Toyota News: Toyota Scraps Plan For Widespread Sales Of A Electric Minicar

[William Maley]

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.

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[David]

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.

[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.

[ocnblu]

Even Toyota knows electric vehicles are junk.