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35 AutoData | December 2018 On the previous page, Viviane Mansi and Anderson Suzuki: awarded on their birthday. On this picture, above, the flex hybrid Prius in tests W hen the first Toyota flex fuel hybrid of the world arrive to the Brazilian dealerships (which should not take long), it come with an item in the trunk already: the 2018 AutoData Award for Technological Development. The ‘mule’ of the project, a Prius, was officially presented at the headquarters of Investe SP in March. But the tests began almost three years ago in partnership with Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo. As part of the development in this 2018, the model traveled along the São Paulo-Brasília route, approximately 1 thousand kilometers. At the time, Toyota considered that technology represented a “perfect marriage” by uniting the benefits of the electric motor to the vegetable fuel. The development is a combination of Brazilian and Japanese engineering. The headquarters sees the product as an important tool for achieving the aggressive energy efficiency goals as the company set for itself until 2050 in its Environmental Challenge. The development happens in a Prius, but the technology is expected to reach the stores under the model’s hood with more massive commercialization volumes, as possibly the new Corolla, getting ready to be born in the factory of Indaiatuba SP. The Toyota plan is to have at least one hybrid version of all models it sells in Brazil, even though a deadline has not been set for that. Studies carried out by the company pointed out that the flex hybrid has one of the highest compensation and reabsorption potentials in the emission of carbonic gas generated from the beginning of the use cycle of ethanol extracted from sugarcane, through the offer in the supply pumps and the combustion process of the vehicle. When the model was filled only with ethanol, or E100, the results were even more promising. Anderson Suzuki, general manager of communications and public relations, said: “This is the recognition for everything we have consistently done in recent years. Prius flex is hard work and we want it to come to become concrete in the near future. It is a technology closely related to the Brazilian energy source and it associates global development, in the case of the hybrid, with the Brazilian, for the ethanol”. Disclosure/Toyota “This is the recognition for everything we have consistently done in the last years. The flex Prius is a hard work and we want it to become concrete in the near future.” Anderson Suzuki, general manager of communication and public relations