The Economist Innovation Awards 2004 (from 18 Sep 2004 issue) Energy: Takeshi Uchiyamada, senior managing director, Toyota, for developing the Prius hybrid car. In 1994, Mr Uchiyamada joined Toyota's project to develop an eco-friendly car for the 21st century. He became chief engineer for the Prius, the world's first mass-produced petrol-electric hybrid car, in 1996. Given a free hand in the design, his team developed a continuously variable transmission system that allows the petrol engine and electric motor to work separately or in tandem. The hybrid design improves fuel efficiency and dramatically cuts emissions. By 2003, Prius sales had topped 150,000 units worldwide. That's the entire mention of the Prius, but the whole article can be found here. It's a subscription site; you could use http://bugmenot.com/.
I used bugmenot and was able to log in, but it then told me that this was a "premium content" article and therefore still could not read it. Oh well....
I used a bugmenot password and got in. bugmenot has multiple logins for each site, maybe only some have premium access. Ask it for another one.
Interesting -- there seems to be several gentlemen at Toyota who are getting the title, "father of the hybrid". In the MIT Technology Article, the following is said about Takehisa Yaegashi: It goes on to say that Yaegashi went on to head the Prius team during the 90s. [hr:68a1d6af75] Well, to whoever fathered the hybrid at Toyota, my congratulations!
looking at the sweeping scope of innovations for the Prius, it would be hard to fathom any one man being chiefly responsible for many different highly complex areas of development and fabrication needed to bring the Prius to fruition. a telling article that was posted here about ford being a year late with their hybrid because they could not find reliable suppliers shows how different this car had to be. Toyota completely rewrote the book on the Prius. in an article i read about the Supercar project by the big 3 (http://priuschat.com/forums/album_pic.php?pic_id=799) ford engineers tried to reverse engineer the Prius to try to figure out how the car worked and just went bonkers when they discovered the main on board computer under the seat. but that is an indication of how revolutionary the Prius is. that incident happened in 1999. here we are 5 years later and the car is still just as ground breaking.
