Toyota’s President Katsuaki Watanabe revealed that the Japanese automaker is planning to develop a small electric car for sale early in the next decade. Thus the competition between General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. to produce a rechargeable car is to be updated. Therefore Toyota will speed up delivery of its plug-in hybrid from 2010 to the end of 2009, while the Chevy Volt is due in showrooms in late 2010.

Vice Chairman Bob Lutz said Toyota's plug-in hybrid has a much shorter electric range than the Chevrolet Volt and must use gasoline to continue working.

The latter carries its own gasoline engine so that it can recharge the batteries when they are over.

Toyota Prius will travel about 40 miles in city traffic for about 80 cents worth of electricity. It will cost just 4 dollars a week.

The Tallahassee owner Fran Sullivan-Fahs was the one behind the design of this car.

General Motors Vice Chairman Bob Lutz told reporters this week that its company doesn’t consider itself to be at competition with Toyota.

“It’s wonderful that Toyota is working on this,” Lutz said, according to the Associated Press. “If they have test fleets out next year, that’s great. But it’s not the same thing as a Chevy Volt, which is not a plug-in hybrid.”

GM said the prize of the Volt will be somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000. The current Prius, which can't be plugged in for recharging but runs on both gas and electric power, has a base price of $21,500.