Bloomberg reports that the US International Trade Commission has launched a probe of alleged patent violations which could result in the banning of all Toyota hybrids from the US market. Paice LLC won a 2005 civil suit against Toyota, in which Paice’s founder Alex Severinsky sought a court order banning the sale of Toyota’s Prius, Highlander and Lexus RX400h hybrids. Instead, an appeals judge awarded Paice $4.3m in damages, and ordered Toyota pay Paice a $100 royalty per hybrid sold in the US. In the current case before the ITC, Paice claims that Toyota’s Camry, third-generation Prius, Lexus HS250h sedan and Lexus RX450h are “are materially the same” and violate the same patents as those in its first case. If Paice can convince the ITC that Toyota indeed violated its patents, he will still need to prove that the little-known company has a market to protect. But Paice doesn’t actually want Toyota to be banned from selling cars. In the words of one patent attorney,  an “injunction would have given Paice strong leverage to negotiate a lucrative licensing deal with Toyota…Paice always felt that their technology was worth a lot more than [$100 per car] to Toyota.” (Read More…)

We thought the Lexus HS250h would be a cynical rebadge of the Prius with a little more power. We were wrong. The HS was marginally unique enough, but then ToMoCo went and cynically reabdged it as a Toyota and called it the Sai. Sigh. It hasn’t been confirmed for the US yet, but if it is, there’s not much breathing room between the $22k Prius and the $26k Camry Hybrid. Nor would there be much reason left to buy an HS.

Official fuel economy testing for all vehicles is conducted on chassis dynamometers, which are basically treadmills for cars and trucks. One subtlety of chassis dynamometer testing is that vehicle fuel economy measurements using decades-old standard speed profiles may be overly optimistic compared to today’s average on-road fuel use. Official methods exist to adjust the test cycle fuel economy of conventional vehicles to better estimate expected real-world fuel use, but a similar adjustment method has yet to be finalized for PHEVs.

From a National Renewable Energy Lab paper on plug-in hybrid efficiency testing [via Green Car Congress].

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Let’s assume for a moment that Hybrid Kinetic Motors and its planned Alabama assembly plant are not just a visa scam. Say, for example, it’s a visa scam that will actually build cars at some point. Can anyone make sense of the limited powertrain specs we have to work with? We’re told the vehicles will have a 1.5-liter combustion engine, capable of running gasoline or compressed natural gas. The curious part is the “hybrid kinetic” element, which will include a battery-electric hybrid system and, one assumes, some form of kinetic energy storage. Brilliance, the Chinese company whose former executives are behind HK Motors have only shown mild hybrids, leading one to assume this drivetrain technology was not developed there. However, Brilliance does build BMWs in China, and the Bavarians have adapted a “Kinetic Energy Recovery System” (KERS), which was created for Formula 1, for the road. That system uses regenerative braking to store small amounts of electricity which can be used to boost power for short periods. HK Motors’ claim that it will get 45 mpg out of a 1.5-liter ICE sounds reasonable, but the “up to 400 hp” spec sounds like pie in the sky. Unless that kind of power is only available for short bursts in a BMW KERS-style system. And though BMW’s F1 team has abandoned KERS, there’s talk of it coming to road cars like the next-gen M5. So has HK Motors licensed/stolen “flybrid” technology, or is there another system that could plausibly produce these specs? Or, are we wasting our time discussing vapor?

Hybrid Kinetic (HK) Motors and its chairman, former Brilliance chairman Yung Yeung, have announced plans to build a massive car plant in Baldwin County, Alabama in order to begin production of its fuel efficient vehicles by 2013. The $1.5b plant will produce 300,000 units per year and employ 5,000 Alabamans when it comes online with eventual production planned at one million units per year, according to a release from the Alabama governor’s office. A “full report” from Alabama Live states:

All the HK Motors vehicles will feature a 1.5-liter engine, but despite the engine’s size, the hybrid power sources will allow it to generate up to 400 horsepower, according to C.T. Wang, chief executive of HK Motors.

They will get at least 45 miles per gallon, Wang said, and the plug-in vehicle planned by the carmaker can go 600 miles on a single charge.

OK, is this starting to sound a bit strange? It probably should. The exact same scenario is playing out in Mississippi, where another former Brilliance boss is also building a huge, mysterious auto factory in the face of massive auto production overcapacity. Guess what else the factories have in common?

[Fundraising] will rely heavily on the U.S. government’s EB-5 program, which trades U.S. visas for $1 million invested in the U.S., or $500,000 in rural and high-unemployment areas.

We will only do a hybrid if that is what is required to maintain the vehicle. I think we have a pretty good plan right now that probably will not require a hybrid in the near term . . . I don’t believe that we need to do a six-cylinder engine in a Corvette at this time.

GM’s Tom Stephens, promising Automotive News [sub] that new efficiency standards won’t tame Chevy’s little red love machine. Incidentally, GM has already developed a hybrid ‘vette. In theory.

A brand is a promise to the consumer. It’s the umbrella under which all products must shelter. All the people responsible for a brand must ensure that it meets that promise. The Toyota Prius is a promise of reliable transportation that achieve high-mileage with low emissions. So it’s no wonder that Toyota has decided to stretch the brand to other vehicles. Oh, wait, the Prius isn’t a brand. It’s a model within a brand, which contains other examples of reliable transportation that achieves high-mileage with low emissions. Is that confusing? Well if it isn’t now, it soon will be. “The Highlander hybrid and Camry hybrid do OK, but calling it ‘Synergy Drive’ never resonated with consumers,” veteran Toyota dealer Earl Stewart told Automotive News [sub]. “But they can make hay on the Prius name. It’s a magic name. If somebody says ‘I drive a Prius,’ everybody knows what he means.” But for how long? The truth about a brand is that its products must fulfill the brand’s promise, or the brand dies. Confusing that brand diminishes it and alienates the people who gave birth to it in the first place. Maybe not straight away, but eventually. And forever.

To put it simply, Honda’s Insight sold 4,226 units last month while the Prius sold 18,886. Through August, Toyota sold 93,810 Priora while the Insight motivated only 14,045 buyers. Honda has tacitly admitted that the Insight is not up to snuff. But upgrades could take years. Honda could just as easily have the long-rumored Fit Hybrid ready in the same time. Would it be a better Prius fighter? Or will Honda Hybrids be stuck wandering the desert until, say, the CR-Z arrives?

GM-volt.com’s Lyle Dennis got a test drive of GM’s two-mode plugin CUV at GM’s recent PR event. First planned as a Saturn Vue (canceled due to the Saturn spin-off), then planned as a Buick rebadge (only to be murdered by Twitter), the two-mode plugin is currently homeless. Will it ever see the showroom floor? Which brand will it be sold as? How long will it take to restyle it in such a way that even the biggest fanboys won’t diss it as an obvious rebadge? Even GM executives probably don’t know yet.

Not selling power, mind you. In fact demand is so high for the new Prius that Toyota would like to increase production past its 500k/year projections. Too bad its battery supplier, Panasonic, can’t keep up. “Battery bottleneck,” howls Automotive News [sub], before admitting that Toyota has been building towards a million battery per year capacity. A year ago Toyota said they would reach that mark by 2011, now they are saying Summer 2010. Besides, what’s the hurry? “In terms of the Toyota lineup, I’d say [the Prius] is probably in the midlevel of profit,” reminds Toyota senior managing director Takahiko Ijichi. And all those batteries require more harmony between man, machine and nature. I mean nickel mines.