Toyota may not be making pure EVs widely available next year as some outlets are reporting, but it will start offering a different kind of plug-in car in 2012. We’ve already heard about Toyota’s experiments with a bi-directional charger that could serve as a backup power source for your home in an emergency, but Toyota is taking the car-as-powerplant theme a bit farther next year, as Automotive News [sub] reports
Next year, Toyota Motor Corp. will start offering AC electric outlets as an option on its popular Prius hybrid so drivers can plug in household appliances — from computers to refrigerators.
The idea was born from watching victims of Japan’s March 11 earthquake using the Toyota Estima hybrid van as a source of emergency electricity when the power was knocked out.
It is the only Toyota model currently offering a standard AC outlet.
But Toyota wants to add them to the Prius next year and eventually across the hybrid lineup. One hitch: It will be offered only in Japan initially. Concerns about different voltages and safety regulations are keeping the technology off export models at least at the start.
Toyota may be only offering the system in Japan at first, but this step offers a fascinating insight: clearly Toyota believes consumers would rather take electricity out of their cars than put it back in. It’s a new interpretation of the plug-in concept and one that, as a blogger who’s always looking for on-the-go laptop power, I can certainly appreciate.
That would be a HUGE selling point down here on the Gulf Coast, where it can take days for power to be restored after a hurricane. I went for 15 days without juice after Hurricane Ike, and it took 15 more to finally get the smell of gasoline out of my nose after searching for it, hauling it, and pouring it into a generator for two weeks straight.
I’m surprised the Volt didn’t have this from the get-go.
Did you forget about the 3-yr/one model iteration lag required of all new GM vehicles?
Should help boost sales to survivalist types who, by virtue of generally being holed up far away fro work and shopping, tend to put big miles on their vehicles to begin with. Now they just need to offer a diesel version….
Didn’t this crop up post-Katrina? In fact, I know it did, a friend was running electrical appliances off of his Prius in NO and made sure to mention it to me as I’ve made no bones about having little interest in his car. Granted, the guy has some electrician skills so the lack of a household outlet didn’t bother him. I’m pretty sure some news orgs. picked up similar stories at the time.
and…why is an AC outlet considered significant in the auto news press release world? I was in a car yesterday with just such a setup, and frankly it’s been around for a while. Now if they were offering a 220V outlet this would be a much bigger deal, is that what they actually mean here?
My weather beater 2005 Saturn has a 110VAC outlet in the back. It is only rated to 150 watts so I won’t be running a fridge, but I can run a laptop, charge a phone, camera, etc. etc. and we do use it from time to time. It only operates when the engine is running. Certainly enough to keep a cell phone charged and other vital functions in a huge natural disaster (that is until gasoline runs out).
One can buy some very potent power inverters that will clamp onto the battery posts of a car and do some rather heavy duty electrical service, as long as the engine is running. Heck I could get a twenty-year old Corolla and spend $200 to $300 on a really good inverter and be able to do the same thing.
I don’t see this as a big deal.
I call shenanigans on Toyota’s stated reason for keeping this Japan-only. Different voltages in other countries are hardly a concern for a single small island nation that uses two different cycle frequencies. How the heck can they sell it even Japan-only without supporting both 50Hz and 60Hz?
The only way I could buy the voltage difference excuse is if they can barely squeak out 100 VAC out of their setup. Good enough for what’s typical in Japan, but just won’t cut it anywhere else in the developed world.
+1
More likely the exchange rate of the Yen versus US Dollar does not enable us to offer this value added feature to our North American customers.
+1. The Matrix has had a light-duty 110V AC outlet for years. It would be trivial to add one to the Prius. A bit more costly to beef it up to let you run real appliances off it, but still trivial engineering.
The Escape hybrid also has one. It’s also light-duty, so I wouldn’t try running the fridge off it, but I did use it to run a light and the TV during a power outage a few months back. The engine cycled off and on a couple of times to keep the batteries charged and we were the only house in the neighborhood with lights.
And the outlet in my fiance’s Vibe (Matrix’s sister) did quite well running a slow cooker filled with bbq-ed pork on the way to a potluck.
If you sell the Prius as a generator you need more than light duty from the AC outlet.
The Matrix has you can run your laptop on it outlet. What Toyota will sell in Japan is you can run your house on it
The difference that the Prius will offer 1500 watts out of its inverter, using its battery.. once the battery gets low the engine will cycle automatically and recharge the battery.. a lot safer that keeping a generator fed with gasoline or having to store cans of gas, but park the car outside the garage when you do this. The car can do this for a couple of days until it runs out of gas.
1500 watts is enough to run a fridge or a window unit AC. UQM makes a similar inverter that can handle 5000w continuously and 16,000w peak
I was going to say that it’s probably more cost-efficient to have a separate generator and an ordinary car, yet a hybrid car or SUV with extra battery capacity will be very useful for emergency trips in massive traffic jams out of town.
So if it serves double-duty as an emergency power generator, why not?