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t-decoration: underline ! important; position: static;" class="kLink" target="_top" id="KonaLink0" href="http://www.evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1343#">auto industry.I and a handful of high-profile American automotive journalists are about to experience the ride of a lifetime: we're about to get behind the wheel of Toyota's internally developed plug-in hybrids.

For many of us who not only have been watching but also faming the flames for electric plug-in hybrids, it may seem that the big auto companies have only lately and reluctantly come to the dance. But as I am about to learn during our visit to Toyota's proving grounds, Japan's largest carmaker has been quietly experimenting with PHEV technology for much longer than many of us have imagined.

Our trip to Higashi Fuji started early in the morning with a 5 AM breakfast call, a walk to the near-by Tokyo central train station from which issues gleaming white bullet trains every few minutes and commuter trains every few seconds. As I am writing this, the trains are less than 100 meters from my 3rd floor room in the Four Seasons at Marunouchi. Gratefully, the sound proofing in the room is excellent.

Higashi Fuji is a one hour bullet train ride south of Tokyo, plus an hour-long bus ride that winds over narrow roads, through a string of Japanese towns and villages. Once at the Toyota proving grounds we must leave our cameras behind -- hence there are no photos of the plug-in Priuses we test drove or the FCHV (fuel cell hybrid vehicle) that was also on hand for us to experience.

After the pre-requisite company presentations, including a glitzy, but informative video, we piled onto a second bus -- thus insuring that no cameras would be present -- and wound our way through a maze of buildings and garages, eventually arriving at the center of one of the complex's two test tracks. There Toyota had set up two short driving courses, each adjacent to the other. The nearer course would be for the plug-in Prius drives, while the outer loop would be for the FCHV.

The company had set up a tent with folding chairs for the gathered journalists who report for the likes of the Wall Street Journal, Road and Track, LA Times, Edmunds, the New York Times... and of course EV World. But since the weather was fine and the six flower and bird-emblazoned Priuses beckoned, no one followed the script. Instead, we piled off the bus and made a bee-line to the neatly lined-up cars to check them over.

Apart from their curiously Zen-like applique of flowers morphing into birds atop pearlescent gray paint, the cars are your standard Japanese, right-hand drive models; albeit the computer display screen offers at least one new wrinkle that indicates one's driving performance in both EV and hybrid mode.

We had learned the previous day at Toyota City near Nagoya, that in order to experiment with the plug-in hybrid concept, company engineers had chosen to simply add a spare Prius NiMH battery to each vehicle, giving the car a total of 2.6 kWh of electric power capacity or enough to propel the car in electric-only mode between 6-7 km, an admittedly modest distance. Like the grassroots plug-in experimenters and converters in the U.S. and Europe, Toyota engineers also chose to locate the additional battery pack in the spare tire well below the rear cargo deck, a move that Toyota itself has criticized as being unsafe since it is outside the vehicle crush zone.