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Jim Press is Toyota Motor Corp.'s executive vice president of sales. Anyone who saw him in action here this week at the North American International Auto Show knows that he deserves the title. The man doesn't miss a trick.

Take the matter of Toyota's proposed full-size pickup truck, the FTX. Press introduced it to the media here Sunday as the ultimate American pickup fighter.

That means the FTX will roll into the U.S. market in the winter of 2006 with a big V-8 engine, huge cargo bed, and the ability to haul and tow anything that can be hauled or towed by a Chevrolet Silverado, Ford-F Series or Dodge Ram pickup truck.

That isn't what environmentalists enjoy hearing from a car company that promotes itself as the greenest of the green -- especially not from one that received the 2004 "National Car of the Year Award" for its second-generation, gas-electric, fuel-efficient, clean-burning Prius Hybrid sedan.

But the Prius is a niche car in a North American automotive market filled with niches, including exceptionally lucrative foxholes for a variety of pickup trucks. Toyota talks green; but it also likes to put as many U.S. greenbacks as possible into its corporate pockets.

It needs a bigger and better pickup than its current Tundra to help haul in that loot. It's business; but it tends to corrupt the purity of a true-green environmental image.

Press obviously was aware of that contradiction Sunday when he introduced the FTX, which he strategically saved for the last part of Toyota's news conference.

With ruffles and flourish, Press told the international audience of journalists that Toyota was prepared to install a gas-electric hybrid power system in the FTX.

The journalists gasped. There was a murmur of approval. Press seized the moment.

"Not today," said Press. "Not tomorrow," he said. "But to give you an idea of what it will look like . . . ." There was a dramatic pause. Press reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a chrome-plated, script logo that read, "Hybrid." He stuck that magnetic logo on the truck's rear pillar, placing it above the FTX badge -- just as his news conference ended and photographers from around the world began taking pictures of the "Hybrid FTX."

Press stood on the stage next to the truck, thus assuring that no journalist could photograph him without also shooting the "Hybrid FTX."

I asked press when the hybrid version of the FTX would go on sale. He smiled. He demurred. He said "2008 . . . possibly. Our people are working on it."

I thought Toyota would remove the "Hybrid" logo from the FTX when the truck was moved to the main display floor in Cobo Hall here. I was wrong.

The metallic blue "Hybrid FTX" pickup was sitting there in all of its fictional glory when Jeffrey W. Runge, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, arrived Tuesday for a lengthy tour of the Detroit show.

(Runge said he would have attended the Washington auto show, which ran Dec. 26 through Jan. 4, but: "The problem with that show is that it falls right in the middle of Christmas, when [official] Washington empties out," Runge said.)

Press guided Runge to Toyota's big-truck market warrior, extolling its potential environmental virtues as a gas-electric hybrid. Runge listened politely, attentively. But his questions to Press mostly concerned the FTX's rollover potential and the truck's compatibility with smaller vehicles on the road.

I found this amusing, and asked a Runge aide if the administrator already knew that the "Hybrid" label on the FTX was, for the moment and the foreseeable future, pure marketing hype.

The aide smiled and said of his boss: "He's pretty sharp. He sees a lot of things people think he doesn't see."

I asked another Toyota executive why the company had not removed the "Hybrid" logo from the FTX before Runge's arrival. "We just wanted to show what the possibilities were," the Toyota executive said.

None of this is to say that Toyota is pulling the wool over the eyes of the public or official Washington on the issue of hybrids. In addition to its award-winning Prius, the company has plans to introduce a gas-electric, midsize Highlander SUV hybrid in 2006 and a luxury Lexus RX 400h hybrid the same year.

All major car companies will offer hybrid cars and trucks by 2007. Among those will be Ford Motor Co.'s gas-electric hybrid Ford Escape compact SUV, now scheduled to go on sale this summer.

But the "Hybrid FTX" sales pitch made to Runge and other high-level Washington visitors to this show --which opens to the public Saturday, Jan. 10--indicates the political value that the entire auto industry is attaching to hybrid technology.

The car companies think they have a winner with the gas-electric vehicle. But they will have to persuade more than Washington to make that victory a reality. Their toughest customers will be the thousands of rank-and-file consumers walking through the doors of auto shows here, across America, and around the globe.