SEMA Preview: Venza Project Cars

Toyota will display two Venza project cars at this year’s Specialty Equipment Market Assn. (SEMA) show in Las Vegas to help illustrate the Venza’s versatility.

The first of them is called the Venza AS V (Active-Sports Versatility). This car, developed by Five Axis, will be outfitted with several features offering unique solutions for transporting and storing all types of winter sports equipment.

The rear of the vehicle will house a unique utility system, the Integrated Cargo Carrier (ICC), created by Magna Car Top Systems. The ICC is a stow-away rack system that pulls out to transport a variety of wet and dry equipment such as bicycles and skis.

Exterior body enhancements will include new front and rear bumpers as well as slightly more aggressive over-fenders. Wider 20 x 10.5-inch wheels and larger diameter tires will also enhance the look of the Venza AS V.

The second project is called the SportLux Venza. The idea behind this vehicle, developed by Street Image, Inc., is to give the occupants the feel of a refined sports car while retaining Venza’s utility and functionality. Body kit modifications have been added to the exterior, with an upgraded black/burgundy leather treatment inside.

Complementing the interior is a premium navigation unit that is equipped with a full entertainment system. The engine’s output has been enhanced, and so has braking and suspension performance.

These two project cars will be on display Toyota’s SEMA show booth. Press information will be available on Toyota's Pressroom site during the 2008 SEMA.

You can also visit our Venza Project Car set on Flickr for a gallery of images.

- Denise Morrissey, Corporate Communications

Hybrid Flavors

You’ve no doubt noticed that as gas prices have risen during the past year, so has interest in hybrid vehicles - both those currently on sale, and those that are in the pipelines of a variety of manufacturers.

But there seems to be a bit of confusion about the definition of a hybrid – and also about the divisions among the hybrid family.

So let’s start from first principles to clear that up.

According to the SAE International, a leading society of engineers, a hybrid vehicle is one that has "both a rechargeable energy storage system (RESS) capable of releasing and capturing energy and an energy generating device that converts consumable fuels into propulsion energy."

So if a vehicle has two power sources, one of which is an RESS such as a battery pack, it is, by definition, a hybrid.

But because hybrids are separated into types - series, parallel and series/parallel- and because there are also plug-in hybrids, mild hybrids and full hybrids, a further bit of explanation is in order.

Things Every Driver Should Know How to Do

It seems clear that folks today are nowhere near as involved with their cars as drivers once were.

And that’s OK. You don’t need to be involved with your car to the point of having a relationship with it. In point of fact, cars today – almost all of them, ours and those of other manufacturers – are so well developed that they need very little attention.

But this apparent disconnect between drivers and their vehicles has, it seems to me, some unfortunate potential consequences. For as we’ve become less involved with our cars and less interested in them, we’ve apparently forgotten that there are some things about them that we really need to know, and know how to do.

Here’s a quick list of some of the things that are essential for any driver to know – things you can learn about simply by leafing through your car’s owner’s manual:

Three Toyotas make Fuelly’s Top 10!

Three Toyotas in Fuelly’s Top 10? Well, that’s great! For the record, they’re the Camry, the Corolla and the Prius.

But, uh, what’s Fuelly?

Fuelly is one of the latest, cool, fun things we’ve found on the Web. It’s a community site that lets you – indeed, invites you to – record and keep track of your car’s fuel economy on a Web-based log.

Ah, but there’s more to it than that. The site also invites you to monitor what others who drive cars like yours are doing, in terms of mpg. You can, in fact, monitor the fuel economy of just about any car you can think of.

Why should you monitor your car’s fuel economy? Not everyone believes that doing so is important. But those who do largely subscribe to the notion that it’s better to know than to not know. And many believe that once they establish an mpg baseline, it may be possible to modify driving styles to improve those mpg numbers.

Least Expensive, Best for Families

We’ve recently come across a couple of "10-best" lists that we found interesting, each of them from Forbes.com. No surprise, as Forbes has been doing a series of "10-best cars" stories recently.

The two stories that caught our attention are titled "The Least Expensive Cars to Drive," and "10 Best Cars for Families." Both topics are dear to our hearts, since we’re all on budgets and since we all are involved with families. So we thought it would be well to pass along a few details of the Toyota vehicles that the Forbes folks selected. For that matter, click on the above links and you’ll be directed toward photos and descriptions of all 20 vehicles – ours and those of others – selected for these two lists.

First, the least-expensive cars: Forbes’ testers named the Yaris and the Prius to their list of 10. To arrive at their conclusions, the Forbes folks looked at purchase price, taxes, license fees, maintenance and miles per gallon – in short, the likely cost of driving each car for five years. And they factored in depreciation.

Brochure Style

One of the things I like to do in my free time is look through old magazines. I’m not much interested in the articles and pictures. What I am interested in is the advertisements and the writing style used in those old ads.

I get the same enjoyment from looking at Toyota brochures from the 1950s and 1960s. They can be pretty entertaining.

Here’s a good example from a 1959 Toyopet Crown brochure - and as always on Open Road, if you'd like a larger view, just click on the picture:

Notice the couple – man and woman sooo ‘50s stereotypical - looking at the car. The text on the left strikes me as very funny. It would never see the light of day in any Toyota brochure today.

It says, "Look, Andy, the Toyopet’s really a BIG car. Plenty of room for even my pheasant-feather hat…and your legs!"

This probably is not the most politically correct way to describe a car.

Marking the Century

If you’ve been following along at all with the news currents from the automotive sector, you probably know that General Motors celebrates its 100th anniversary this week, joining a select list of iconic American corporations that have been in business for a century or more.

You remember 1908, the year GM was founded, right? That’s the year that that William Howard Taft beat William Jennings Bryan to become the 27th President of the United States and that the famed Thomas Flyer won the New-York-to-Paris automobile race - incredibly, that car still exists and today is housed in the National Automobile Museum in Reno. It’s also the year that Henry Ford introduced his Model T, the car that put America on wheels.

It’s worth noting then that Ford, founded in 1903 in Dearborn, Michigan by Henry Ford, also is one of those select century-old companies. So is another famous name in transportation. That would be Harley-Davidson, founded in 1903 in a tiny backyard shed in Milwaukee by William S. Harley and Arthur Davidson. Harley sold its first police motorcycle in 1908, and speeders have watched for cops on Harleys ever since.

A Peek at 2009

We get lots of requests for information about upcoming vehicles, and mostly what we can say is this: "Sorry, we don’t discuss future products."

But this is one of those rare moments in time when we can tell you a few things about what’s coming for 2009. That’s because the product release date looms, thus secrecy soon won’t be an issue. So here goes:

Standard for Tundra in select regions  is the capacity to use E85 Flex Fuel on 4x4 models powered by Toyota’s 5.7L V8 engine.

Additionally, two new option packages will be available for Tundra: TRD Sport and TRD Rock Warrior. Both offer unique wheels. TRD Sport gets color-keyed front and rear bumpers and Rock Warrior gets a color-keyed front bumper and a matte-black rear bumper. Rock Warrior also gets a special TRD-tuned off-road suspension.

Highlander raises the ante with a new option, which we mentioned earlier in this post: a 2.7L four-cylinder engine on the two-wheel-drive base model. Available in January, the 187-hp four-cylinder beats the V6’s fuel efficiency, yet still keeps performance brisk.

On Safety and Driving Less

By now, we all know what a terrible strain the price of gas is placing on – well, on everyone, from school districts, which have to fuel their school busses, to regular citizens, who have to commute to work and haul groceries home from the store.

We’re told, in fact, that the price of gas is keeping people from driving.

Because people are driving less, deaths from traffic accidents apparently have dropped to their lowest level in 47 years. According to a study recently released by the Transportation Research Institute at the University of Michigan, traffic deaths this year are on pace to record about the same number experienced in 1961.

This has us thinking about fuel economy, and about safety.

Indeed, it’s our view that, first, with the right vehicle, the expense of driving can at least be somewhat moderated. We take that view because while gas costs what it costs, our cars and trucks are some of the most efficient and thrifty available in their respective classes. Indeed, Toyota overall (Toyota, Scion and Lexus) has the highest average Corporate Fuel Economy – 31.1 mpg - of any major manufacturer. And second, we build our vehicles in such a way that driving doesn’t necessarily have to be an excessively risky business.

Bang for the Buck, and More

So, what vehicle do you buy if you want the very best deal in efficient commuting?

As it happens, that’s what the folks over at ForbesAutos.com were wondering. So, using numbers from NADAguides.com, a vehicle pricing and information Web site, they took a look. The result was a story titled "Best Hybrids for the Buck."

In that piece, author Jacqueline Mitchell pondered that most elusive of numbers, the hybrid payoff period, and though the story ignores some of the hybrid’s most important values, she did reach some interesting conclusions.

Working with the current cost of gas in Los Angeles, which she lists as $4.59 per gallon, Mitchell writes, "The best deal for a Los Angeles commuter is the … Toyota Camry Hybrid…."

She notes that the Camry Hybrid is EPA rated at 34/combined mpg and that according to her figures, the buyer breaks even – that is, pays off the so-called "hybrid premium" - after about 18,000 miles. That break-even figure, of course, will change, depending on where you live, what you pay for your hybrid, and the cost of gas in your area.