Toyota (TM) Means To Be First To The Plug-In Car Business
It is not entirely clear that consumers want plug-in electric cars, but that is not keeping Toyota (NYSE:TM) from marketing one, probably in two years. Hybrids are less expensive and get up to 50 mph. The same is true of…
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The largest Japanese car company says it will begin to sell its Prius Plug-In Hybrid. The car will take a charge to get more mileage from the electric part of the current Prius engine.
Toyota claims the new car will be able to travel 870 miles using its hybrid/electic/gas fuel capacity.
The new vehicle from Toyota is meant to compete with similar models that GM and Nissan plan to launch, but all three vehicles are coming into a market where it is not clear that people will want to charge their cars in a garage the way that they might a golf cart. Charging electric cars requires special equipment. The price of electricity is variable. The price of gas has fallen and is now under $2.25 per gallon in many US cities. Oil prices are back near $70 and there is evidence that a stronger dollar could drive that price lower.
The Toyota may be an example of a large company building something that no one buys. It happened before with the Edsel.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
