If you live in Boston, New York, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles you may run into a huge, adorable, high-tech flower. To promote the new 2010 Prius, Toyota has placed giant solar-powered flowers in cities across the country featuring laptop and cell phone recharging stations along with access to free WiFi. Toyota says these daisies represent the Prius theme of “Harmony between Man, Nature, and Machine.” Ooh I want one in my backyard!

If you thought the Toyota Prius was eco-friendly, check out the soon to be released Toyota plug-in hybrid cars available by the end of this year. Toyota will start leasing 200 plug-ins in Japan, 150 in the U.S. and 150 in Europe, mostly for rental, such as through special government-backed programs. The cars will use lithium-ion batteries. The plug-in car will recharge from a regular household socket, and when the battery runs low, it will start running as a regular hybrid.

I’m really excited to see how this car works and I’m really excited about the idea of having a car I can plug into my house!

Burning Image's flickr photostream/Creative Commons

Is the golden age of the hybrid car already over? The Los Angeles Times fears that this might be the case. Even though Honda releases its Insight this month, and the new Prius isn’t far behind, sales of hybrids are falling fast, as gas prices do the same.

Last month, only 15,144 hybrids sold nationwide, down almost two-thirds from April, when the segment’s sales peaked and gas averaged $3.57 a gallon. That’s far larger than the drop in industry sales for the period and scarcely a better showing than January, when hybrid sales were at their lowest since early 2005.

I assume “last month” means February and “April” means of 2008. But, the point is, instead of running out of cars and charging far above sticker price for the Prius, Toyota dealers now have 80 days’ stock on hand, and are having trouble moving them, even after including some bonus pricing deals. This all comes, by the by, as American automakers are finally embracing the hybrid market. Read the rest of this entry >>

We’re well aware that the global economic crisis has proved a rocky road for automakers in Detroit, but it seems the Great Stall Out is upsetting plans in Tupelo, Mississippi as well.  Sadly, Toyota has indefinitely postponed construction on the first North American Prius factory.  Although the plant is 90% complete, would-be hybrid owners will have to wait for a locally produced Prius, but in the meantime they can checkout Jon’s rundown of the soon-to-be-released Ford Fusion.  As a Prius driver myself, I’m hoping that Toyota can get back into gear and start cranking out the fuel efficient cars here, so others can cut down on their oil consumption and save money at the pump.  And hopefully we’ll soon be able to eliminate our reliance on oil altogether.

takepart and learn how you can help Solve the Climate Crisis.

Related:  Inconvenient Truth of the Day

Photo: Thom Watson’s Flickr Photostream (Creative Commons)

What’s your carfun footprint? Don’t know what a carfun footprint is? Well, me neither until Blair showed me this AMAZING MINI ad in the September issue of Ode.

From the insert:

“At MINI, we believe that the letters RPM can play nice with the letters MPG. That it’s possible to hug trees and corners at the same time. And that adrenaline is a renewable resource. We believe having fun on the road it not only still possible, it’s responsibly attainable. It is our MINIMALIST philosophy of doing more with less that has led us to what we like to call the Carfun Footprint.”

Brilliant.

And your Carfun Footprint is just that: the measure of how fun your car is versus its environmental impact. Let’s a test drive…

Read the rest of this entry >>

In Danville, California, a construction company is building a tract of green luxury homes - so green, in fact, that there’s a Prius waiting for you in the garage if you buy one of these properties.   Clarum Homes is building 10 homes all valued around $2 million, and are being certified by LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), a set of standards from the U.S. Green Building Council.

The Contra Costa Times tells us that, “The homes use solar power, with solar hot water heaters, special heating and cooling systems, Web-based irrigation controllers and a host of other features.”  And, did we mention, they’re just throwing in a Prius?  This kind of reminds me of how these days Ticketmaster gives you a free iTunes download if you buy a ticket.   Sure, we’ve tacked on 168% in convenience fees, but here’s a 99 cent download.

Regardless, the fact that there’s enough of a demand for these homes in the top one percent is a good thing.   And, somehow, I doubt there’s actually a lot of similarities in paying $32 for a $13 concert ticket, and $2 million for a 3,600 square foot home.   Anyhow, you can takepart here to learn some various ways you can green your home, just in case you don’t have the money to drop on a luxury home/Prius combo.

Earlier this week, we mentioned that Toyota would be making a solar-powered Prius starting next year. In other exciting and related news, Toyota has also announced that the first Prius plant in the United States will be operational in 2010. At the same time, the automaker has announced that production on trucks and SUVs will be suspended for three months in order to clear out a backlog of unsold vehicles. From the Reuters article:

The unusual and costly moves by Toyota, now the global auto sales leader, underscored the pressure across the industry as major automakers scuttle truck production and take steps to ramp up output of passenger cars to keep up with a dramatic shift in US buying patterns.

These two news items point to the increased value consumers are placing on greener cars as the price of gas climbs ever higher. Read the rest of this entry >>

It’s official: Toyota will offer a solar panel-powered Prius in 2009. In these days of high fuel prices and environmental concerns, this silver lining in the cloud of car-created CO2 is long overdue. According to Gizmodo, the solar panels will be offered on the next generation of the high-end Prius hybrid model. Interestingly enough, the panels will even power the air conditioning. Toyota will be the first major automaker to go solar with their vehicles. Read the rest of this entry >>

A 100 Mile Per Gallon automobile is being tested by scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. The car is basically an after market assembly of Toyota Prius in which scientists added extra Lithium Ion batteries capable of being plugged into the power grid for recharging along with solar panels on the roof of the car for some extra juice. These two add ons will serve to power the Prius along with its already existing batteries and gasoline tank in its hybrid motor power system.

The result yields a car that barely consumes any gas whatsoever for its first sixty miles on the road, yielding gasoline mileage of approximately 100 mpg per tank. Plus with the average commuter spending only 30 miles on the road per day, the experimental model would hardly ever need to be filled up at all as long as it was plugged into the wall each night for recharging. Read the rest of this entry >>