An "insider" at LLN has it on good authority that the oft-rumored Prius brand is, in their words, "a go." According to their source, the goal of the spin-off is to create cheaper hybrid models that would command a marginal premium over their standard, hybrid-free counterparts.

This isn't the first time we've heard that Toyota might spin off the Prius as a separate brand much like Scion. But we now have the most concrete news about the automaker's plans we've seen yet.

In the future, we'll eat all our meals from toothpaste tubes, everyone will be beautiful and healthy, and we won't need cars, what with the proliferation of nuclear-powered jet packs. Prediction is such thorny business, though Toyota isn't making such a fantastical claim by suggesting that each of its vehicles will have a hybrid option available by 2020. Wired's blog seems to agree that by 2020, hybrids will have proliferated like rabbits, and we'll be awash in electron propulsion systems.