Hybrid Superstar Shines Brighter

It said the new Prius share the platform with Camry, Lexus EX and RX. Can it be right?

 

"Prices have not been announced, and the most basic version, to be called Prius I, will not be available until later this year. It is likely to be priced comparably to the base 2009 model, which was $22,600. (Toyota said last week that it was planning a hybrid version of its Yaris subcompact that would compete more directly with the less expensive Honda Insight.)

The mainstream version that goes on sale in May will be the Prius II, in the mid-$20,000 range. From there, there will be Priuses III, IV and V, with additional luxury features and higher prices."

 

No, Edmonds.com says this:

"The 2010 Toyota Prius has almost exactly the same footprint as the '09 model, but uses an all-new platform and suspension system that it shares with the Toyota Corolla and Matrix, and the Scion xB."

This agrees with other articles.

 

Which are the other articles? They may just referenced Edmunds. I found a Wikipedia that said otherwise. Upon further research they may be two MC platforms. One stands for Medium Compact and the other stands for Midsize Car. Which one does the 2010 Prius based on? I guess we'll find out when the SAE paper is published.

 

This does not seem to jive with what I've read about Pulse And Glide. I don't know what he means by "goose the gas pedal" (full throttle?) but I thought "pulse" meant not flooring it but accelerating at a point where no power flows to or from the battery. And the glide part is where you decellerate at a point where no power flows ANYWHERE (i.e. a totally non-animated screen save for the wheel animation). He seems to say Glide is just slowing down with regen only and NO BRAKE, no foot on gas or brake.

 

This one's an easy debunk: an automotive platform consists basically of the floorpan (chassis), wheelbase dimension, steering mechanism and power steering, type of front and rear suspension, placement and choice of engines and other powertrain components.

Prius ZVW30 has a 2700mm wheelbase, as does NHW20. The Corolla E140 (tenth-generation) has a 2600mm wheelbase, as did the previous E120. The Camry has a 2776mm wheelbase (previous model 2720mm).

There is another candidate: Toyota's European C/D size car, the Avensis, and the related Scion tC. A Scion site lists the 2008 tC as sharing a platform with the 2008 Prius. The new Avensis has double-wishbone rear suspension, however, not the Prius' torsion-beam system.

Platforms allow a certain amount of development and tooling cost to be shared among multiple cars, to amortize the costs over more models. You can't describe any change to the fundamental geometry as being the same platform. Having multiple cars on the same platform should make it possible to swap production on a line between those models relatively easily.

 

You can find a model code decoder here. It's a bit out of date, though.

The first two characters are supposed to be the engine code, and the third the platform code. It appears, though, that if both engine code and platform code are two letters, the middle letter is neither. Since there is no such Toyota engine as NH (all Prius so far are NHWnn, using NZ engine) or ZV (2010 Prius is ZVW, and we know the engine is ZR family), I speculate that the real platform code is XW. W was the MR2, which was built and sold at the same time as the Prius, and the two clearly aren't related. "The Prius That Shook The World" claims that the first Prius started from a completely blank sheet of paper.

The first character after the hyphen indicates which car built on this platform it actually is. 'A' is usually the primary car for the platform. All Prius have been NHWnnL-A (or R-A for right-hand drive). Mine is NHW20R-AHEEBW; one of the cars at PCD was ZVW30L-AHXGBA (link).

Prius is its own platform. I just think the media can't believe that it isn't related to anything else, so make it up.

 

Adding a bit more detail, I note from Toyota's European TechDoc site that the iQ is either a KGJ10 or an NUJ10. The KGJ10 comes with a 1.0 litre 1KR-FE engine (presumably - KR is a 3-cylinder family and only the 1KR currently exists) while the NUJ10 is, I'm guessing, the 1.4L diesel with a 1ND-TV engine. Platform code J was and is used for the Landcruiser. An iQ is not a Landcruiser by any stretch of the imagination. It must be platform XJ.

The AYGO is KGB10 or WNB10. Again KG represents the 1KR-FE engine; WN is harder to figure out as Toyota don't seem to have produced any engines with a W code. However, the Aygo is a joint venture with Peugeot/Citroen (PSA) who in turn have got their diesels from a joint venture with Ford. The Aygo is available with a 1.4 DV4 HDi engine, which is presumably this model. An Aygo is not a B platform - that's a Coaster bus! Aygo must be XB.

All signs point to Prius = XW, not shared with any other car.

 

A piece on Ward's Auto:

The Prius now is on Toyota’s new, wider MC (midsize-car) platform. As a result, it feels much more rigid than the old Prius and resists body roll during aggressive cornering.

 

That's straight out of the marketing materials given out at the press day, which I think Danny posted here. However, it seems that TMS USA marketing are using a different definition of 'platform' from the one commonly used in the motor industry. Normally 'platform' means common floorpan, engine and suspension setup. The 2G and 3G Prius share a wheelbase dimension of 2700mm with the Scion tC and the Avensis (European mid-size car), but not with Corolla or Camry. If one of the most basic measurements is different, how can it be the same platform? Avensis has independent double-wishbone rear suspension, while Prius has torsion beam (ETA-beam) suspension.

Toyota's model code system ties engine and platform together in one model code. When first designed, engines and platforms both had a one letter code so the model code was simply engine code followed by model code, so a Corolla with an A-series engine would be AE, then the 'generation' code, e.g. 82.

Eventually they ran out of single-letter codes and started creating xZ and xR engine codes. Again they concatenated the two, e.g. a Supra might be JZA80 if equipped with a 2JZ engine. They also ran out of two letter platform codes, so the RAV4 was XA. Again, fine if used with a one-letter engine code.

It appears that their computer system had trouble with more than three letters, though, so they seem to have come up with a way of encoding the last character of the engine code, and first character of the platform code, into one character. NHW20 is an NZ engine with a ?W20 platform, and ZVW30 a ZR engine with a ?W30 platform. I use ? to indicate we don't know what it is - there's no reference to how the encoding works. I'm tentatively calling it XW.

I can't find any reference to any other Toyota or Lexus vehicle with an XW platform.

XW30 may well be wider than XW20 - but it's not because it shares parts with Corolla or Camry.