Green Options

Just how popular is the Prius? If you ask Jim Lentz, President of Toyota’s U.S. arm, it is so popular that it could soon sell even more units than Toyota’s perennial best seller, the Camry. Are hybrid cars really that popular?

To date, Toyota has sold two Camrys for every one Prius, but with over a million of the peppy little hybrids sold, and sales growing stronger every year, the Prius may soon join the Camry on the podium of top sellers.

I’ve always found most body kits to be silly. Side skirts, fender flares, and front splitters usually do little more than add weight and make a slow car look like it’s trying too hard to go fast. But every now and then a good, clean body kit can improve the appearance of a car, and if done right, even improve its aerodynamic properties.

Hybrids seem to be especially popular to make body kits for recently, with both the Toyota Prius and Ford Fusion Hybrid receiving different takes on body enhancements. Toyota is taking the game a step further with its Aerius body kit which offers subtle improvements to the exterior without negatively affecting the drag coefficient.

A lot can be said about Toyota’s hybrid flagship, the Prius. Heck, a lot already has been said about the odd, egg-shaped, fuel sipping little car. Love it or hate it, the Prius has been a sales success story, selling more units than all other hybrids combined while creating a cult of hypermilers and green geeks.

Looking to cash in on the success of the Prius, Toyota is reportedly planning to launch an entire line of Prius automobiles, perhaps even as its own sub-brand. The first contender for a new Prius badge is likely to be either a wagon or SUV, directly addressing the whole lack of cargo room on past Prius models.

While Chrysler’s alt-fuel plans for the future—and its integrity—seem uncertain at best, its cross-town rival General Motors is trying to make good on its fuel efficient pledges in a different way. This includes (finally) offering a Hummer with E85 flex-fuel capabilities, as promised in 2007.

Oh, and for those who are wishing for a Volt sub-brand, keep wishing. GM has no plans of spinning off the Volt as a brand of its own (as Toyota might do with the Prius). That won’t stop the General from spreading its hybrid drivetrain across other models, however.

Every industry is taking steps to adopt greener methods, and it’s become particularly important in businesses that provide transportation services to consumers because this is what people are looking for. Even if they can’t take big steps to make their own homes and businesses cleaner, they can help reduce their carbon footprint by making wiser environmental decisions. In order to address this shift in environmental perception and need, companies like the Green Tomato Cars Taxi Service in the UK are marketing their businesses to the more environmentally conscientious.

According to CEO Carlos Ghosn, unlike its other Japanese rivals, Nissan has made a strategic decision to cede the standalone hybrid wars to them and will not make hybrid-only models such as Toyota’s Prius or Honda’s Insight.

The American hybrid landscape is shifting under our feet.

With the perceptible movement of a slow landslide, Ford hybrid sales have been dramatically increasing over the last year—sales in September were up 73% from last September. According to Automotive News (subs. req’d), this brings Ford within a few thousand units of overtaking Honda to become the second largest seller of hybrids in America.

These numbers are significant because, according to Ford hybrid marketing manager David Finnegan, “More than 60 percent of Fusion Hybrid sales have been from non-Ford owners, and more than half of those are customers coming from import brands, mostly from Toyota and Honda.”

Confirming Finnegan’s assessment, the established hybrid juggernaut, Toyota, has seen sales of its hybrids plummet 28% in the same time period. Toyota still blows all the hybrid competition out of the water—capturing nearly 66% of all US hybrid sales—but the speed with which the changes are taking place certainly bodes well for a healthy and competitive hybrid marketplace in the future.

This one really made me giggle.

Tuning powerhouse Tommy Kaira has given the third generation Toyota Prius an aggressive makeover that is purely cosmetic.

This debate has already taken so many faces, and been argued so many times, that I cannot hope to add much more to it.

But I’ll try anyway.

A new study published by the Journal of Consumer Research has found that many Hummer owners excuse their large, oft-unnecessary H1 and H2s by crying patriotism and quoting American ideals like individualism. So are Hummer owners the morally righteous in the debate of anti-consumerism versus over-consumption?

If you live in Colorado and own a Prius, here’s a New Year’s Day gift for you: $6,000 off a plug-in hybrid conversion.

Earlier this year, Colorado passed House Bill 1331, “Incentives for Efficient Motor Vehicles,” which creates new tax credits of up to $6,000 for the purchase of, or conversion to, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

Background: plug-in hybrid and electric car retrofits.

The new credit will be a substantial discount off the average price of a plug-in conversion, which generally run around $10-14,000. On top of the Federal Tax Credit of 10% (up to $4,000), plug-in retrofits could start to make a lot of sense for some car owners.

The Veggie Van Organization unveiled the first algae fuel powered car this week in San Francisco. It’s actually a plug-in Prius that has been converted with the nickel-metal hydride battery. The green vehicle doesn’t run strictly on algae, but rather a 5% algae/95% gasoline blend. Since this vehicle uses a standard engine without any modifications, it demonstrates the opportunity to use alternative fuel sources like algae in a vehicle, and only 5% algae might be used today, but it gives some hope for the future.