Publication date: 20-October-2003 
Source: Agence France-Presse

Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. Ltd. became the world's first auto makers last year to begin the lease of fuel-cell cars powered by electricity generated from oxygen and pressurized hydrogen gas.

The car has a range of up to 300 kilometers (185 miles) on one tank of hydrogen and Toyota leased 10 such cars to the Japanese government and domestic energy firms with two for the University of California.

The monthly lease costs the Japanese government 1.2 million yendollars) and Toyota senior managing director Masatami Takimoto said the company will have to clear difficult hurdles before being able to sell fuel-cell cars to regular consumers.

"Customers are not stupid. They won't buy just because a car is fuel-cell powered," Takimoto said, adding the current production cost of a fuel-cell car is more than 100 million yen.

"The price is everything. We need to reduce our production cost," he said.

Apart from high production cost, a lack of infrastructure for supplying hydrogen and a lack of keen social awareness about alternative energy sources means the days when fuel-cell cars rule the roads are still far off.

"We must satisfy these three conditions in order to make fuel-cell cars widely available," Takimoto said.

"We have many issues to be solved. Car makers alone cannot solve them. It will take decades or longer" until the wider commercial use of fuel-cell cars, he said.

Taiyou Kawai, general manager of Toyota's fuel cell research and development department, told AFP last December there were only four hydrogen filling stations in Japan, with plans to build another six.

Earlier this month, Larry Burns, vice president of research and development, and planning at General Motors Corp. said GM aimed to make money on selling environmentally-friendly fuel-cell vehicles from 2010.

Fuel-cell vehicles generate no harmful emissions and differ from other hybrid vehicles which combine conventional internal combustion engines with electric motors.