Word: prius
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...hybrid market has taken off with about half a million units in global sales in 2008; cars made by Toyota and Honda accounted for 90% of those sales. For Japanese consumers who want to buy a hybrid this year, there's a waiting list. Toyota launched its new Prius in May, on the heels of Honda's launch of the Insight, a cheaper subcompact hybrid. In Japan, the Prius grabbed the top spot for new car sales (nearly 11,000) last month followed by the Insight in third, according to the Japan Automobile Dealers Association...
...research analyst for CLSA, a Hong Kong-based brokerage house, says smaller players are starting to build electric cars because the playing field is fairly level. EVs are not as complicated to manufacture as hybrids, and the market is in its infancy. Toyota, for all its success with the Prius, has said it could launch EVs in the U.S. by 2012, but has not announced plans to introduce them in Japan. "If you're third or fourth, you'll never beat Toyota or Honda head on," says Richter. "But you can beat them if you change the rules...
...what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years...
Evolutionary psychologists have a cynical term for cooperative, procommunity behaviors like buying a Prius or shopping at Whole Foods or carrying a public-radio tote bag: competitive altruism. Cynical, but accurate. As several studies (like this one) have shown, altruistic people achieve higher status, and are much more likely to behave altruistically in situations where their actions are public than when they will go unnoticed. Competitive altruism explains why soldiers jump onto grenades during war (their clans will reap the rewards) and why vain CEOs build hospital wings (they enjoy the social renown that they could never acquire from closing...
These results help explain a strange thing that happened in 2007: even though tax credits for the Toyota Prius had expired in late 2006, sales actually increased the following year by 69%. (Similarly, prerecession sales of the Lexus LS 600h L far exceeded projections, even though some had wrongly predicted that green-friendly consumers wouldn't shell out well over $100,000 for a hybrid...