Why Can’t the U.S. Have Toyota’s 40 MPG 4WD Minivan?
Toyota sells a 40 mile-per-gallon, four-wheel-drive hybrid minivan in Japan, and has since 2001, but they’re playing keeps.
Its become a bit of a perennial question that I’m reminded of when I find myself mired in the depths of the internet — a question that’s been simmering in the back of my mind since I learned about the Toyota Estima hybrid minivan 3 years ago… and then went to full boil when I learned that the Estima hybrid has been sold in Japan since 2001.
At the time, I googled extensively, I asked some Japanese colleagues, I contacted Toyota — I even set up a half-hearted online petition to bring the Estima hybrid to the US (offline now, but the Union of Concerned Scientists was more ambitious, garnering over 18,000 signatures).
After all that, I never really got answers as to why Toyota had no plans to bring this family-fantasy four-wheel-drive, 40 mpg minivan to the US, but as I did more research, I pieced together my own picture of the reasons. It seemed that Toyota didn’t think Americans would buy it because it wasn’t a “full-sized” minivan and it didn’t have enough power.
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But now, with the hearts and minds of consumers changing and demand for fuel efficient vehicles steaming ahead, I come back to the same question. And it’s the question I find myself asking of most every major auto manufacturer these days: WTF? If you’ve got a car that everybody will want, why don’t you just go ahead and sell it to everybody?
When I was growing up, my family was one of the first to buy Toyota’s Previa minivan. I remember sitting in it for the first time and thinking I was at the helm of a spaceship. It seemed so cool and turned me into an instant Toyota fanboy.
That Previa was built like a tank: it went 170,000 miles without any major service needed. It was also the source of many a fond teenage make-out and illicit substance memory — although most of those are a little foggy now, aren’t they?
I’ve owned Toyotas ever since, and probably will ’till the day I die. But recently I’ve started to get pissed at Toyota in the same way that I am at the American auto manufacturers for some of the dolt-headed, intelligence-defying marketing decisions they’ve made in regards to fuel efficient vehicles.
You see folks, that first generation Previa was the precursor to the Estima, but for some reason, when Toyota introduced the next generation Estima to the rest of the world as it phased-out the Previa, it introduced the turd-like Sienna to the US. The Sienna was a gas hog — just like all other US minivans — and was designed with not a hint of the Previa in mind.
As the years went on, the Japanese Estima got better and better and Toyota even released a “full-size” hybrid minivan to the Japanese market called the Alphard. But we were still stuck with the hulking Sienna.
Currently, the rumors indicate that Toyota will introduce a hybrid version of the Sienna to the US market sometime next year, but it won’t get nearly the mileage of the Estima. Again, I ask, WTF? Yo, Toyota, you’ve already got a minivan that half of the families in the US would kill for, what the hell are you doing investing so much energy in redesigning a has-been?
The video below is in Japanese, but regardless, it clearly shows the Estima hybrid in operation with its fancy Americans-need-it options and all. As a dad to two, I want this car for my family. What do you think? Is Toyota crazy just like all the other big auto manufacturers?
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Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation License
Video Credit: VasyaKurolesov from Youtube
I would even drive it from the right side and have everything in Japanese so they did not have to do anything to it. Of course I think all car companies are usually five years behind the curve at all times on what people really want.
Hey, I don’t have a brood of cubs and two golden retrievers, but I can definitely use a 4×4 minivan. Those things are GREAT for camping. Especially if it gets 2.5x better mileage than I’m currently getting from my 4Runner.
What’s the tow cap?
LOL, thats easy, US Government WONT allow it! Why? because Big Oil has the US Government in its back pocket and cars on the streets doing 40+ MPG cost the oil companies too much in losses. This is no big secret. All about PROFIT.
Jiff
http://www.anonymize.us.tc
Nick - You have great points and for the most part I agree with you but unfortunately our system has a lot of business greed that far out weights common sense. As you mention without a doubt this Toyota Estima, and other vehicles would sell just fine here in the US.
You have heard about the recent oil scandals going on, and that’s just what we hear about. For example:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-fi-oilsex11-2008sep11,0,607347,print.story
Toyota is a business and makes decisions based on dollars and cents, and I bet you a dollar if they could make more money selling the Estima in the US, than not they would. So what do that tell us then…
Toyota hasn’t sold an Estima in North America (Aka Previa in North America) since the mid 90s. My family has one of the last of the line before they stopped selling them here. I would LOVE to have them here, they are the NICEST vans ever but its probably because the vans dont meet safety standards here. I too wish the Estima/Previa came back
When I write about some of the fuel efficient and cool cars being sold elsewhere in the world, but not available to the US, a lot of the inevitable comments I see revolve around “so-and-so automaker has done their research and if they could make money selling this in the US they would” or “it would cost too much to convert the thing to be legal in the US.”
The way I feel about those kinds of statements is that the world has changed dramatically in the last year and a half and the US market has changed dramatically too. I think that the market models these car companies are working from while making their marketing decisions are based on old data about the markets they serve.
If they were to actually gather information about likely car buyers in today’s market they would come to completely different conclusions about what cars they should sell and how profitable they would be.
This is why start-ups like Tesla and Aptera will ultimately be the new American car giants — they are tapping into this wholesale shift in consumer demand at an early stage and not designing for the consumer of the past.
The small mini-van from Japan is pretty ubiquitous in the Japan domestic market. I’ve always been a big fan of the Nissan Serena, Honda Odyssey, Toyota Estima. Personally, I’d like to see the kei-cars (700cc or less) brought to the US.
Google the Mazda 5. I get 35 mpg combined, driven for economy, of course. Six passenger.
IT’S A FREAKING MATRIX!!!!
The real question is: Why would anyone buy it in the first place? IT’S A MATRIX!!!
We have a Sienna now and love it. Unfortunately, the gas mileage isn’t that great (17mpg). We’d switch to an Estima in a heartbeat.