Toyota is slowly adding more green vehicles beyond its poster child the Prius. Yesterday the Japanese automaker introduced several new alternative fuel initiatives that it hopes will keep it ahead of the curve at its Sustainable Mobility Seminar in Portland. On the top of the list was the news that Toyota will show off a new compressed natural gas (CNG) Camry Hybrid concept vehicle at the Los Angeles Auto Show later this year. Toyota tried selling a CNG Camry in California back in 1999, but those were the days of cheap gas and climate change had few celebrity endorsements; sales never took off and the car was discontinued.
It was a day full of automotive resurrections as Toyota said it plans to put four off-lease RAV4-EVs, an all-electric version of its gas-powered SUV, back into operation. Those RAV4’s will be provided to Portland State University who will use them as local shuttles vehicles. The city of Portland is a pretty good place for Toyota’s project — utility Portland General Electric has installed its first electric car charging station and has plans for five more such stations which it has installed in anticipation of growing demand.
While these two announcements are well-intentioned, they are both very small in scale and are mostly gestures. So long as they don’t distract Toyota from innovating cleaner cars on a larger scale, we’re all for it. The car maker says it’s still on track to introduce a plug-in electric vehicle in 2009 and it’s all-electric commuter car “in the early 2010s.”
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