Toyota Plans to Boost Hybrid Line by Selling Gasoline-Electric Pickup

Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that it planned to sell the first gasoline-electric pickup trucks, bringing the fuel-saving technology to General Motors Corp.’s most profitable section of the market.

A hybrid pickup truck is part of the automaker’s plan for a full lineup of low-emission models, said Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe in Tokyo. Toyota has gas-electric engines in six types of vans, sedans and sport utility vehicles since making the Prius hybrid car in 1997.

Watanabe is looking to follow the success of the Prius, which can go more than twice the distance on a gallon of gasoline than a conventional sedan can and has a three-month waiting list at U.S. dealers. Gas-electric engines have gained in popularity as states such as California have introduced tighter emission rules and oil prices have risen to record highs.

Watanabe wants Toyota to put gas-electric engines on more vehicle types to help the carmaker sell 1 million hybrids “as soon as possible,” compared with last year’s 134,700 units.

“We would ideally want a full lineup of hybrid models,” Watanabe said.

Toyota makes the Tundra pickup truck in Indiana and plans to produce more of the model -- which accounted for 5.5% of the automaker’s U.S. sales last year and three times the profit of the Toyota Camry sedan -- in Texas in 2006.

A hybrid vehicle combines a conventional gasoline engine with an electric motor. The motor powers the vehicle at slow speeds and the gasoline engine kicks in as the car gains speed. The battery pack is charged by the gasoline engine and by power regenerated by the brakes.

Toyota, which mass-produced the world’s first gas-electric car, can make more than 300,000 hybrid vehicles a year after it starts building the Camry hybrid sedan in Kentucky, Watanabe said.

Toyota’s next pickup truck may be the FTX concept model, displayed in Detroit at the North American International Auto Show last year, featuring a V8 and a hybrid engine.

As for its cooperation with General Motors in fuel-cell vehicle research and development, the two automakers have “basically agreed to” continue to work together even after March, when their partnership ends, Watanabe said.

The two companies are mapping out a detailed plan, he said without elaborating.

“A fuel-cell vehicle is one of my dream cars,” Watanabe said. “We really need to look into materials [and] fuels because it’s very expensive.”