Toyota has sold 3 million Prius cars. How the heck did that happen?

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The very first Prius in Canada was purchased by Dr. David Suzuki in the summer of 2001. A first-generation car, it was a homely little thing with a 70-horsepower gasoline engine, a cramped trunk, and the zero-to100-km/h time of a 1966 Dodge Dart.

Like Honda’s two-seat Insight hybrid released two years earlier, it seemed like a toy — a novelty automobile perhaps ideal for the eco-conscious host of The Nature of Things, but not really a practical choice for the rest of us. And yet, this summer, a dozen years after that first car took to Canadian roads, Toyota marked the milestone of having sold three million of the things worldwide. How in the heck did that happen?

These days, everyone knows what a Prius is. Toyota keeps making noise about setting up its hybrid division as a separate brand because it’s so well-recognized, and it now sells four main variants: the Yaris-sized Prius C, the standard Prius, the roomier Prius V, and Dr. Suzuki’s new car, a plug-in version that can operate as an electric vehicle for brief periods of time.

All four of these machines have the fizz and panache of a Braun hand blender, so why are they so popular? Why, when almost all automotive manufacturers sell some sort of hybridized vehicle, does the Prius still account for more than half of all hybrids sold worldwide?

The Prius story starts in the early 1990s, a time when Toyota still built sporty and interesting cars like the MR2 and the Supra. Always a conservative, slow-reacting company, Japan’s largest automaker somehow had the premonition that the average person’s attitude toward the automobile was going to change. Rear-drive turbocharged rocketships would always appeal to the gear head crowd, but more and more people were becoming concerned about efficiency and emissions.

The earliest Toyota effort, dubbed the G21, simply tried to do what Mazda does now with its Skyactiv technologies: wring more power from a conventional internal combustion engine. A 50% improvement over the best-selling Corolla was set as an initial goal, yet in an uncharacteristic fit of pioneering spirit, Toyota executives demanded twice that figure and gave their engineers just 12 months to come up with a solution before the 1995 Tokyo auto show.

The first prototypes were hardly a success. The batteries had a tendency to overheat badly and the cars couldn’t handle cold weather, either. Toyota had been fiddling with conceptual hybrid technology for years, but producing a working machine was proving more difficult. Keeping the pressure on, new Toyota president Hiroshi Okuda moved up the schedule for a production version. He intended the car to go into full production just two years after the concept was shown in Tokyo.

A team of more than 1,000 Toyota engineers worked feverishly on the electrical issues. The design of the car was sketched out by a Californian firm in just three weeks. Feelings within the company were divided, with many sure that the hybrid project would receive either a lukewarm reception or total indifference from the public.

And yet, upon its release in Japan in the fall of 1997, the chubby little sedan turned out to be a runaway hit. Yes, it had great fuel economy, but there was something appealing about the way technology had been harnessed to create an entirely new type of car.

At the heart of the Prius experience is its planetary gearbox. This is hardly an innovation — you get the same sort of thing in a Ford Model T. However, in more modern application, the central “sun” gear, the four surrounding “planet” gears, and the external ring gear all play their carefully engineered parts in handling the multiple power outputs.

Unlike a mild hybrid setup as in the Honda Insight, where an electric and gasoline engines are connected side-by-side, the Prius manages its two powerplants independently. From a dead stop, the electric drive provides strong off-the-line torque, and then the gasoline engine comes online at higher speeds. This ability to operate at slow speeds without firing up a fossil-fuel engine is what gives the Prius its exemplary in-city fuel economy.

A side effect of the power split device is that it is also capable of operating as a gearless transmission, providing a wide range of ratios programmed for efficiency. In operation, it’s entirely different from Nissan’s pulley-and-drivebelt continuously variable transmissions, but the result is the same: great fuel economy.

When the Prius finally arrived on North American shores, its popularity wasn’t down to practical considerations like good fuel economy. Instead, the Toyota became a poster car for the environmental movement. Leonardo di Caprio ordered one of the first ones, as did Cameron Diaz, and then there were the 2003 Academy Awards with their fleet of chauffeur-driven second-generation Priuses.

The Prius, now shaped like an ergonomic mouse in the interests of slippery aerodynamics, became a near-instant status symbol. Owning one was a way to flaunt your environmentally sensitive side, to self-identify as an early adopter.

With popularity came the inevitable backlash, and a surprisingly vitriolic one at that. The most persistent claim was that constructing the Prius consumed far more energy than an ordinary car, and that mining the heavy metals for the large battery pack gave the hybrid the same environmental footprint as a Humvee.

No empirical evidence existed to support these claims, but people seemed only too willing to squabble over what the Prius was. The always irreverent South Park expertly lampooned the attitude of some insufferable Prius evangelists in an episode titled “Smug.”

Now, however, with the third generation of cars, the Prius has become less contentious and is simply viewed as a commuting tool, or as the ideal taxicab. It’s far more pleasant to drive than it used to be, and while the interior is a bit recycled-feeling, it’s quite spacious. Handling and acceleration were obviously not engineering priorities, but a modern Prius is perfectly capable of keeping up with modern traffic.

Moreover, the record shows that many of the main concerns of Prius detractors have simply not happened. Battery pack failures are extremely rare (if they do happen, spares are much less expensive than anticipated), and average fuel economy doesn’t seem to deteriorate with age. Resale values are good. Basically, the car’s a Toyota.

But the Prius is no longer an innovation. The new plug-in hybrid, while it stands alone as being one of the few cars on the market to actually hit its Natural Resources Canada fuel economy figures, is hardly better than some of the home conversions done by DIY-types. The Nissan Leaf and, more impressively, the Tesla Model S have made full-electric cars seem both practical and stylish, especially for inhabitants of highly congested areas.

Toyota promises to double research and development on its hybrid powertrains, and with a solid foothold in the marketplace, it will be money well spent. We’ll likely see improvements in fuel economy, on-board technology and passive and active safety systems. The heart of the car will remain the same: a proven method for extracting every last mile from a drop of gasoline.



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