Toyota Marin

In today's highly competitive world of automotive engineering, one needs to make partnerships with the competition in order to make it to the top. In that tradition a major Japanese auto maker and top German car company might be joining forces to share hybrid technology.

Toyota, the Japanese auto maker, has always been in the forefront with innovations in alternative energy and hybrid technology. Almost all Japanese auto makers share their work with other Japanese companies, but few head outside of those boarders to build partnerships.

It makes sense, Toyota has been the only company to successfully sell hybrid…

Toyota has plans to produce anywhere from six to eight hybrid vehicles within two years. They also hope to sell a million hybrid vehicles per year, most of those to the United States. But over in the UK, Ireland, and even Germany and France, hybrid Toyota's are big sellers.

For years, in England the Auris hybrid has been a popular gas-electric vehicle. The company's new Auris five-door hatchback is an entry level designed to do for Europe what Prius has for North America.

Toyota's sold 2.75 million units worldwide since the late 1990s. Prius owns well…

The all new Toyota Prius Plug-in will be coming to New York. Six of the company's test vehicles are headed to Central New York to road test on real world conditions.

The demonstration project is a combined partnership of Toyota Motor Sales USA Inc., Clean Communities of Central New York, Syracuse University, the Syracuse Center of Excellence and CuseCar, a Syracuse not-for-profit car-sharing service.

The plug-in hybrid vehicle has an electric motor along with a gasoline engine. The Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid has a range of 13 miles at speeds up to 62 mph on electric power. When the…

The Toyota Prius is the world's best selling and extremely quiet hybrid car. When the electric engine takes over control of the vehicle, it becomes almost silent. This has been an issue in some areas, especially those with high pedestrian and bicycle powered traffic.

Several accidents involving a collision between hybrid cars and those on foot or on pedals has raised concerns that the Toyota Pius is too quiet. Toyota is working on a solution to this issue.

In Japan, Toyota will start selling a $148 speaker system, which will emit sounds under the hood to help it achieve…