Jump to content
News
Reviews
Discussons
Activity
Create New...
Close
  • William Maley
    William Maley

    By William Maley •

    Toyota Scraps Plan For Widespread Sales Of A Electric Minicar

    William Maley

    Staff Writer - CheersandGears.com

    September 24, 2012

    2012 was supposed to be the year that Toyota would begin selling the electric version of the iQ minicar called the eQ. When it introduced the vehicle back in 2010 expected, Toyota said it planned to sell several thousand of the vehicles per year.

    "Two years later, there are many difficulties," said Takeshi Uchiyamada, Toyota's vice chairman and the engineer who oversees vehicle development.

    Now, Toyota is planning to only sell about 100 of the eQ vehicles in the United States and Japan in an extremely limited release.

    "The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet society's needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs, or how it takes a long time to charge," said Uchiyamada.

    Toyota said they are putting more emphasis on hybrid technology, expecting to introduce 21 hybrid models by 2015.

    Source: Reuters

    William Maley is a staff writer for Cheers & Gears. He can be reached at [email protected] or you can follow him on twitter at @realmudmonster.

    Go to articles

    User Feedback

    Recommended Comments

    G. David Felt

    Very True and common sense, electric is an in city limited commuter car. Not a real world solution. You also add the very dirty power coal provides and the amount of green house gas emitted is crazy high compared to far superior fueling options like CNG.

    Link to comment
    Share on other sites
    Drew Dowdell

    Interesting that Toyota is throwing in the towel on this so early. I wonder what problems they ran into.

    I've driven the Ford Focus EV and Fisker Karma. Electric propulsion certainly has its merits, it is the battery and generation technology that need to catch up.

    I wonder if Toyota's opinion is one of "well if we have to include an onboard generator anyway, might as well make it a hybrid and no one does that better than us". Which could be a valid position to have, but limits flexibility in the future.

    Link to comment
    Share on other sites


    Join the conversation

    You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
    Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

    Guest
    Add a comment...

    ×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

      Only 75 emoji are allowed.

    ×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

    ×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

    ×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

    ×

  • google-news-icon.png



×
×
  • Create New...

Hey there, we noticed you're using an ad-blocker. We're a small site that is supported by ads or subscriptions. We rely on these to pay for server costs and vehicle reviews.  Please consider whitelisting us in your ad-blocker, or if you really like what you see, you can pick up one of our subscriptions for just $1.75 a month or $15 a year. It may not seem like a lot, but it goes a long way to help support real, honest content, that isn't generated by an AI bot.

See you out there.

Drew
Editor-in-Chief

I've whitelisted
Continue without support

Write what you are looking for and press enter or click the search icon to begin your search