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By
EWAN KENNEDY
16 June 2008
Toyota has announced that it will build hybrid versions of its
Camry in Australia. The announcement was made by the president of
Toyota, Mr Katsuaki Watanabe, to the Australian prime minister,
Kevin Rudd, at a meeting in Nagoya.
State
and federal governments have assisted Toyota to bring this new
technology to Australia as part of their push towards greener
cars.
The
standard version of the Camry has been sold here with a lot of
success for many years and Toyota feels it’s now time to make
the cleaner model available. It’s currently assembled in Japan
and the USA, but until now Australia’s low fuel prices haven’t
made it a viable proposition. The sudden rush of petrol from a
dollar a litre to a dollar sixty has taken many by surprise and
there's talk of two dollars a litre, perhaps before the end of
2008…
Toyota
has a wealth of experience in the hybrid field, particularly with
the Prius, which it has built since 1997. That car wasn’t
originally sold in Australia, but from 2001 more powerful,
generations of the car have been deemed suitable for us and Prius
has enjoyed moderate sales success here. The one millionth Prius
worldwide was sold in April this year.
Toyota,
under its upmarket marque Lexus, sells other hybrids in Australia,
so certainly knows what it’s doing from an engineering point of
view, though the technology is still in relatively early days.
The
biggest advantage of a hybrid is that it can recover energy that
would otherwise have been lost during braking or when coasting
down hill. That energy is stored in a battery and can be used
later to accelerate the vehicle or assist it uphill.
A
hybrid drivetrain also lets the petrol engine turn itself off when
the car is stopped, thus cutting tailpipe emissions to zero, then
starts it again promptly when the car needs to move off.
It’s
also possible to use the Toyota hybrid models for short periods as
pure electric vehicles. Thus cutting noise and fumes in places
like underground carparks, or in quiet streets early in the
morning. Or perhaps when you get home much later than you were
expected…
Fuel
consumption and emissions in real world driving can be reduced by
somewhere around 15 to 25 per cent compared to an engine running
purely on petrol. However, as Prius has other fuel saving schemes
from its petrol engine, such as a lower power and less
performance, it’s difficult to say exactly how much of the fuel
usage saving is due to the hybrid system.
The
disadvantages of a hybrid are their extra complexity, greater
expense, more weight and the loss of some boot space. The latter
due to the large battery. In the Camry hybrid the boot is shorter
front to back by about 200 mm than in the petrol Camry. However,
the right-hand side of the rear seatback can still be folded down
to give a load-through facility.
Toyota
will begin to build the Camry hybrid at its Altona plant near
Melbourne late next year, with the first sales starting early in
2010. This model has been sold in the USA since 2006 and we will
get a later generation of the car. Toyota in Australia plans to
make 10,000 per year to sell in Australia. Some may be exported
later, but at this stage there are no definite plans.
Camry
hybrid has a four-cylinder petrol engine that is slightly down on
power compared to the standard 2.3-litre already familiar to many
thousands of Australian buyers. It differs from other Camry
automatic models in driving through a continuously variable
transmission (CVT) instead of a conventional automatic
transmission. This is a further fuel saving measure as well as the
best way of tying the two motive powerplants together.
Though
we have a lot of experience behind the wheels of other Toyota and
Lexus hybrids, including test track time with engineers in Japan,
we have yet to drive a Camry hybrid. We will see if we can’t
manage a test and will report back if we arrange one.
In the meantime,
colleagues in the States report it has reasonable performance,
though it’s slower than the standard Camry four-cylinder. They
say there's some driveline harshness at times as the engine and
electric motor juggle which is doing what. Some reported a type of
torque steer, probably also due to changing between the two power
sources, when crawling along in traffic. It seems certain the
latter, if it is a genuine problem and not a rarity, would be
rectified before Australian production begins.
It’s too
early to set a price for the new Camry hybrid, but expect it to
cost about $3000 to $5000 more than the petrol-only model.
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Marque Publishing Company
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