Toyota Delivers Three Prius Plug-In Hybrids for Year-Long Demo

San Diego Gas & Electric and the nonprofit California Center for Sustainable Energy rolled out three Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHVs) today in what’s expected to be at least a year-long program intended to assess the vehicles’ performance in real-world driving conditions throughout the United States.

The three cars unveiled today in San Diego are among the first of a 150-vehicle demonstration fleet that Toyota Motor Sales USA plans to deliver throughout the United States by September. The Japanese carmaker plans to deploy 600 of the next-generation hybrids around the world as part of a demonstration program intended to both assess the PHV’s performance and as a way to measure public acceptance of the technology. Toyota will incorporate the data in both its engineering development and distribution plans for the Prius PHV Hybrid, which is slated for its U.S. introduction in 2012.

Toyota Prius PHV (courtesy Toyota)
Toyota Prius PHV (courtesy Toyota)

Mary Nickerson, a Toyota spokeswoman in Los Angeles, tells me the Prius PHVs unveiled today are the first to be delivered in Southern California. The Bay Area got its first glimpse in San Jose two weeks ago, and a few Prius PHVs are scheduled for delivery in San Francisco by the end of July. Toyota also plans to deliver Prius PHVs to Toyota fleet vehicle customers in Detroit, Boston, and Seattle (the other cities in our growing Xconomy Network), but Nickerson says the schedule hasn’t been worked out yet.

The PHV is based on Toyota’s current third-generation Prius design. It combines high-output lithium-ion batteries with Toyota’s Hybrid Synergy Drive technology to offer an all-electric driving mode for the first time.

The Prius PHV, like a standard 2010 Toyota Prius, combines a 98-horsepower, 1.8-liter gasoline engine with an electric motor that produces the equivalent of 80 horsepower. Unlike a standard Prius, however, the PHV can operate in electric-only mode—powered only by its batteries for 13 miles at speeds up to 62 mph. The Prius PHV can be recharged in roughly three hours from a standard 110-volt electrical outlet, or in 90 minutes using a 220-volt charger.

As I mentioned earlier this month, San Diego is expected to be a test market for as many as 10 different electric vehicle designs over the next year. SDG&E and the California Center for Sustainable Energy are evaluating how advanced electric vehicle charging stations can be integrated with the power grid. The center also is leading a joint study with SDG&E and AeroVironment to determine how used ion-lithium batteries from electric vehicles can be given a second life in smart-grid energy storage applications.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.