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Toyota Sees All-Hybrid World, Ford Pushes Hydrogen Power

By Joe Benton
ConsumerAffairs.com

July 11, 2007

Toyota Motor Co. is counting on a fuel-efficient and green image in their cars and trucks as gasoline costs continue to rise.

"Eventually, everything will be a hybrid," according to Jim Press, president of Toyota Motor North America.

Hybrids are driving Toyota's growth in the U.S. and the automaker would benefit more than any other company from growing consumer acceptance of cars.

Toyota sells three out of every five hybrids sold in the U.S. and most of those sales are of the Prius. So far in 2007 hybrids have accounted for just 2.3 percent of all cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. but demand for the gas-electric cars has grown by 60 percent.

Toyota executives are planning to sell roughly 175,000 Prius hybrids in the U.S. this year and that is up from 109,000 in 2006.

Press touted the Prius as the first of a new generation of cars. "It's going to be like the Model T when you look back." he said.

Hydrogen Powered Ford Bus

While Toyota is the acknowledged leader in hybrid sales with its new-age version of the low-cost Model T that helped launch the Ford Motor Co. 80 years ago, Ford is now pushing hydrogen as the fuel for the future.

Ford points to its 12-passenger parking lot shuttle bus powered by a 6.8-liter internal combustion hydrogen engine which is in experimental use at airports across the country as a relatively quick-and-easy answer to foreign oil dependence and automotive greenhouse gas emissions.

"We really believe this technology is ready to be evaluated at the consumer level," John Lapetz, the company's program manager for the buses, told reporters on Tuesday at an event staged to tout Ford's future vehicles.

About 30 E-450 Hydrogen shuttle buses are in service at airports in the U.S. and Canada.

Ford engineers monitor the hydrogen-powered buses electronically in real time. The vehicles are powered by a modified gasoline engine and produce near-zero emissions. The vans get up to 13 percent better fuel economy than a gasoline alternative.

Ford executives said the company has the ability to bring internal combustion hydrogen technology to the market in cars within five years but only if fuel storage limitations can be solved and public concerns allayed.

The driving public is still wary of hydrogen technology and there is no network of hydrogen filling stations.

"The technology is there at a sufficient level, in the three-to-five year window, if all things were perfect, we could reasonably think this is a solution we could draw on," Ford’s Lapetz said.

The Ford hydrogen buses are expensive, costing $250,000 each. The buses cost far more than the roughly $70,000 Ford charges for shuttles powered by gas engines.

Their range is limited to not much more than 200 miles because of fuel storage technology.

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