Student Teams Win Cash in Lexus Eco Challenge

You remember the Lexus Eco Challenge, right? It’s an educational program that inspires and empowers middle- and high-school students to learn about the environment and take stands to improve it.

The Lexus Eco Challenge, conducted in conjunction with Scholastic, a publisher and distributor of books for children, is composed of several elements. For each of them, teams are required to define an environmental issue that is important to them, develop an action plan to address the issue, implement the plan and report on the results.

We’ve posted about the Lexus Eco Challenge previously. You can read our earlier post by clicking here.

We’re posting again now to celebrate the fact that the first phase of this year’s Eco Challenge is complete, and that 16 teams in 12 states each were awarded $10,000 for their outstanding entries in the "Protecting the Land," the first of three subsidiary Challenges of this year’s Eco Challenge.

On the Safety of Teen Drivers

You may know that we operate a program called Toyota Driving Expectations. It’s a driver-training program, provided free of charge, that is designed to help teenagers understand and manage the very real and precipitous risks that are involved with driving a motor vehicle.

One of the elements that Driving Expectations looks at is the role that driver distractions can play in a traffic accident.

According to The Times of London, a study done by the Association of British Insurers shows that a young driver’s risk of being involved in a fatal accident is greatly increased when there are teenage passengers in that driver’s vehicle.

The more passengers there are, the greater the risk, the study says. It found that the risk of a fatal traffic accident for teen drivers is 39% higher with one passenger, 85% higher with two passengers and an astonishing 182% higher with three or more passengers. My father used to note ruefully that, "One boy’s a whole boy, two boys are a half a boy and three boys are no boy at all." This exponential increase of mischief and risk is what he was talking about.

The Open Road Poll

We’ve got a question for you. Actually, we’ve got several questions.

We plan to ask them because while you probably know a great deal about us, who we are, what we do, what we build and what we stand for, we know very little about you and what you’re looking for when you visit Open Road, and that bugs us.

It’s important that we try to learn a few of the things we don’t know, because without you, this blog is the sound of one hand clapping. And without knowing a bit about who you are and what you’re hoping to find when you point your browsers our way, we can’t do the best possible job of supplying what you’re looking for.

So we’d ask for this quick favor. Take a look at the question below and give us your answer. There will be just a couple more questions like this one over the course of the next few weeks, and the answers to those questions will help us do a better job. Thank you.

- Jon F. Thompson, Editor, Open Road

Online Surveys & Market Research

Toyota and the Last Best Places

A good number of years ago, an anthology titled "The Last Best Place" sung the glories of that wonderful state Montana. As fate would have it, one of the true "last best places" is partially located in that state known as "The Last Best Place."

That would be that groundbreaking natural wonderland known as Yellowstone National Park. Its boundaries extend north into Montana from the park’s main bulk in neighboring Wyoming.

Groundbreaking? As a concept, absolutely. You probably know that Yellowstone is the world’s first national park, thanks to a bill signed in 1872 by President Ulysses S. Grant. It consists of 2.2 million acres of wonder and awe, thanks in part to the amazing variety of wildlife that lives there, and thanks also to the park’s topography, which is marked as much by geysers and bubbling, smoking mudpots as it is by abundant forests, cliffs, lakes and rivers.

One of the park’s challenges is helping its visitors make more than a superficial connection with the wonders in Yellowstone. That’s why Toyota recently presented Yellowstone Park Foundation officials with five new vehicles – three of them hybrids - and a check for $882,772.

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:

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.

Toyota Supports Independent Radio

Given the incredible ubiquity of the iPod and similar devices that allow folks to listen to audio entertainment on demand, it’s easy to forget that radio still has a lot of appeal, and a lot of popularity. It is, after all, "old media" in this day of run-away popularity for new media. Yet, there remains a variety of independent broadcasters who present a rich assortment of formats.

And that’s what Free YR Radio is all about. And in character, it’s anything but "old media."

Free YR Radio, a program created by Toyota and Urban Outfitters, supports and publicizes the importance of independent radio. It comes to life through a series of events developed to generate awareness and support for partner stations.

Edgy Car Meets Edgy Movies

Make no mistake about it, Toyota’s Matrix represents all the forward thinking that went into its design with a sense of sculpted-sheetmetal style that can only be called edgy.

So it seems fitting, we think, that Matrix will sponsor the Asian American International Film Festival July 10-19 in New York City, one of the edgier  film festivals around.

The festival will feature two special centerpieces. The first is titled "Princess of Nebraska," a film by director Wayne Wang ("Chan is Missing," "Center of the World," "Maid in Manhattan"). "Princess," which stars Li Ling, is being billed as, "a complex drama about the conflicted emotional landscape of a young woman at a crossroad." It is scheduled as the festival’s opening-night presentation.

The second centerpiece, scheduled as the festival’s closing-night presentation, is "Ping Pong Playa," a comedy about a young man’s efforts to protect his family’s table-tennis empire, from director Jessica Yu.

A series of panel discussions titled "New Landscapes: Media and its Adaptations" also will take place at the festival.

Even though the Matrix doesn’t star in either film, we’re pleased that it’s involved with art as durable and creative as motion pictures. If you’re interested in additional information about the Toyota Matrix, click here.

- Cindy Knight, Product News Manager, Corporate Communications

Prius Converted to Star Trek Shuttle. Really!

Cruising at warp speed though the space-time continuum might not be the Prius’s main claim to fame, but obtaining enviable fuel economy from a drive system almost as advanced as one that uses dilithium crystals is one of the car’s hallmarks. Maybe that’s why New York psychiatrist Willie Yee has merged his enthusiasm for his Prius  with another one of his passions.

That passion would be Star Trek. To indulge that passion, he’s converted his 2007 Prius into a Federation shuttlecraft.

Right: A white ’07 Prius is now a Federation shuttle. We wouldn’t kid you about this.

The conversion, which is ongoing, hasn’t been all that difficult, Yee told Open Road. It started simply, with a visit to a graphic designer who came up with the design essentials. Next came a set of spun-alloy Moon hubcaps, a set of blue undercar LED lights that flash in what Yee describes as "a cool pattern," and some aftermarket seat covers. Yee has also ginned up a special MP3 compact disc so that the Prius’s screen displays the car’s phasers and its warp-drive system, and provides all the appropriate sound effects.

The Meaning of "All"

TODOS is a Spanish word that when means "all." That works for us, because just as Toyota offers vehicles for nearly every category of buyer and use, we also believe in the concept of inclusiveness as a social value.

But TODOS also stands for Toyota Organization for the Development of LatinOS, an internal organization that provides development opportunities, community-service volunteer events, fellowship and other opportunities for growth for Toyota’s Latino Associates.

One of those opportunities for service and growth is this program’s flagship, a program we’ve been involved with at Carson High School, a campus local to us, since 2002.

Our thought is that if students at Carson High want to go to college, we should help them make that happen.