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USA:Too much credit for Ford hybrid goes to Toyota; race just begun

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"This is an editorial I read today and found it very interesting." Stacy

Too much credit for Ford hybrid goes to Toyota; race just begun

By Daniel Howes / The Detroit News

Sometimes the smartest thing a company can do to burnish its image at the expense of the competition is to do the slow walk on correcting misconceptions.

Case in point: Toyota Motor Co.p. and Ford Motor Co.’s new Escape Hybrid SUV. Last March, the companies said they had concluded “licensing agreements for hybrid systems and emissions purification patents” — lawyerly language that soon gave way to talk that the first hybrid SUV from an American automaker was actually powered by Toyota.

Even if it wasn’t.

Months passed, and Ford execs seethed at the misperception. On June 22, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. issued a news release headlined, “Hybrid Hype? Fact and Fiction surrounding the new technology.” Deep in the corporate Q&A is this nugget:

“Is Ford using the Toyota hybrid system?”

Answer: “Although the Ford system is very similar to Toyota’s, Toyota is not directly supplying any components to Ford. Toyota and Ford have entered into a licensing agreement allowing Ford to use technology that had been patented by Toyota.”

Two days later, a Toyota spokeswoman, Cindy Knight, told a California newspaper: “It is really not accurate to say that Ford obtained the technology from Toyota. So far, Nissan is the only other company that has planned to get its hybrid system — or parts of it — directly from Toyota.”

So why wait so long to clear this up? Why deflect questions with lame responses that Toyota people in Japan drafted the March announcement, not the Toyota people in California? Why allow environmentalists, even Toyota dealers like my father-in-law’s in suburban Washington, to perpetuate the fiction that the Escape Hybrid is a Toyota under the skin?

Because the confusion strengthens Toyota’s carefully crafted green marketing message. And it buttresses the image of Detroit’s Big Three-are-environmental-morons, a rap that GM, Ford and Chrysler partly fuel by their slow response to the budding hybrid movement and their devotion to big trucks and SUVs.

This Toyota-Ford hybrid flap is yet another example of two common tendencies in the U.S. auto industry:

First is the “Teflon Toyota” syndrome. When activists denounce GM and Ford for building too many trucks and SUVs that deliver poor fuel economy, they ignore Toyota — whose comparable products get even worse fuel economy, according to federal statistics.

Second is Detroit’s “unlevel playing field” rant. Our automakers gripe about the “penalty” they carry in health-care and pension costs that their foreign rivals don’t, but it was their predecessors at GM, Ford and Chrysler who granted those bennies in the first place and passed them down to the successors.

Look, there’s no denying Toyota’s leadership in the hybrid race, considering that its second-generation Prius is in high demand and more hybrids are headed for showrooms. But it’s a race that has just begun, so to declare it over and anoint Toyota the victor is akin to saying the Pistons will win the NBA title the next 10 years because they did this year.

It’s not that simple. Give Toyota credit for setting the pace on hybrids and forcing Detroit’s automakers to recognize their legitimate place in the market. But don’t credit Toyota for developing Ford’s hybrid because it didn’t.
 
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