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
There are many flaws in this post. First, you can’t compare fuel economy numbers from Japan or anywhere else to US numbers. They are all based on totally different driving cycles. Example, look up the SmartForTwo mileage rating in Europe. It is in the realm of 60mpg. In the US it was rated at about 44, and most people get about 37 in practice. Second, in most situations Hybrid powertrains are a joke. Yes, if you drive in stop and go settings, they work out ok due to the engine deactivation feature. Put them on the highway at speed, and they do as well as any economy car. Factor in the huge upcharge for the hybrid, and it just isn’t worth it. Why is this? The Toyota system converts mechanical energy to electrical energy and back to mechanical energy, which is extremely inefficient, when you are in scenarios where you don’t get electrical energy for free, such as braking. Not to mention they contain batteries that will pollute the earth for many years to come. If fuel economy is your goal, buy a 2007 mini cooper, and you will spend about 18k and get 40 mpg in essentially all conditions without rewarding Toyota for the biggest scam in the auto industry.
Parker,
There is no flaw in my mpg calculation. Toyota lists the Estima as getting 20 km/l in whatever fuel economy test the Japanese government uses as standard. 20 km/l is roughly 47 mpg. The Union of Concerned Scientists (referenced in my post) estimate that the Estima would get 35 mpg. I chose to take the middle road and hedge it down a bit from that by estimating a 40 mpg fuel economy. To be fair, we will probably never know what this minivan would actually get given that Toyota won’t sell the damn thing in the US.
I agree there is no doubt this would be a competitor for fuel economy in the mini van market, although I would hesitate to assume that it will perform 15% better than predicted and achieve 40 mpg instead of 35 mpg. Also, this van is now being offered with a 3.5L V6 in all other markets besides Japan, because the 2.4L engine was not enough to drive in countries with similar driving environments to the US (Australia).
My real complaint is not with this van, but with America’s love for the Prius, hybrids, and Toyota in general. In my opinion U.S. automakers did not pursue hybrid drives for a simple reason: in the every day man’s drive, they accomplish nothing other than adding cost to the vehicle, as well as an expensive repair when the batteries need replaced. What they did underestimate was excellent marketing execs at Toyota and uninformed American consumers. This link serves a good indication of what generally happens when a person with a commute that does not involve a lot of stop and go traffic buys a Prius (or other hybrid) http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/hybridwatch01.html. Hybrids have been employed with excellent results in mass transportation buses, because this is the ideal driving environment for this technology.
Fuel economy is a function of performance, vehicle weight (safety), and emissions. You can usually get two of the three, but not all three. In general most internal combustion engines are working with the same set of control features and are of comparable quality and efficiency. Compare Toyota’s product line up with any U.S. automaker’s in an apples to apples comparison, and you find that the fuel economy is essentially identical. Now, Toyota advertises the Corolla at 35 mpg, but when you dig in to it you learn this is for a 1.8L engine. Some might consider this unsafe to drive in the U.S. in a 2900 pound vehicle, but it is the customer’s call. Bump it up to the 2.4L and the fuel economy is no different than the Chrysler Sebring, which weighs 500-600lbs more. This holds true for Camry and the rest of their product portfolio. Couple this with the fact that Toyota’s in general are much less feature rich than an American/European vehicle at the same price (including standard safety features such as ESP and traction control), and reliability becomes the only reason to consider Toyota. Reliability is a notoriously difficult thing to measure, but Toyota was recently derated by consumer reports from their “Always Recommend” status.
I think the key message I’m trying to get across is that their isn’t a magical vehicle out there that gets 100 mpg that is being kept from us in America. The “evil” big 3 sells many vehicles in Europe that get exceptional fuel economy, but they don’t meet US regulations. Toyota benefits from an uneducated customer base, coupled with a great Yen to Dollar exchange rate (they make several billion per year explicitly from this and devalue their currency to maintain it). This is not to say they don’t have an attractive product for certain types of consumers, but in general it is less than extraordinary and does not deserve the praise it draws.
I’d once read that there is a single machine in DC that is used to make MPG estimations; it’s a treadmill built in the 1970s and is woefully inaccuarate, oversetimating mileage by 30% or more. Is perhaps the auto companies resistance to bringing in efficient foreign autos an attempt to hide this fact?
Join the club … I’ve been wondering why they won’t bring the Isuzu D-Max on-shore(it’s essentially a Chevy Colorado with a diesel engine).
IMHO, the first automaker to make a truck smaller than the Silverado 2500HD avaible with a diesel will make a killing, and I really hope it’s Chevy.
There’s a car just like that already sold on the U.S. market: a Mazda mini-minivan. It’s terrific, but do you see many around? It’s the object lesson for Toyota.
I’m not buying any of this “safety” concerns stuff, structural integrity, crash tests, bumper heights, blah blah blah
can someone tell me how the “smart car” that I am now seeing pop up all over town was able to penetrate the market here in the US?
That “smart car” is smaller than a golf cart??
Nick Chambers:
“The way I feel about those kinds of statements [regarding safety regulations] is that the world has changed dramatically in the last year and a half and the US market has changed dramatically too.”
Unfortunately we still have the same NHTSB. Get rid of the regs and you’ll see a massive improvement in fuel efficiency, as well as a massive increase in fatalities due to accident.
“This is why start-ups like Tesla and Aptera will ultimately be the new American car giants…”
Ahem. Aptera is not building cars. They are, according to the regs, building three-wheeled motorcycles. That’s why Aptera can get away with building a carbon-fiber eggshell that will be totalled by a door ding. (Yes, really. Damage to a carbon-epoxy laminate CANNOT be repaired. You can’t just bang out the dent with a hammer; a monocoque body, once damaged, is unusable.)
A little presumptuous, aren’t you? My family owns a Sienna, and we love it. With three kids, including an infant, we need all the space we can get, especially on long trips. And it’s great when we have our kids’ friends in tow.
I agree there may be a market for a smaller van that gets 40 mpg. If so, Toyota is nuts not to fill it. That said, it’s more than a little irritating when pugnaciously self-righteous twerps denigrate the economic choices of others as either selfish or stupid and proclaim that they alone know what consumers really want. Feh.
Ben,
Sounds like you’ve got some guilt associated with driving a gas hog that leads you to draw conclusions about what I wrote that are completely antithetical to what I actually meant.
Nowhere in there did I denigrate the economic choices of others as selfish or stupid. Where the hell did you get that? If anything I was trying to point out that we’re stuck with gas hogs because auto manufacturers have us cornered into whatever they choose to sell us. I think it’s clear that I fully understand the needs of a US family.
So stop passing blame and go blow your hot air at somebody who’s actually threatening your lifestyle — like the foreign oil empires that you support everyday by not demanding that the US kick its oil habit.