Tokyo (ANTARA News) - Toyota Motor Corp. said Thursday that sales of its fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles had topped one million since they were first introduced a decade ago.
It took the Japanese auto giant about eight years to sell its first half million hybrids but less than two years after that to hit the one-million mark, AFP reported.
Toyota, which overtook struggling US rival General Motors in the first quarter of 2007 to become the world's top-selling automaker, said in a statement it aimed to sell one million hybrids a year by the early 2010s.
The Japanese group first launched the Prius -- the world's first mass-produced hybrid gasoline-electric vehicle -- in Japan in 1997, followed by North America, Europe and elsewhere in 2000.
It has since introduced the system to sports utility vehicles (SUVs), mini-vans and other vehicles.
Japanese automakers have struggled to keep pace with demand for their petrol-electric hybrids, particularly in the United States where interest in fuel-guzzling vehicles has been hit by soaring gasoline (petrol) prices.
But US sales have stagnated just as Toyota ramped up production and the automaker has begun resorting to special deals to attract customers once willing to wait months for a vehicle that became a status symbol among the environmentally-conscious.
Toyota said that had owners of its hybrids bought petrol-powered vehicles of a similar size and performance instead, an additional 3.5 million tons of greenhouse gas would have been released into the Earth's atmosphere.
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