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However, the article does provide credible statistical evidence to suggest the car's popularity, noting "Toyota has sold a total of 100,000 of all types of HEVs worldwide in the last five years and boasts that it will crank out 300,000 HEVs annually by 2005, as more car buyers show a preference for lower emissions and better mileage." As further testimony to the likely future popularity of the cars it also notes as well that in addition to Toyota, Honda and Nissan have also begun to offer hybrid cars. Other automotive manufacturers plan to introduce electric cars in the next few years, including Ford, General Motors and Daimler Chrysler. All of these manufactures, incidentally, have linked advertisements to this article on the World Wide Web.
The intended audience of this article, however, is clearly more interested in the car's purported power than environmental impact. Although the article does quote a director of alternative power technologies at J.D. Power & Associates, Westlake Village, who notes "the total HEV industry could be as large as one-half-million units by 2007," instead the author is more keen to emphasizes that forward-thinking car makers are "building a new breed of HEVs with smaller sticker premiums and more modest emission-reduction and mileage-enhancement targets." Thackery gently mocks the Toyota Prius, for example, stating that the car "sells on its appeal as a statement of the driver's environmental piety," but the more revved up HEVs, of the future, which are incidentally are more likely to be made by American car manufacturers, "are more attuned to market realities in a country where gas guzzling is an accepted addiction. 'If you do the math, you can see that we can actually save significantly more fuel converting a 20-mpg vehicle into a hybrid than a 30-mpg vehicle, especially if it's a vehicle that sells in high volumes, not a niche vehicle,'" one GM executive is quoted as saying, in defense of GM's future, more modest emissions standards for its electronic vehicles, in contrast to the Toyota Prius.
Thus, the article overall presents solid and credible information about how hybrid cars work, and their burgeoning popularity. But this American car and electronic niche magazine, aimed at car and gadget aficionados rather than the average cost-conscious middle class American car consumer may be too quick to sneer at the petite and cost-conscious hybrids such as the Prius, and too quick to endorse the more mildly conservationist and conserving 'mild-HEVs' that American manufactures plan to make in the future. Although its information its solid, its tone must be regarded with a pinch of proverbial (electrically charged) salt.
