In a World were “pricing” has become the biggest player in determining the sale of any product, Toyota Motor Corp, the biggest seller of hybrid cars, says it has cut the cost of building fuel-cell vehicles by 90% and could sell its first hydrogen vehicle for $50,000 by 2015.
The first model will be a sedan with driving range equal to a gasoline-powered car, “with some extra cost,” Yoshihiko Masuda, Toyota’s managing director for advanced autos, said in an interview. The Japanese carmaker has cut production costs to about one-tenth of earlier estimates that ran as high as $1 million a car and would need to reduce current expenses by about half before starting retail sales, he said. The excessive cost has been among the technology’s greatest hurdles and one reason Honda, General Motors and others lease or loan, rather than sell the few hydrogen-fuel-cell cars they have on the road. “Our target is, we don’t lose money with introduction of the vehicle,” Masuda told Bloomberg. “Production cost should be covered within the price of the vehicle.
Another biggest issue facing the adoption of hydrogen-powered vehicles is that there is little to no infrastructure to speak of across the country. Most hydrogen fuel station are located in California, and even within California, there are but a handful. Hydrogen also currently costs much more than gasoline. That is one reason battery electric vehicles have proven more appealing, at least in the short-term, to automakers and policymakers. But that could change if hydrogen’s hurdles are cleared.
“On a cost basis per car, range and performance, fuel-cell vehicles can have an advantage over battery vehicles,” said Jay Whitacre, a professor of materials science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “On a system basis, infrastructure, battery cars win.”
Toyota, Honda, General Motors, Daimler and Hyundai are among the automakers who hope to have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the road by 2015.
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