That is why Toyota is still not committing to plug-in hybrids or fully electric cars.

Antonio Roncero @roncero_antonio 29 April 2019 3 min.

That is why Toyota is still not committing to plug-in hybrids or fully electric cars.

According to a study by INSIA, current Toyota hybrids can drive more than 80% of the time with zero emissions in urban cycles

We got a first glimpse of this during the road test of the new Toyota Corolla that we carried out at the launch of this model. A series of sensors installed in the vehicles measured the time they spent running with zero emissions. The confirmation now comes after the study commissioned by Toyota from INSIA, the University Institute for Automotive Research at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

Keep this figure in mind: current Toyota hybrids can drive more than 80% (specifically 84.4%, according to the study) operating cas zero-emission vehicles on urban journeys.

But watch out, because the study’s second conclusion is even more surprising: when urban driving is combined with travel on the city’s outskirts, Toyota hybrids also operate as zero-emission cars almost 8 out of every 10 minutes of their driving time.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons Toyota has not rushed to announce a battery electric car. The first fully electric Toyota is scheduled for 2021.

This is how the study was carried out

To reach this conclusion, INSIA conducted a test using 20 different drivers, over 60 different journeys, including urban and interurban routes. In total, more than 50 hours of driving and about 1,400 kilometres were completed.

You are probably wondering where the catch is, given that the battery in Toyota hybrids is a low-capacity battery and the system is designed mainly to assist the combustion engine when starting off or driving at very low speeds.

Well, there is no trick involved. The percentage of time Toyota hybrids spend driving in zero-emission mode (ZEVt) is the total percentage of driving time during which the vehicle is either moving in purely electric mode, operating in energy-recovery mode, or stationary with the combustion engine switched off.

As for the percentage of distance in zero-emission mode (ZEVd), this covers two situations: when the vehicle moves in electric mode, and when it moves while recovering energy.

In case you are curious, the following charts show the percentages obtained over the total route, the urban route and the interurban route. They show, for each case, the distance and time during which the Toyota Prius hybrid used in the test operated in each of the modes.

Urban route

Peri-urban route

Total route

The conclusions of the study, carried out in Madrid, match the data Toyota has obtained in other similar studies in European cities such as Paris, Madrid and Rome. All of them show that, on average, the share of time Toyota hybrids spend in zero-emission mode in the city is around 80 percent.