Great news all around!
This posting should be required reading for all middle management at all automotive companies. Hybrids are not bad business; they sell.

All the 4 cylinder hybrids are seeing increased sales; all the 6 cylinder hybrids are seeing decreased sales.

New York City, too. Last weekend I was walking around Tribeca in Manhattan and saw 5 shiny new priuses within a couple blocks of each other. Awesome!

The genie's out of the bottle...the electric-hybrid is here to stay. And as time goes on, they'll keep getting better and better.

"This posting should be required reading for all middle management at all automotive companies."

Upper management. Middle management doesn't make major decisions about product direction, marketing, etc. You've got to change minds at the top.

I am one of the proud owners on a new Toyota Prius purchased on May 5 2007! I absolutely love my new hybrid! You gotta test drive the Prius if you are in the market for a new car!

They would be Prii.

Yep, as politicians line up behind CAFE because "the market" won't do it, consumers line up to buy Prii and turbodiesels. And is that a slight acceleration I see over the past few months?

Senator Dodd supports a CAFE standard of 50 mpg, achievable over the next decade. This is achievable if Americans give up their beloved and hated SUVs.

These sales figures vindicate my view, expressed when the Accord Hybrid come out, that emphasizing performance over economy is a loser in the hybrid market. If all people care about is performance, they can pay up in other ways.

Here's hoping Honda doesn't give up, though. Thus far, they've been outfoxed and out technologied by Toyota.

The article states that GM does not post figures for it's hybrid sales. How appropriate, they may call thier cars hybrids, but they are NOT hybrids. Not yet. Idle stop does not constitue a hybrid, at least in my book.

GM cars have the ICE boost as well, similar to the civic. The Aura and Vue owners are happily reporting over 30MPG. Real hybrids for real people.

MPG makes sense to me. Maybe we will start to rate them by CO2 quantity per distance traveled, but with the refinery and world oil situation, I would be satisfied just getting the mileage up in the U.S.

"Perfect is the enemy of the good. Why do so many people feel so strongly compelled to attack the things that are doing the most good among all the products in the marketplace? I'll tell you why. Because it's not their pet little "silver bullet" and it frustrates them that the market is going in directions that they either don't prefer, or in multiple directions."

Well said! Consumers need choices and different approaches for different lifestyles. For those waiting for the "silver bullet" - don't sit around and wait for it, you're just making excuses. Manufacturers will continue making improvements if we show them we want them, otherwise they'll just keep building the same stuff.

For green technology to really make an impact, it needs to be introduced to the majority in a way they understand to be accepted. While MPG isn't necessary the best indicator of "greenness" it's a metric most people can relate to. Hybrid is just one way of many potential ways to improve MPG and consequentially improve CO2 emissions. It's not a silver bullet, but it's available now, it works, and it can continue to be improved upon. Baby steps.

What I would like to see is more models getting the current hybrid technology - for example, at one point Toyota talked about having a hybrid drivetrain option available on all models by 2010. I know recently, there was an article here or elsewhere about some delays with the lithium ion batteries for the next generation of their Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD). I hope that doesn't stop Toyota from introducing HSD on more models, even if it's the current version. It's still an improvement. Personally, I would love to have a Tacoma Hybrid to park next to my wife's Camry Hybrid, but I'm sure a hybrid Yaris would really be great for somebody else. Whatever it is - Toyota and their customers would benefit by just getting more choices out there.

So one can see you can get a better mpg/CO2-result even without hybrid .

And you can get 300MPG+ on some gas scooters. Just don't mind the criteria pollutants coming from the tailpipe.

CO2 in and of itself is a narrow goal.

HI Karkus the values are from their respective inormation brochures here in germany and i repeat the A2 1.2 has 390/1140 Liter and the Prius2 408/1210 so they are comparable .

As i have personal experience with both cars you can not remove the backseats in the prius2 but you can do it in the Audi A2 1.2 . So it was only possible for me to put two bycicles upright standing in the Audi and only one small bycicle horizontal in the Prius2 where they made the car dirty .

What in my eyes is important . Audi built w i t h o u t hybrid a equal ( and more flexible ) size car in the year 2000 with much better mpg . ( Audi 1.2 has 81 G / KM CO2 where a 2007 Prius2 gets only 104 G / KM ( all from the german brochures and advertising ))

So this in my eyes proves that at the moment ( ! ) Toyotas way of bulding hybrids is not a prerequisite for a good fuel usage . In fact without hybrid you can get even much better fuel usage .

I did not bought the prius2 - instead i bought the ordinary 75 PS A2 gasoline version which even though got me ( with my style of driving ) better mpgs than the prius2.

And two german DriverMagazines got also 6.6 and 6.8 L / 100 KM with the Prius2 under ordinary driving circumstances which ist not very remarkable here in Europe and is in line with my own experiences with the prius2 .

So lets see if the prius3 finaly matches a equal size nonhybridcar from the year 2000 in mpg .

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