Hybrid cars are gradually developing from a niche alternative to a mainstream solution and now their impact has been reaffirmed with the news that the Toyota Motor Corporation has cumulatively sold more than two million hybrid vehicles since the 1997 launch of the Coaster Hybrid EV and the Prius.
According to official statistics, cumulative sales of Toyota hybrid passenger vehicles reached 2,014 thousand units with sales of commercial hybrids reaching 2.7 thousand units for a total of 2,016.9 thousand units at the end of August this year.
The most successful vehicle, unsurprisingly, is the Prius, with cumulative sales of that hybrid car topping more than 1.4million units and representing 71 per cent of the global total. The Camry Hybrid is the second most popular with just over 167,000 units sold, representing 8.3 per cent of the total. Then comes the Lexus RX400h/450h, with 7.3 per cent of the total – more than 146,000 units.
The news coincided with Toyota Motor Europe’s announcement that cumulative sales on the continent have topped the 200,000 mark with 50 per cent of those sales occurring over the last 24 months. Indeed Toyota Motor Europe has sold a total of 202,125 vehicles since introducing the first commercial hybrid back in 2000.
The third generation of the Toyota Prius helped the company get over the threshold with more than 17,000 additional customer orders since June 2009. Toyota has now set a sales target of one million hybrid sales per year by the early 2010s.
