopter’ mentality. The Japanese as a race love anything new and techy, and they also have a strong leaning to environmental issues (don’t mention the whales!).

And in many ways you can understand the sales of the new Prius. In Japan’s crowded cities, emissions are a big issue and, despite our reservations about Hybrid cars, Hybrid cars are clean. Not in terms of the meaningless and pointless headline CO2 emissions, but in terms of what really matters – NOx emissions and particulates. With huge traffic jams the norm, the driving experience – even in a supercar – is practically non-existent. So the fact that small-engined Hybrids like the Prius and the Insight offer an economical means of transport – not a ‘Drive’ – is all that really matters.

It seems likely that in the short to medium term Hybrid sales will continue to grow. But only to those who spend most of their time in traffic or view cars as a means of simply getting from A to B. We’re still trying to be open-minded about the new Prius until we’ve tried one. But we’re not holding out much hope that it will be a ‘Driver’s’ car.

As a footnote, this inexorable rise in the sale of Hybrids could be a big earner for Lotus if the Japanese – as seems likely – legislate to make Hybrid and EVs ‘noisy’. As we reported this weekend, Hybrid cars are considered dangerous when running in silent mode, but Lotus has the solution with its Safe & Sound Technology.