Already the industry leader in clean, fuel-efficient vehicles, Toyota is planning on bringing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to market in 2015.
Unlike some EVs limited to 100 miles of travel on a charge, Toyota’s fuel cell cars would have a driving range similar to gas-powered vehicles currently on the market. This could make them more attractive to customers still looking for an automobile they can take on long trips. A successful launch of fuel cell automobiles is then mostly dependent on one factor: the availability of hydrogen filling stations.
Toyota will be keeping distribution mostly centered around California – which has plans to install 68 refueling stations by 2015 – but Toyota plans to build and sell a substantial number of fuel cell powered vehicles to retail and commercial customers, probably in hopes to push for more.
“Volume will be what the infrastructure can hold,” said Justin Ward from the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor.
Toyota was the first automaker to successfully mass produce hybrid cars, introducing the gas-sipping Prius in 1997. Other manufacturers have been playing catch-up ever since, a feat Toyota is looking to replicate with this foray into fuel cell vehicles. Most manufacturers are not yet ready to enter the fuel cell automotive market, seeing the technology as not quite ready for primetime. Volkswagon doesn’t see it happening for them until around 2020. Honda already has a fuel cell vehicle, the FCX Clarity, on sale in limited markets and numbers here in the U.S., but it will be leasing just 200 such cars over the next three years at $600 a month.
[via Detroit Free Press]
Image Credit: Toyota