Sales of the hybrid vehicle segment have been on the decline as of late because of falling fuel prices and the rising efficiency of conventional gasoline cars, not to mention the advent of fully-electric vehicles.
While the Toyota Prius is at the top of the leader board when it comes to hybrid vehicles given its previous and consistent successes over the years, its efforts are still not enough to uplift or perk up the sagging segment.
Thus, when the 2016 Toyota Prius is officially released to the retail markets this coming fall, it is expected that it will have the unenviable task of breathing new life into the flagging hybrid segment.
While the challenge will be great and many motoring experts believe that Toyota will be in a very tough position, the key to the hybrid market is no other than the Toyota Prius because the Prius is the hybrid segment in itself, cites PostBulletin.com.
In 2014, Toyota sold 207,635 of the three combined Prius models, accounting for 42% of the hybrid market. The Prius is also by far, the best-selling hybrid in US history, having sold more than 1.8 million units since its debut in 2000 as a 2001 model.
However, Prius sales this year has dropped by 15.8% compared to last year, based on a recent study of Autodata Corporation. The figure is not just for Toyota Prius but for all other hybrids out in the market today.
Waking the market from its stupor
So when the 2016 Toyota Prius rolls out to the market, it will be in for a challenging ride to once again stir the market from its seeming stupor.
Meanwhile, Jalopnik reported that a Taiwanese website has just posted plenty of diagrammatic images of what could possibly be the 2016 Toyota Prius.
The images show a car that’s a clear evolution of the familiar Prius lozenge-shape, updated with a design vocabulary seen in the Mirai and some of Toyota’s latest concept cars.
The drawings of the 2016 Toyota Prius on the website feature a bolder look, less anonymous, with lots of crisp origami-ish angles and creases. It also sports dramatically-shaped boomerang lights that Toyota has been tinkering with for quite some time.
The images also suggest that the 2016 Toyota Prius comes in two basic versions which come in green and blue color.
The supposed 2016 Toyota Prius is lighter as it now weighs only 2,821 pounds which can be attributed to the replacement of one of the glass panels in the tailgate with acrylic. But the engine is still the same from previous reports and rumors about the hybrid vehicle. It still has the 105-horsepower 1.8-liter DOHC VVT-i Atkinson-cycle engine under the hood.
In addition to being a little bigger, the 2016 Toyota Prius has reportedly been given better driving dynamics by the Japanese carmaker, a feature which enables the upcoming model to overwhelm the present variant of the hybrid vehicle.
Game-changer among hybrids
When the first Toyota Prius was launched in 1997, it became an iconic gas-electric vehicle as it was among the first hybrids released in the market then.
With the impending roll out of the 2016 Toyota Prius, which is the fourth generation model, the Japanese carmaker not only expects the vehicle to sustain the momentum of its predecessor variants, Toyota is confident that it will become a game-changer among today’s hybrids especially with its superb 55 miles per gallon fuel efficiency rating and its fully revamped interior.
The hybrid vehicle should be expected to debut this fall either at the Tokyo Motor Show in September or the Los Angeles Auto Show in November. Production of the hybrid vehicle is said to start in Japan in December this year.