pFiled under: a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/hybrids/" rel="tag"Hybrids/Alternative/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/green/" rel="tag"Green/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/japan/" rel="tag"Japan/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/hatchbacks/" rel="tag"Hatchbacks/a, a href="http://www.autoblog.com/category/toyota/" rel="tag"Toyota/a/pimg vspace="4" hspace="4" border="1" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.autobloggreen.com/media/2009/05/2008_09_20_09_prius_opt.jpg" /br /br /Sometime in early 2008, about the time when it became clear that Honda was planning to price its then-upcoming Insight hybrid very aggressively, rumors began to circulate that following the release of the redesigned third-gen Prius, Toyota was considering continuing sales of a de-contented second-generation version in order to compete. Ultimately, a href="http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/03/02/toyota-will-sell-second-gen-priuses-alongside-2010-models-in-jap/"Toyota confirmed that plan/a, although the decision was made to offer the old Prius only in Japan. That model, now labeled as the Prius EX, is going on sale in its home market - mostly to fleet customers - starting June 8. br /br /The EX is only available in black, silver or white with a grey interior (the car shown above is a 2009 U.S. model, as Toyota has not released images of the new model). Dual stage airbags and air-conditioning are standard, but luxury items like hub caps and foglights will now be dealer-installed options. The base price of the Prius EX is about $19,700 at current exchange rates (1,890,000 yen, the exact same base price as the Honda Insight in Japan) and Toyota hopes to sell about 2,000 a month. br /br /Toyota vice-president of communications, Irv Miller, explained to Autoblog that the company opted not to offer this model in the U.S. because updated on-board diagnostics regulations for 2010 would require a significant amount of software development, an investment that would likely negate any savings in offering the older model.br /br /[Source: Toyota]pa href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/18/toyota-releases-new-ex-grade-second-gen-prius-in-japan/" rel="bookmark"Continue reading emToyota releases new EX-grade second-gen Prius in Japan/em/a/pp style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/18/toyota-releases-new-ex-grade-second-gen-prius-in-japan/"Toyota releases new EX-grade second-gen Prius in Japan/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.autoblog.com"Autoblog/a on Mon, 18 May 2009 18:29:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./ph6 style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"/h6a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/18/toyota-releases-new-ex-grade-second-gen-prius-in-japan/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/forward/1549409/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.autoblog.com/2009/05/18/toyota-releases-new-ex-grade-second-gen-prius-in-japan/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/apa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Jl7moJMEO2aHy-5Js37t3g4of-E/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Jl7moJMEO2aHy-5Js37t3g4of-E/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Jl7moJMEO2aHy-5Js37t3g4of-E/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/Jl7moJMEO2aHy-5Js37t3g4of-E/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare"a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=lm1uA2WMS-M:BEhuGmLnBT4:wF9xT3WuBAs"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=lm1uA2WMS-M:BEhuGmLnBT4:wF9xT3WuBAs" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?a=lm1uA2WMS-M:BEhuGmLnBT4:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/weblogsinc/autoblog?i=lm1uA2WMS-M:BEhuGmLnBT4:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a/divimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/weblogsinc/autoblog/~4/lm1uA2WMS-M" height="1" width="1"/

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