Eideard

…Recent sales data shows that the world’s most popular hybrid is, in fact, the best-selling car in the state. Well, the best-selling vehicle line, at least, since the Prius now comes in four variants.

If you add up sales of the Prius Liftback (aka, the regular Prius), the C, V and Plug-In models, you get 46,380 units for the first three quarters of 2012, according to numbers from the California New Car Dealers Association and reported by Bloomberg. That’s enough to move the Prius from fourth place last year to first this year in the sales rankings in America’s most populous state. In fact, roughly a quarter of the Priuses that Toyota sold in the US were in California. Reports of $5 gallons of gas are relatively recent, but we have to assume that the state’s long-time high gas prices are playing a role in pushing the Prius to the pinnacle there. Nationwide, Bloomberg says, the Prius is in seventh place…

The Prius is already the best-selling car in Japan, and has been for years, even though the Honda Fit has been nipping at its heals. Worldwide, the Prius family was the third best-selling nameplate in the first quarter of 2012, behind the Toyota Corolla and the Ford Focus.

It helps when the firm responsible for a qualitative change in transportation – like the Prius – is more forward-looking, secure in their knowledge of technology, confident enough to last past early days of improvement and acceptance.

If this profitable project was governed by American politicians it would have been shutdown long ago as another “car whose time has not come”.