Toyota announced today that its hybrid sales have surpassed the one million mark after ten years of sales. The feat is a major landmark for Toyota, a pioneer in the development of petrol-electric hybrid cars, and comes as rival carmakers around the world prepare for the launch of their own hybrids.

Sales of Toyota hybrids have reached 345,000 in Japan, with the rest of the world accounting for 702,000 units. This brings its total hybrid sales to 1.047 million units. Of this, 757,600 of these were Prius cars, the clear leader in hybrid cars today.

Toyota is well poised to take advantage of increasing demand for hybrid models caused by rising world oil prices and the concern for global warming. "Toyota is clearly ahead of the pack in hybrids," said industry analyst Tsuyoshi Mochimaru in an interview with the Associated Press. It does, after all, have ten years of feedback to help develop and refine its hybrid system.

The carmaker is now hard at work developing cheaper hybrid systems, and hopes to sell another million of them by the end of the decade. Recently, Toyota’s vice president in charge of powertrain development, Masatami Takimoto, claimed that by 2020 all Toyota models will be hybrids.