(Tue 12 Jan 10)

Toyota's stand at the Detroit Show features a new concept which is intended to demonstrate the company's aim of increasing the choice available to potential hybrid customers.

The FT-CH is only an inch narrower than the Prius, but it's about two feet shorter (making it about the size of a Yaris, and justifying the fact that the "C" in its title stands for "compact"). This is partly to make it a more obvious choice for city driving, but it also means that a production version would be lighter - and therefore even more economical - than a Prius, as well as being considerably cheaper.

The concept was designed at Toyota's European Design and Development centre in Nice, and is designed to appeal to the "8-bit generation" - people, in other words, who enjoy or are nostalgic about the music and art devised for home video games in the early 1980s.

No mention has been made of the FT-CH or anything much like it going into production, but Toyota is restating its intention to sell a million hybrids globally each year in the not too distant future, the majority of them finding homes in North America.

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