Toyota aims to sell one million hybrid vehicles annually

Although Toyota Motor (NYSE: TM) basically invented the popular notion of hybrid vehicles years ago by making the Prius compact passenger car the spokescar of the hybrid world, the automaker now has its sights set a little higher. Toyota wants to sell at least one million Hybrid cars every year shortly after 2010 gets here.

Although Toyota was not the first automaker with some profile of hybrid vehicle on the road, it’s been the most aggressive marketer of such technology and resulting vehicles by far. Although the hybrid Prius has sold only 1.25 million units since first being introduced in 1997, Japan’s largest automaker thinks that mark can be hit annually within a few years. Are those plans too ambitious?

If fuel prices stay at the level they are at now, it’s not inconceivable to think Toyota can’t hit that mark. The automaker has publicly said that it wants a hybrid drivetrain in every vehicle it sells come 2020, so to get that kind of expertise ramping, it needs to move fairly a few hybrid vehicles that year and increase that amount every year going forward.

The internal combustion engine still is not perfected, so transitioning millions of vehicles to a hybrid drivetrain in a little by a decade sounds like a risky plan to many. whether Toyota can start selling a million of them per year lengthy before that, though, it just may have a chance.

Original post by Brian White