Toyota Motor Corp’s global sales of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles have surpassed 5 million in a milestone for a technology that was initially greeted with skepticism.
The Japanese automaker, which yesterday said it had sold 5.125 million hybrid vehicles as of the end of last month, started selling the Prius, the world’s first mass-produced hybrid passenger car, in 1997.
“What an achievement for this technology to have grown this widespread,” said vice chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada, known as “the father of the Prius” for having led the team that developed the hit model.
“I believe there is a lot more room for this technology to grow,” he told reporters at Toyota’s Tokyo office.
Toyota’s hybrid vehicles now account for 14 percent of its global sales and 40 percent of its sales in Japan.
Toyota sells 19 hybrid passenger car models and one plug-in hybrid, and is promising 18 new hybrids from now through December 2015.
The hybrid has been so successful the only obstacle for Toyota may be that many rivals are in the game now.
“Toyota has led the world on cost-effective fuel-saving hybrid technology for more than a decade, but the competition is really heating up,” said David Friedman, senior engineer and deputy director of the clean vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.
The organization thinks that Honda Motor Co, Toyota’s Japanese rival, overall offers greener cars, despite Toyota’s hybrid success.
“To stay ahead of the pack on hybrids,” he said, “they will need to focus their hybrids on boosting fuel economy further and cutting costs, while picking up the pace in innovation in their conventional and electric cars.”
The big growth in auto sales is coming these days from emerging markets, where hybrids have yet to catch on because of higher prices compared to gasoline-powered autos.
Uchiyamada acknowledged costs will have to come down, but he said such nations were also growing concerned about energy efficiency and emissions and they need to offer incentives, or subsidies, for consumers so they can buy hybrids.
“Hybrids have now become a core technology,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts