Interesting article about the effort to come up with the Toyota Prius, and hopes of new non-fossil fuel automobiles.
Creating a hybrid would demand excruciating labor, and management had moved up the deadline to 1997. The engineering obstacles were tremendous, especially the development of the hybrid battery, which must deliver power and recharge in spurts as the car is being driven.
Uchiyamada ditched the usual back-up plans and multiple scenarios, focusing his team on one plan at a time and moving on when each failed.
As Uchiyamada tells it, the Prius wasn’t the kind of car Toyota would have ever approved as a project, if standard decision-making had been followed. It was sure to be a money loser for years.
Conventional wisdom was wrong; Toyota’s once skeptical rivals are now all busy making hybrids.
The Frankfurt auto show in August had hybrids galore.
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Tags: hybrid technology