Toyota organized a live event named “TOYOTA BARISTA”. A racing car which was brought into the venue ran through a virtual Le Mans circuit and recovered the energy, then the recovered energy was utilized to power cooking appliances. The amount of recovered energy was demonstrated by serving breakfast to 171 people.

Toyota organized a live event named “TOYOTA BARISTA”. A racing car which was brought into the venue ran through a virtual Le Mans circuit and recovered the energy, then the recovered energy was utilized to power cooking appliances. The amount of recovered energy was demonstrated by serving breakfast to 171 people.

Footage of the event was recorded and made public and a website was also set up which explained the system in such a way that the general public could understand it.

Ordinary car fans who saw the news of a racing car powering a mass breakfast gained a deeper knowledge of the technology while enjoying watching the video footage and looking at the website.

Over 180 media articles in 20 countries covered this news. The movie that filmed this event was played over 3 million times on YouTube in 212 countries. Toyota dealers also utilized this film globally to increase showroom traffic.

Social concern toward hybrid technology was raised again through publicity for this campaign. And as a result, the new model of the mass-production hybrid car Prius received 5 times more pre-orders than expected.

Through The 24 hours of Le Mans, Toyota is developing its unique “energy recovery system”. However, this technology was too complicated to explain to the general public.

So Toyota organized a live event named “TOYOTA BARISTA”. A racing car which was brought into the venue ran through a virtual Le Mans circuit and recovered the energy. Over 180 media articles in 20 countries covered this news. The movie that filmed this event was played over 3 million times on YouTube in 212 countries. The new model of the hybrid car Prius received 5 times more pre-orders than expected.

The technology behind the Energy Recovery System was so complex that it was very difficult to explain to the general public. Even though the system of recovering energy under braking and reusing that energy is exciting to some car enthusiasts, for the general public it was just technology which was hard to understand and boring. The idea of the campaign was to excite interest among a wide range of users by re-using the recovered energy in a very familiar form and turning it into an entertainment event.

The 24 hours of Le Mans is the battleground for cutting-edge hybrid technology. In this race, Toyota is developing its unique “energy recovery system”, which has also contributed to the improvement of mass-production cars. However, this technology was a term only for racing geeks and too complicated to explain to the general public.