AutoblogGreen

Over at the Toyota Open Road blog, Toyota's American Communications boss Irv Miller has a new post talking about hybrid battery supplies. As we reported yesterday, May sales of the Prius were down 40 percent compared to the previous May. It's not because people suddenly didn't want Priuses anymore, especially with gas at $4/gallon. In fact exactly the opposite is true. So many people have wanted Priuses through the first four months of the year, that there simply weren't any more to be had. Those 15,000 units Toyota sold were basically all the cars that were left.

Miller mentions the same things the he told ABG the other day and then goes on to discuss the situation in a little more detail. The Panasonic EV Energy plant in Omori, Japan currently builds the batteries for Toyota's hybrids and it is being expanded. A new lithium ion battery line is being installed to supply batteries for the first plug-in Priuses that are coming in 2010. Toyota expects to sell 450,000 hybrids worldwide this year, an amount that the company has stated it wants to increase to 1 million annually sometime within the next decade.

[Source: Toyota Open Road]