Toyota wants to lessen the premium on Hybrid cars

World’s second largest automaker and the leaders and pioneers of hybrid cars Toyota have expressed views that they would want to lower the premium on such cars to make them more affordable for the common man. Katsuaki Watanabe, Toyota Motor President spoke about their plans: “We would like to lower overall costs for hybrid cars so that more people can afford them.”

The rising oil prices in the recent times and the problems with ever increasing pollution has boosted the demand for such vehicles which gives impressive fuel efficiency and are less polluting. Toyota is the leader in this market with their Prius vehicle, which sells in large numbers in the various markets around the world. Honda also has an impressive product Insight in this market. Both these companies are committed to launch more products running on this technology.

Toyota now wants to halve the gap between the respective production and development costs of the two types of vehicles as soon as possible. Hybrid vehicles generally cost around $4,500 more than their conventional alternatives. If this price difference can be lowered, more and more consumers would be lured into buying these vehicles.

Toyota has sold more than 360,000 Prius vehicles around the world, which Japan being the prime market followed by the United States. They plan to sell more than 1 million hybrids by the end of the year and also want to convert most of their vehicles range on this technology.