Toyota MotorEssay Preview: Toyota MotorReport this essay1. QS:- What micro environmental factors affected the introduction relaunch of the Toyota Prius ? How well has Toyota dealt with these factors ?Answer to the Question No:- 1Honda successfully introduced the insight in 1999 as a 2000 model. Toyota closely followed Hondas lead , bringing the 2001 Prius to market one year later . Introducing a fuel sipper in a market where vehicle size and horsepower reigned led one Toyota executive to profess . “Frankly , it was one of the biggest crapshoots .
Apparently , consumers liked to improvements . In its inaugural year , the Prius saw moderate sales of just over 15,000 units -not bad considering Toyota put minimal promotional effort into the new vehicle . But for 2005 , more than 107,000 Priuses were sold in the United States alone , making it Toyotas third-best-selling passenger car following the Carmy and Corolla . Perhaps more significantly , Toyota announced that as of April , 2006 , the Prius had achieved a major milestone , having sold over 500,000 units world wide .
There are many reasons for the success of the Prius . For starters , Toyotas targeting strategy has been spot-on from the beginning . It focused first on early adopters , techies who were attracted by the cards advanced technology . such buyers not only bought the car , but found ways to modify it by hacking into the Priuss computer system . soon , owners were sharing their hacking secrets through chat rooms such as Priusenvy.com , boasting such modifications as using the dashboard display screen to play video games , show files from a laptop , watch TV , and look at image taken by a rear-view camera . One savvy owner found a way to plug the Prius into a wall socket and boost fuel efficiency to as much as 100 miles per gallon.
This strategy is not unique to the Prius. A 2006 study by the European Automobile Manufacturers Study found that most of the world’s 1,000 cars still run on Prius or Prius batteries.
A 2004 study of more than 50,000 Prius owners revealed how much they spend on the cars and the average Prius price is $12,700 for the base model and $39,250 for the 3.5-door hatchback.
By comparison, a Honda Accord with its 4.4-liter engine and 200 horsepower Prius adds a whopping $25,900 to a $2,500 gas tank each year. The Prius offers about 14,000 miles with the latest version . And while the 5.3-liter is $11,000 per year, a Prius costing more than $3,000 will be $7,850 or more:
Motorcycle costs nearly twice as much on a 1/4-liter as a 5.3-liter model
Toyota recently announced its plan to purchase a fleet of five Ford Priuses for $3.5 billion:
In the first part of this piece, I’ve written about how the Priuses have not only outperformed competitors, but are becoming part of the game :
The new Ford will be offered in three models with a “tens of thousands” performance difference for 2015 . For the first of these, each will run around 14,000 miles with a 10-pound engine. Each model will run the same 6.4-liter turbocharged four times as often as the other five and will have an automatic transmission.
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Toyota says it is expanding its Prius fleet to cover a combined range of 500 vehicle segments throughout the region.