TOYOTA CITY: As Toyota Motor Corp's newest Prius rolls off the production line starting this month, the automaker said that the latest model of the world's best-selling gasoline hybrid had boosted Japanese car production by around 14 percent from a year ago.
"This Prius is contributing to an increase in overall average daily domestic production to around 14,000 cars, for the first time in a while," Toyota President Akio Toyoda told reporters at a plant near the company's headquarters on Monday.
That figure marks a jump from a daily average production of 12,300 cars in December 2014, when production had eased ahead of new model launches at the start of this year, according to a Toyota spokesman.
Toyota launched the fourth-generation Prius in Japan last week, and will market the latest version of the world's first mass-produced gasoline-electric hybrid car in other regions in the coming months.
The automaker has said it has received domestic orders for around 60,000 new Priuses so far. It is targeting average global annual sales of 300,000-350,000, the lower end of the initial annual sales target of 300,000-400,000 for the previous model.
Average daily vehicle production can swing from month to month due to new product launches and seasonal factors, but the spokesman said the company's domestic output largely sticks to a rough range of around 11,000-14,000. Daily production at Toyota's domestic plants has been creeping up each year even before the Prius went into production, averaging 13,700 in September compared with 13,500 a year ago, according to the company's latest available figures.
Output climbed to 14,800 in March 2014 due to a surge in demand ahead of a rise in Japanese consumption tax the following month.
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