Toyota's Futuristic Hybrid Featured At New York's Museum Of Modern Art

NEW YORK, N.Y.,-  Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. (TMS) announced that its low-emissions Prius hybrid car is being 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. 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.