Toyota Motor Corp yesterday said it set out to match the performance of diesel engines in developing its new Prius, as analysts predict gasoline-electric hybrids will benefit from Volkswagen AG’s emissions-rigging scandal.
Certain grades of the Prius that goes on sale in Japan in December are set to achieve as much as 40km per liter under Japan standards. The car’s engine has thermal efficiency of more than 40 percent, a key to fuel economy and on par or better than diesel engines.
“For a long time our dream has been to catch up with the diesel efficiency,” Toyota engineer for hybrid vehicles Shunsuke Fushiki said in Tokyo. “We’ve been successful in achieving this.”
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The Prius reigns over the global hybrid vehicle market, with more than 3.5 million units sold since its introduction in 1997. The fourth-generation model debuts by the end of this year in Japan amid growing mistrust of the auto industry following Volkswagen’s admission to cheating on pollution tests.
Toyota officials declined to discuss Volkswagen’s scandal in particular or any potential shift in demand between diesel and hybrid vehicles. The automaker is to continue to develop diesel engines in parallel with hybrids, Fushiki said.
“If a tough approach is taken to the introduction of real driving emissions testing, higher-than-expected costs would be unavoidable for both diesel and gasoline engines,” Jefferies Inc Tokyo-based analyst Takaki Nakanishi wrote in a report on Friday last week. “This would very likely increase the relative competitiveness of gasoline hybrid vehicles.”
Consumer mistrust of automakers’ claims on the cleanliness of their diesel engines might combine with stricter emissions policies in Europe and the US in necessitating costly updates that would make the powertrains more expensive, according to Bloomberg Intelligence. This might push consumers to cheaper gasoline vehicles or fuel-efficient hybrids, analysts Tanner Murphy and Kevin Tynan said this month.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by