A greenie grudge fight is brewing, with Toyota’s hybrid supremacy challenged by adetermined Honda. Bryon Mathioudakis is your referee.
Amid the woes of the big American carmakers at the Detroit Auto Show in January, two Japanese hybrids stole the limelight. Their debuts were two of the most critical going into the next decade. Since then, the Toyota Prius III and Honda Insight II have begun to draw battle lines that will set the stage for a new ‘green’ world order.
Now completely redesigned, the Prius aims to be the ultimate environmental expression of affordable family car motoring, while the Insight is engineered – and priced – to be a stepping stone between the regular internal combustion cars of today and full-series hybrids.
The third-generation Toyota Prius is on sale now, but the Insight has been delayed from a late-2009 debut until early next year.
The Insight employs a ‘power assist’ parallel hybrid powertrain, meaning the 1.3-litre single-cam i-VTEC four-cylinder petrol engine (another Jazz-sourced mainstay in the Honda range) is almost always in operation when the Insight is running, while its ‘integrated motor assist’ (IMA) electric motor device simply provides back-up power during times of acceleration. Pure electric motivation comes in very briefly when the car is cruising on a flat surface at about 50km/h.
Honda has also designed the engine to partially shut down its cylinder effort during deceleration, which decreases resistance when the IMA generator is providing electricity to charge the battery. Applying the specially developed brakes diverts kinetic energy into the battery pack, while an automatic start-stop function cuts the engine completely when the car is idle under normal operating conditions.
In contrast, Toyota’s ‘Hybrid Synergy Drive’ set-up allows the Prius to be powered by the petrol engine (a 1.8-litre Atkinson Cycle unit) or an electric motor, or both at certain lower speeds, to deliver approximately 100kW and 207Nm. More importantly, economy and emissions are cut to 3.9L/100km and 89g/km respectively. But with more costly components, including the need for a larger Ni-MH battery pack and electric motor, the Prius price gap disadvantage is unavoidable. The starting price is $39,900.
Honda hopes to achieve “mainstream sales volumes” with the Insight next year, and so aims to price it at, or even under, the $30,000 mark – but only if the Australian dollar holds up above 70 yen.
If it proves viable, this pricing would significantly undercut both the Prius and the continuing $35,990 Honda Civic Hybrid (first released here in 2004), which uses an earlier, larger, heavier and less efficient version of the Insight’s parallel hybrid powertrain.
“It is the most important new model in Honda’s future”, is how Honda Australia managing director and CEO Yasuhide Mizuno puts it. “The Insight will be the mainstream model for Honda Australia in the future, because of the increase in fuel prices.
"The Australian public’s intentions are as much an environmental issue as economic, and if we succeed in bringing it in at a reasonable price, like in Japan, then it will be in the mainstream.”
But the hybrid war won’t end there.
Honda has already made it clear that the 2007 Tokyo Motor Show CR-Z Concept – a spin-off from the Insight program – will introduce a sports car element to the hybrid equation.
Its job is to ‘sex up’ the image of green cars, as well as Honda’s line-up, since the brand has lacked an affordable sporty car since the demise of the Integra some years ago.
Out later in 2010, pundits are predicting that the production CR-Z hybrid will be marketed as a modern take on the CRX coupé of the late 1980s – but with an Enviro twist, of course.
Also in the not-too-distant future is the Prius Plug-In, using all-new lithium-ion batteries instead of the massively cheaper and tried-and-tested Ni-MH packs used since the nameplate was introduced in Japan at the end of 1997.
Toyota says that, operating purely on electric vehicle (EV) mode, the Prius Plug-In Hybrid should give about 16km of range before charge is completely depleted and the petrol engine kicks in.
At the other end of the price scale, both Honda and Toyota are preparing light car hybrids based on their respective Jazz and Yaris. The Jazz is closer to market, with an on-sale date scheduled for about 2011. At under $25,000, it could very well be the cheapest of its type.
And don’t expect Toyota to take this price pummelling sitting down. Development of the next-generation Yaris is well advanced, and now Toyota insiders are whispering about a hybrid derivative that will borrow Honda’s idea and have a ‘power assist’ parallel hybrid powertrain rather than the Prius’s full series Hybrid Synergy Drive system, to keep costs at bay.
However, Toyota may go one step further than Honda by designing a bespoke body style sitting on top of the 2012 Yaris hybrid platform, in an effort to steal a march on the Jazz Hybrid.
More hybrids from both carmakers are in the pipeline too, with Toyota planning to include one in every model line-up by the middle of the next decade. Honda is hedging its bets somewhat as far as Australia is concerned, sticking with hybrids in its smaller models up to Civic, and then going for the diesel option in some of the larger future models.
Yet, despite all this hybrid activity, both companies agree that – ultimately – it will probably be the hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicles from about 2020 that will truly lead us into the zero-emission vehicle age. But that is a battle for another decade.
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