Irv’s Sheet: Amping Up Battery Production

You may have seen recent stories about the fact that in April, global Prius sales passed the 1 million mark.

As we noted in our post about this on May 15, passing this mark took just a little more than 10 years from when the first-generation Prius went on sale in Japan. Sales were leisurely at first. But then the Prius caught on, and sales gained incredible momentum - momentum that spread to other hybrid vehicles such as the Camry hybrid.

And now, as gas prices continue to head toward the stratosphere, that momentum has shifted into overdrive – we can’t build hybrids fast enough. The flip-side of the coin, however, is that we’re building them as fast as we can. The problem is that we’re pretty much at maximum performance in terms of our ability to supply the battery packages for these vehicles.

So it is that Toyota Motor Corp., our parent company, is working with its corporate partner Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. through their joint venture company Panasonic Energy EV, to significantly expand production of the battery packages our hybrid vehicles require.

In this venture, we’ll jointly spend ¥20 billion ($192 million) to build a new production line on the grounds of Panasonic EV Energy’s Omori Plant in central Japan, our core facility for hybrid-battery production. Construction currently is under way. When it comes online in 2010, this new facility will enable us eventually to increase production of the nickel-metal hydride batteries we use in the current generation of vehicles powered by Hybrid Synergy Drive.

Our first mass-production lithium-ion batteries also will come from the Omori plant – keep in mind that we are committed to producing plug-in hybrids, with lithium-ion batteries, for fleet users in 2010. Production of lithium-ion batteries at the Miyagi plant, located in north-eastern Japan, eventually may also be considered.

So this is very clear: We plan to sell a million hybrid vehicles annually sometime during the decade beginning with 2010, up from the 450,000 hybrids we expect to sell worldwide during 2008. To do that, we will amp up our production of the batteries that will allow us to build hybrid vehicles in the numbers that consumers tell us they want. The sooner we’re measuring our energy use in amps instead of gallons, the better off we’ll all be.

- Irv Miller, Group Vice President, Corporate Communications

Comments

[Paul Rivers]

I'm anxiously awaiting to see what the next-gen Prius looks like. Hope we'll see it soon. :-)

[Nick]

Same here, on both the next-gen Prius and measuring energy use in Amps instead of Gallons.