Bob, you cause me to remember my last meeting with Dave Hermance, who was plainly salivating at the prospect of an LS 600h. It is a substantial engineering achievement in many ways, including the NVH aspects you mentioned. It will appeal to a very small market segment, yet each one sold is going to net a lot of money for Toyota.

I prefer to suppose that Toyota has gone in this direction to further refine the HSD, on small production runs.

Putting HSD into high-volume vehicles like vans and pickups appears to await bulletproof Li HV batteries available at the right price. That, I suppose, will be the second hybrid revolution, after the sedans already done by Honda and Toyota. The 'performance hybrid sedans' are just a space-filler while we continue waiting.

Good that there are Aveos, Focus, Fit, Matrix etc. available to those who want small sedans. But that is a different market segment, and it makes little sense to confuse it with the big fancy ones.

DAS