What's a "quality unit"?

Won't be long now.

Good guess, but not quite. Actually we often produce hundreds of "quality check" units. They just go through special checks to ensure top Toyota quality - and they end up being sold just like every other car. Once the manufacturing engineers are satisfied everything is looking good on the line, we start building "official" normal production units.

Doug Coleman
Prius Product Manager
Toyota Motor Sales, USA

Does anyone know why some of these cars have one "eye"-bolt peeking through the front bumper, while others have two of them?

I'm guessing they are the "priority orders" that were placed via PC a few months back...

Quality units are the ones built meeting the customer shippable quality.
There are alway things that will went wrong during the pilot run of autos like misalignment of parts or painting blemishes with the production parts.

If this ship gets hijacked, I'm authorizing the use of deadly force

After the MANY different definitions of "quality unit" (laughing), I tend to think your definition makes the most sense. (especially since the Prius wasn't expected to go on sale to the public until June)

The original article said "The countdown begins until they hit showroom floors. If they even make it that far before customers take delivery." From an advertising standpoint, it makes a lot more sense to get them out on the road. They get a lot more exposure to the general public if they are being driven on the streets instead of locked in a showroom. A doubling effect is that people will see the Prius in on the roads and go to the Toyota dealers to see it, and when the Prius is not there, they will likely look at Toyota's other [more profitable] vehicles and possibly buy one.

Doug from the Prius team said "quality units" are early production vehicles which are thoroughly checked over for any fit, finish or production issues and provided those vehicles meet Toyotas high standards of quality they will make their way to retail customers.

I suspect crash testing has already been done and all the right signatures are on all the right documents to allow the new Prius to be sold to Americans for use on the roads.

I suspect the so-called "quality units" is similar to sampling checks like any mass-production QA verification phase.

Considering the fact Toyota had been getting lots of public attentions on its quality issue for past several years, it is better to catch some of the bugs early for such an important release in recent years.

Ship Name and Pic?

Does anyone have a nice picture of a trans-pacific roll-on-roll-off car carrier? The best picture I have is of a ship picking up cars in Germany. It's the "Atlantic Highway", and you can see it at vesseltracker.com.

Although I've nearly worn myself out with anticipation for my new 2010 Prius, I am hoping that I will be able to find out the name of at least one of the ships carrying them over from Japan, and track it across the Pacific using the vesseltracker.com website. Anyone know of the name of such a ship?

Thanks in advance!

Re: Ship Name and Pic?

Here you go with some ship names
HOTOKU MARU
TOYOFUJI MARU
TOYOFUKU MARU
HOUSHO MARU

I found this info at
TOYOFUJI SHIPPING | TFS News


Hope this helps.

Re: Ship Name and Pic?

Thanks! Kind of neat, getting into the details of the huge shipping network that brings us our Priuses This company seems to serve only the Japanese domestic market, and East Asia/Oceania, so any further tips would be appreciated!

This sight could ruin someones day.


[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cougar_Ace"]MV Cougar Ace - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Heh heh - yup, if that happened to one of our Prius ships, we might have to turn the color theme of PriusChat to black to mourn for a day