While Elon Musk, Carlos Ghosn and Jonathan Browning are flapping their gums about how fuel cell vehicles are doomed, Toyota has been taking them to task. For instance Toyota’s Bob Carter, senior vice-president for automotive operations, says he believes his company’s hydrogen fuel cell vehicle could be the next Prius.
According to BDLive, “Bob Carter said in a speech that he believed a hydrogen fuel-cell car it planned to launch next year could eventually be as successful as its pioneering Prius petrol-electric hybrid.
“Mr. Carter said ‘naysayers’ who had spoken out against the technology would be proven wrong and referred to Mr. Musk, founder of electric car maker Tesla Motors, Nissan Motor Co CEO Carlos Ghosn and former Volkswagen executive Jonathan Browning by name.”
Bob Carter went on to say that in California, 10,000 hydrogen fueling station didn’t need to be built in replication of the same number of gasoline stations. He said that 1,500 would be sufficient.
For Nissan, this has been a quick change of heart since in September 2012 the company unveiled its hydrogen fuel cell TeRRA SUV Concept at the Paris Motor Show.
So, between Toyota and Nissan, which is the naysayer and which is the soothsayer? I’ll let you make the call.
Its gonna take several years before Toyota starts to turn a profit on fuel cell cars.
Nissan and Tesla are already losing money on BEVs. And they both have some significant issues with recalls. They don’t have the deep pockets to pioneer fuel cells.
This article has an interesting graph of Toyota hybrid sales:
http://green.autoblog.com/2014/01/15/toyota-sold-million-hybrids-in-last-nine-months-6m-since-1997/
If hydrogen cars were to take the same trajectory, sales won’t begin to take off until 2021, six years after Toyota’s initial FCV launch.