If Toyota isn’t planning ahead, I don’t know who is: the famous Japanese automaker, who is also the biggest seller of hybrid vehicles in the world, has recently announced that it wants to provide the markets with thousands of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles until 2020.
The announcement was made yesterday at the Geneva Motor show, while presenting its hydrogen-powered FCV-R concept car.
The company isn’t sitting with its hands folded, so to speak: concrete measures in this sense involve a continuous sell of the plug-in version of its Prius hybrid and this year’s battery-powered RAV4 and Scion iQ models, while removing price and technical issues that make a potential customer hesitate.
However, these hindrances cannot account for the yet undeveloped taste of drivers for fuel-cell cars: no matter how plentiful and efficient hydrogen is, it cannot compensate for the high cost of manufacturing and the lack of recharging stations.
In any case, let’s remain optimistic: this is one of those cases when the original idea is great, but it just needs a little polishing. The important thing is that the technology is there – someone will eventually figure out how to improve it!
[via Bloomberg]
