Motor Trend reports that Toyota's famous Prius hybrid could become its own brand sometime in the next decade. The story quotes an Automotive News interview with Toyota R&D executive vice president Kazuo Okamoto. Though Okamoto would not confirm anything, he did say that he thinks "it is a reasonable direction."

Alternatively, the Prius lineup could be expanded to include other body styles such as a sedan or wagon without splintering it away from the Toyota brand, the report said. It's pretty clear that one way or another, Toyota wants to maximize the publicity and cachet surrounding the Prius badge.

I'm of two minds about this. On one hand, it could raise brand awareness even further and bring in many more customers. On the other hand, Toyota could go too far and end up like GM's Oldsmobile, which affixed the name "Cutlass" to almost 40 different models at one point. That reduced its meaning to zero.

Honda and Mazda have had the opposite problem, in taking perfectly good names such as "Legend," "Integra," and "Miata" and dropping them in lieu of meaningless letters and number designations such as "RL" and "MX-5." Their hope was that people would learn to associate the cars with the company name (e.g Acura, Mazda) instead of the specific model names. It's a complicated business, this marketing stuff.