Toyota’s Prius Pays Price for Cheap Gasoline
wsj.com
wsj.com
America has really shitty public transit, so on average, you're driving (or being driven) somewhere and seeing other people driving.
America is also a place that encourages and celebrates individuality (for better or worse). At the same time, it's a country of sub-cultures and mixed cultural identities.
So you get people buying cars that they think fit their personal identity and their sub culture.
Prius(i?) were a statement for the conscious movement, but it's damning that Toyota never pushed the bar further and explored (until recently) other cultural identity vehicles as eco-conscious (like Tacomas, imagine how awesome that would be!).
tl;dr - cars are critical to American culture, and not just as practical tools for moving around. Even if you think you buy a prius because you "don't care" - that unto itself is a cultural and style decision you are making to express yourself. Hoodies forever.
side rant: Why Tesla is the only car company to make an electric (or even hybrid) that doesn't look like vanilla boring practical dogshit is beyond me.
And it wasn't an accident either. The car companies actively campaigned to tear up and dismantle public transit.
Dallas used to have a huge streetcar network; all that remains is the M uptown line.
Even here in San Francisco the anti-public-transit movement managed to tear down the A and B lines (among others; The A line used to run down Geary to the beach and the B line turned south and ran down 19th Ave.)
http://www.acogok.org/transportation-planning/maps-and-data/...
There are plans in the works to build a new light rail system. The trains were just purchased earlier this year.
I've often day dreamed about building a bot that sends a screenshot of traffic in Google Maps to my local representatives at 0830 and 1700 every day. Perhaps with the words "PLEASE fix my bloody commute" overlayed... the thought usually comes to me as I cross the 10 lane Wakota Bridge over the Mississippi that was recently replaced. Despite hundreds of millions of dollars, traffic still grinds to a halt at the same spot every damn day.
In the other corner, the effort to stop the transformation of Earth into a smoldering pile of garbage that cannot sustain human life.
It's a fight that "makes sense".
It's satire. It's a way of cranking up the Sharpen filter all the way to 100, to make things more obvious. Clearly the contradiction right now is not as bad as that - but it could be, there are future timelines that could be conceived in ways similar to that.
What I'm saying is - there's a dystopia in the future that looks like that. Let's make sure we don't take the wrong fork in the multiverse road and end up there somehow.
My next car will hopefully be a Tesla, but I cannot afford the Model S no matter how much I'd like one.
Seems more like Toyota's Prius is paying the price for hanging onto a decade-old product. The type of customer who would have bought a Prius in 2002, has moved on to EV's and PHEV's, and Toyota doesn't appear to be selling those yet.
Cheap Gasoline hasn't stopped Tesla from racking up multi-year-long waiting lists for the Model 3. "CMAX Energ-i" and Volts and LEAFs can be bought today at decent prices. But Toyota's response -- the "Prius Prime" -- doesn't appear to be for sale yet.
Priuses are kind of boring. (I owned one for a while so I hope I'm not too clueless on this.) They work, they're reliable, they're cheap to run, but few people come back from a Prius test drive thinking, holy shit, I'll do whatever it takes to own one of these cars. Nobody warns prospective Prius buyers, "don't test drive one unless you're ready to put down a bunch of money to buy it, because you will want to."
If I had to buy a non-EV car again, I'd probably look at Priuses because efficiency pleases me, Toyota has a good reputation, and their stuff is pretty reliable, but it's not particularly compelling. For a lot of people, saving money on gas is the main reason to even consider a Prius. It's not even in most people's top 10 for a Model 3.
Note that with a whopping 22 miles of electric range, the Prius Prime is far from a Model 3 competitor. Toyota seems to be betting on hydrogen rather than batteries, for reasons I've yet to comprehend, so I'd say their Model 3 competitor is the Mirai. Although I don't know why anyone would ever buy a Mirai.
The bumper sticker on my roommate's Prius goes...
"Hey, cool Prius!" -Nobody
I suspect this will go down in history as a major misstep. Especially given Toyota's experience / expertise in the space.
Toyota has been selling a PHEV model in the Prius line for sometime, and is replacing that model in the 2017 model year with the new Prius Prime, which is also a PHEV.
> Cheap Gasoline hasn't stopped Tesla from racking up multi-year-long waiting lists for the Model 3.
Having fairly small production numbers per year helps with racking up a multi-year-long waiting list -- the Model 3 waiting list is less than a year and half of combined sales of the Prius models in the US.
Your right. I forgot that technically there is an existing "Plug-in" Prius. However:
- it has an EPA-rated an all-electric range of just 6 miles
- it has no way to actually lock in a pure electric mode
- is limited to 62mph in pure-electric mode
according to http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1104921_2017-toyota-priu... . And Prius is the "weakest plug-in offering on the market", according to http://insideevs.com/plug-in-prius-setting-the-record-straig... .
Which is basically a repeat of my argument above. Prius seems to be selling poorly primary because it's no longer a competitive product. Other PHEVs have real all-electric modes, that are much faster (80-100mph) and longer range (20-40ish miles), making them more appealing than the Prius to those types of car buyers.
Prius Prime may change that. But it's not out yet -- people can't buy that yet. And in the meantime, this market can buy LEAFs, Volt's, CMAX Energi's, and other competitors today.
I'm a happy Toyota hybrid customer. Styling was not an important consideration when I chose the Prius. Gas mileage was much more important, along with price, quality, and comfort.
http://motorburn.com/2014/01/12-of-the-most-aerodynamic-cars... (#5)
For people like me who consider cars a utility item, I couldn't really care much less about its outward appearance to other people.
Most of those cars look great. The Prius stands out (along with the XL1) as a weirdmobile there, and it still only gets fifth place.
I'm not going to bash it over its appearance, but I think that list shows that it doesn't have to look different to be efficient.
Yes, that may be. But imagine if there had been an alternative to the Prius - was priced the same, had the same gas mileage and equivalent specs, but it looked a lot more stylish/sporty/refined, etc...
Which do you buy now?
The Prius is known for many things: I don't know of anyone who would go out of their way to say it's a stylish or attractive looking car as one of it's top 20 attributes. I'm sure someone out there like that exists, but they are very clearly in the minority.
Today, there's plenty of options, and the Volt would probably win (budget) or Tesla (best looking, pure electric).
I think the latest Prius simply looks worse than previous designs.
In Cambridge, MA, there's a significant part of the population for whom "I am making an overt statement about my care and concern for the environment" that will cause them to prefer the unstylish Prius/LEAF/Volt.
http://motorburn.com/2014/01/12-of-the-most-aerodynamic-cars...
Car styling is always a matter of taste, but I bet virtually everyone will find at least a couple of cars on that list that they think are nice to look at.
The Prius's weird styling isn't so much to be efficient, but to look efficient. The latest generation makes that much more obvious. Those weird lines and mismatched rear panels aren't doing anything for aerodynamics, but they call out that this car is different.
For example, I can put down the rear seats and place an assembled bicycle inside, without removing the front wheel or lowering the seat post. I couldn't even think about doing that with my last car, an Acura Integra.
It's one of the oddest shaped hatchbacks in production, and frankly looks weird to even a hatchback lover like myself. Take a look at the front runners in the hatchback field, you'll notice big differences in aerodynamics, "sleekness", and styling. Ford Focus, VW Golf, etc... all far better looking cars than the weirdly lined Prius.
Also I went with the Prius over the Volt mostly because the Volt has WORSE styling and less reliability.
EDIT: I did get a significant discount that was available to pretty much anyone who walked in to buy one. He told me there was considerable pressure to move them because sales completely dried up. In retrospect, I probably could have gotten a much better warranty :/ Oh well...
I was going to break down and buy a truck since it would be really useful, but the Colorado really is poor.
Many carbon taxation implementations would amount to a regressive tax. Poor people on average drive more and spend more of their income on gasoline than the wealthy. Add in the fact that it becomes a hidden consumption tax as well and it could end up being a fairly regressive tax.
Then the question becomes: are the ecological advantages worth the economic harm from the regressive nature?
Since my wife buys about 200 gallons of gas per year, my daily driver is electric, and our income is enough that we'd never notice a carbon tax, it's easy for me to support it personally. That's far from true for many others.
My favorite idea is a dynamic gas tax that maintains a constant slowly increasing price level. And using the tax revenue to invest in shifting the economy to be less carbon intensive.
So, set a national overall target CO2 production, divide it by the taxpaying population, and issue an fixed income tax credit of the carbon tax for that per-capita share of the target production. The poor spend, on average, a greater share of income on things that would pay the carbon tax, but if you rebate it that way, they still aren't usually going to end up seeing a net tax increase, though they'll still have all the socially beneficial incentives of a carbon tax.
British Columbia's carbon tax is claimed to be revenue neutral though I've noticed some criticism about the balance of resulting tax cuts.
Other carbon tax jurisdictions such as Alberta are taking a different approach and are using revenues on green projects.
If you don't build transit, people will have no choice but to drive just as much as they did before the tax was implemented, so the tax will have a minimal effect on vehicle emissions.
Sure, people will cut back on non-required trips, but the vast majority of driving people do is commuting, and they can't stop doing that unless they have an alternative means of getting to work.
The only way to reduce driving significantly is to create useful public transit, so any carbon tax scheme that does not increase funding for public transit is just going to take money from peoples' pockets without giving them a realistic way to avoid it -- and as other posters have noted, it will disproportionately harm the poor. This could make carbon taxes so politically unpopular that they will be repealed, and new ones will not be created. That could be pretty bad for the environment.
I did a double take at that as price per gallon seems markedly lower than when I was last in the US.
UK prices ratchet seemingly inexorably upwards. When US prices peaked in 08 at $4.50 we paid pretty much exactly what we pay now - £5 approx. Tax is around 65% of pump price, though it's been higher in the past.
I assume there's no US attempts to increase taxation to combat clmate change and encourage alternative behaviour.
Of course there's no attempt to increase taxes, because taxation is theft and government is the enemy. The federal gas tax hasn't been increased since 1993, and worse it's a fixed amount per gallon, not a percentage, so both inflation and increasing fuel efficiency cut into it. State gas taxes are a little more mutable but still face lots of resistance.
We had, under Blair, yearly percentage increases above inflation in fuel tax as part of their climate change efforts. There was a point, I forget quite where - perhaps around 99p a litre or £4.40 a gallon, where behaviour and car use started to noticeably change.
When gas prices started to retreat from the $4/gallon peak around 2008, there was talk of increasing gas taxes to compensate. Not just for climate change, but also because efficiency is hitting gas tax revenue and that money is needed to build and maintain roads. But it's a tough sell when half of the electorate thinks climate change is a conspiracy and government always wastes its money, so nothing happened.
The Prius looks like an old-man's car to me. Teslas have all the bells-and-whistles and don't look half bad. Much easier to peacock in a Model S than _any_ of the Prii.
In mid-2000s Toyota was an innovator and disruptor (hybrids). Now they're busy being disrupted by GM and Ford (Toyota has no production electrics) and, of course, Tesla.
And the new Priuses don't look good. Everyone I talked to have said the same thing. It's like they wanted to ensure it'd fail - because Toyo is now all-in for fuel-cells.