Sep 10th, 2009 by Ross Edwards
The Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid concept will be unveiled this week at the Frankfurt Motor Show. Five hundred plug-in Prius cars will be released later this year as a test fleet, 150 of which will be in America.
The plug-in Prius will have a 12 mile range and be able to reach highway speeds in electric-only mode. After that point it will revert back to conventional hybrid mode. The plug-in Prius will be basically identical to a standard Prius, but will have an additional fuel door for the plug.
One of the most important things the plug-in Prius pilot program will do will be to test lithium-ion batteries in a hybrid. Lithium-ion batteries are commonly found in laptop computers and are widely regarded to be the future of hybrid batteries because of their small size. The pilot program will allow Toyota to see how the battery technology works in many different real-world scenarios.
Photo via Toyota.
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