This is the proclamation on the cover of Hot Rod magazine
for August 2012. ‘Kill Your Prius’. While our motivation is different, I could not agree more
with the sentiment.
No one knows the North American automotive market like Toyota.
And, arguably, they have, and continue to, manufacture some of the most
reliable ways of getting from A to B world-wide. Toyota’s ability to rebrand is
also second to none, all the way back to the late 80s when a marketing type and
an accounting type got together, cooking up a way around export restrictions in
Japan. The topic on the white board that day; ‘Luxury EXport to the US’ a deft wipe of the board
left only the letters LEXUS remaining. The effort to capture Gen Y was also
extremely successful with the Scion Brand- it is almost impossible to find a
Scion xB (the ‘hat-car’) that doesn’t have a Jackass sticker, aftermarket wheels
and flat-brim-wearing driver - probably playing questionable, radio friendly, cross-genre
music.
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| Squashed Hat Car |
So what’s wrong the Prius then? Being critical of
anything is too easy, let’s start with what is right. Prius is Latin for earlier,
before, previously. Toyota has stated this is the name,
as before this time, people were not environmentally conscious. Valid point of
view? Irrelevant! Nothing could have motivated Hollywood celebs to trade in their
Hummers faster than the re-launch of the Prius in 2002. It has become an
accessible, understandable symbol for (apparently) caring about the environment.
A symbol of status and attitude. Toyota has made the hybrid a palatable commodity,
in a market where the Ford F-Truck has continued to be top of the sales charts
for many decades. (As a side note: The U.S.
is the only market where the Camry out sells the Corolla.) The Prius
consistently makes the top 20 each month for national sales. It is the only ‘strictly
hybrid’ model to make an appearance. This popularity is the cause of a problem.
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| Outsells the nearest competition by almost 2:1 |
A symptom of Toyota’s supreme ability to create a niche
and then fill it with a target audience would be an almost complete ignorance of
Prius alternatives. In most recent history Honda preceded the rebooted Prius
with both the platform-defining Insight and Civic Hybrid, yet failed to gain
street cred or recognition. However it is traditional combustion engine ‘compact’
cars where the oversight is most interesting. Right back to the early 80s, the
tail end of the first oil crisis, you can find examples that get very close to the
thrifty gas sniffing of the Prius, usually European diesels. No one Stateside
wanted to drive them, though they now are the darlings of Californian hippies
doing bio-diesel conversions. The Prius is still the king for Miles Per Gallon
(if you exclude the latest batch of Full-Electrics) but not by a great deal. In
fact, the latest round of tests from the Environmental Protection Agency shows 8
alternatives to the Prius that run solely from a combustion engine and match or
outperform it in real world driving- that would be flat out, interrupted by unnecessary
braking with Air Conditioning on ICE cold. And this is running on the bilge
water that passes for petrol in the United States of America. Makes you wonder
why car companies couldn’t attain these figures before now.
What does this leave us with? An upwardly mobile compact
car market, that is pandering to Pop-environmentalism and homogenous driving
experiences? This is not a horrible situation, though it would be dangerous for
any realities of the Prius to be used against the very movement it helped
encourage.
The Prius is a bare minimum kind of gesture- it is the
thought that counts. If only Toyota would use their expertise to forge a faux
enthusiasm for public transport or, taking baby steps, create a belief that 2
people in a car does not equal High Occupancy.
