Toyota Motor Corp., the biggest seller of hybrid cars, said it has cut the cost of making fuel-cell vehicles by about 90 percent since the mid-2000s and may be able to price its first retail hydrogen model at about $50,000.
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.
"Our target is, we don't lose money with introduction of the vehicle," Masuda said in Torrance, California, where Toyota's U.S. sales unit is based. "Production cost should be covered within the price of the vehicle."
Hydrogen cars that don't sell at a loss may boost support for the technology, which has lagged behind electric cars in U.S. research funding amid criticism it's too expensive. Toyota, General Motors Co., Honda Motor Co., Daimler AG and Hyundai Motor Co. have all said they will be ready to sell fuel-cell vehicles to retail customers by about 2015.
Toyota plans to sell an "affordable" model in the U.S. and elsewhere, the Toyota City, Japan-based company has said, without providing details. Were the carmaker to set a U.S. price at about $50,000, the market for the vehicles would be "small, but with some support," Masuda said, without elaborating.
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