Toyota's Futuristic Hybrid to be Featured at New York's Museum of Modern Art

20 July 1999
Toyota's Futuristic Hybrid to be Featured at New York's Museum of Modern Art
    NEW YORK, July 19 -- Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. (TMS)
today announced that its low-emissions Prius hybrid car will
be featured at the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) summer exhibit Different
Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century.
    The exhibit, which will run from July 22 through September 21, 1999, is
"... a forward-looking examination of automobile design and its impact on
society," according to Christopher Mount, Assistant Curator of MoMA's
Department of Architecture and Design.
    The Prius has been on sale in Japan since 1997 and is slated for U.S.
introduction next year.  It uses both a gasoline engine and an electric motor
to achieve extremely low emissions and outstanding gasoline mileage.
    The hybrid 5-seat sedan operates on electricity at low speeds and switches
automatically to the gasoline engine at higher speeds, depending on driving
conditions.  Because the gasoline engine and "regenerative" brakes recharge
the battery pack, the Prius is effectively an electric vehicle that never has
to be plugged in for recharging.
    The Prius achieves 66 miles-per-gallon in Japanese fuel economy tests,
cuts the emission of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) in half, and reduces
the emission of other pollutants by 90 percent compared to a modern,
pollution-controlled sedan.
    "When the Prius is re-calibrated for typical U.S. driving conditions,
Toyota engineers expect its exhaust emissions to fall into the 'Super Ultra
Low Emission Vehicle' (SULEV) category, and its fuel economy to be about
55 miles per gallon," says James Press, executive vice president of TMS.  "At
the same time, it's a family-friendly car that offers all the safety, comfort,
derivability and performance of a conventional four-door sedan."
    Interior volume of the Prius compares to that of the mid-size Toyota Camry
sedan, the best-selling car in America for the last two years.  Due to
innovative styling by Calty, Toyota's southern California design studio, the
Prius takes up little more curb space than a compact economy car.
    This summer, forward-looking consumers can get a preview of Toyota's car
for the next century at MoMA.