Toyota doubles production of Prius

About bloody time.

 

Yes...I bought the stock! Paid 63.25/ share in Sept. and it's up to 73.28 this afternoon. However, it is a long-term investment so we'll see what happens. I still believe they are headed in the right direction with product development and as long as the quality level stays as high as it is, they will prosper, as will those of us who decided to support them.

 

It's an old news.
http://www.toyota.co.jp/en/news/04/0101.html
President Cho stated 130,000 THIS year on New Year's message.

 

We just returned from a week in Beijing. The traffic was appalling because many people have purchased cars in the last few years, in part because of the SARS epidemic which made people wary of public transit and bicycles. The dominant non-Chinese car maker by far is VW. I saw very few Toyotas and no Prii at all. I wondered about the Prius in China; it seems a natural fit. The air quality in Beijing is pretty awful with dust as an added irritant. We never got the raspy throats one got in LA during the worst of the smog, but the visibility was rarely more than a few miles.
China is in a big push to get ready for the 2008 Olympics. Part of that plan, I am told, is a tightening of air pollution restrictions on cars and factories. This will help improve the air quality of course, but will have the added effect of creating huge demand for cleaner and more efficient cars. We were told that the Chinese government is encouraging the purchase of cars to bolster the native auto economy. When you think of 1.3 billion people emerging into a developed capitalist society, you KNOW there are going to be big changes.
China, like California, will lead us into a new envrionmental paradigm by dint of sheer numbers. VW will be pushing diesels, and my partner and I concluded that bio-diesel will probably be a huge deal in China in the next few years. Our guide told us that diesels are making inroads. and bio-diesel is very much cleaner than petro diesel. China also has huge supplies of (used) cooking oil to use to make the bio-diesel. A win-win situation here.
China does have some oil sources, but there is no way they will not have a major effect on gas prices world wide.
Isn't it ironic that China will become more environmentally savvy than George Bush's benighted 19th Century administration?
HUMU

 

Huge supplies? If every family used a half a pint of oil a day for cooking, and every family had a car (once China is half as developed as the US) then each family car would have about 1/20 of a gallon a day of biodeisel, if all that used cooking oil were recovered.

However, an emerging country is going to have a LOT of people desperate for cars but unable to afford clean ones. And the central government is going to be more concerned with economic development than with cleaning up the environment.

Mexico, much more advanced than China, also uses a lot of cooking oil, but there are no biodiesel cars there to speak of. It's a great idea, and would replace a small chunk of the petrolium demand, but probably requires more capital investment than either country is willing to commit.

Here's an interesting episode:

To combat pollution in Mexico City, they instituted a plan called "Hoy no circula." (Don't drive today.) Depending on the last digit of your license plate, you were forbidden from driving one day a week. At first it actually worked, and smog declined. But people stopped trading off their old junkers as they bought newer cars. They kept the junker to drive on the off day. Soon, there were as many cars on the road every day as there had been before, but 1/5 of them were the old junkers, dirtier than the average car, and smog was even worse than it had been before the experiment began. So they doubled the days you cannot drive, and again smog declined, but now it's as bad as ever, with even more junkers on the road.

They have an inspection system, where you cannot drive without an inspection sticker, but there are enough corrupt inspectors that for an extra fee you can get any car stickered. It just costs a bit more if the car pollutes.

China could control that if they can control corruption, but the real question is whether China is willing to impose on its people the additional transportation cost of requiring them to drive clean cars.

I predict they will not, until China is as affluent as California.

The good news is, by then perhaps the world will have run out of oil and we'll be forced to go back to horses.

 

I think most of the extra Prii go to Europe. In the Netherlands (one of the first countries on the mainland where the Prius was introduced in Europe) the car was introduced on Feb 5th. Shortly after that in Germany, Denmark and France (probably Belgium as well). So a lot of cars will go to those countries as well. Too bad the Netherlands only had an allocation of 1000 Prii for 2004.

 

The only problem is that your car will be thirsty an hour after you fill up :lol:

 

Before you know it, the Fed goverment will be mandating MSG be added to motor fuels

 

Daniel! Horses are good. Even better than our Prii. Horses eat grass and not oil like the Prius. Horse droppings (from the free grass) make excellent fertilizer, not CO2 and other stuff like the Prius. Horses frequently repair themselves. The Prius doesn't. Horses reproduce themselves. The Prius doesn't. Come to think of it, I don't think it would be so bad if we all went back to horses for transportation. What was the hurry all about?

 

I too have been to China a couple of times, but the one thing to remember is that China and Japan still are not on the best of terms with each other. The Chinese have a long memory, and still remember the horrible abuse that happened to them in WWII. The last time I was there I was reading the English newspaper and there were a couple of articles denouncing the Japanese and in particular the lack of help or concern that Japan has toward all of the left over munitions. People are getting killed from them exploding, and injured from the chemical stockpiles. Then again, the english newspaper is just a PR pipe from the communist party, so you can't believe much that you read in it.

Atoyot