Toyota Motor Corporation

has
scrapped plans for widespread sales of a new all-electric minicar, saying it
had misread the market and the ability of still-emerging battery technology to
meet consumer demands.

According to Reuters, the Japanese automaker which had
already taken a more conservative view of the market for battery-powered cars
than rivals General Motors Company and Nissan Motor Company, said it would only
sell about 100 battery-powered eQ vehicles in the United States and Japan in an
extremely limited release.

Toyota company had announced plans to sell several thousand
of the vehicles per year when it unveiled the eQ as a pure-electric variant of
its iQ minicar in 2010.

“Two years later, there are many difficulties,” Takeshi
Uchiyamada, Toyota’s vice chairman and the engineer who oversees vehicle
development, said.

By dropping plans for a second electric vehicle in its
line-up, Toyota cast more doubt on an alternative to the combustion engine that
has been both lauded for its oil-saving potential and criticized for its heavy
reliance on government subsidies in  the
United States.

“The current capabilities of electric vehicles do not meet
society’s needs, whether it may be the distance the cars can run, or the costs,
or how it takes a long time to charge,” said, Uchiyamada, who spearheaded
Toyota’s development of the Prius hybrid in the 1990s.

Toyota said it was putting its emphasis on that technology,
an area in which it is the established leader. Toyota said on Monday that, it
expected to have 21 hybrid gas-electric models like the Prius in its line-up by
2015, adding that out of that total, 14 of the new hybrids will be all-new, the
automaker said.

Toyota plans however, to have a hybrid variant for every of
its brand. In a gas-electric hybrid like the Prius, a battery captures energy
from the brakes to provide a supplement to the combustion engine, boosting
overall mileage, particularly in stop-and-go city traffics.