Toyota’s Satoshi Ogiso, who is known as ‘the grandfather of the Prius’ hybrid revealed his regret in a recent interview in Japan regarding the late arrival of the Fuel Cell prototypes of the company that is scheduled to be launched in 2015. He said that if these FCV prototypes could be produced earlier it would have been really better and that the company took a long time.
Toyota is the pioneer of green cars, when hybrids are concerned. At a time when people disbelieved and jeered at the hybrid concept, Toyota was the only company that sternly stuck to its hybrid and lost tons of money to do so. After years of struggle, the Japanese giant came victorious with its Prius all over the world and made other car makers follow its suite.
The father of the global hybrid segment though now is kind of repenting for not being the first to come up with the Fuel Cell technology as well. The company is still sticking to the hybrids for more technological breakthroughs to happen but is also saying that the Hydrogen powered Fuel Cell vehicles are the ultimate winners when it comes to the immediate future planning in regards to performance, efficiency and cost effectiveness.
Toyota has already showcased its concept model of the FCV (Fuel Cell Vehicle) at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show and wowed the audience great deal. The dazzling blue colored sedan that looked like a horizontally lying water droplet, looked every bit of a future ready car. Powered by the hydrogen fuel cell the Toyota FCV concept promised to give optimum performance and emit nothing other than pure water vapor into the atmosphere. Toyota has also revealed earlier that this FCV sedan will have a range of 500 kilometers on a full tank and will take just a few minutes time to refuel its tank fully. Thus, this is the ultimate green car with the power of both performance and convenience.
One may say, if Toyota has done so much, then why is it displeased with its achievements? The answer is its rivals. Toyota’s homegrown rival Honda Motor also has a strong hydrogen powered contender coming soon to compete with the Toyota FCV. Honda has also announced that its Fuel Cell car will come in the year 2015. On the other hand, the South Korean car major, Hyundai has already gone ahead and officially unveiled its Fuel Cell Tucson, which will be offered for sale from February, 2014. Though the Hydrogen powered Tucson will be lease only models now, a lot of updates are expected to happen by the year 2015. Thus, Toyota is really upset about not coming with a Fuel Cell car first.
However, the Technical Center Principle Engineer at Toyta, Matt McClory said that Toyota or any other company could not have come up with the Fuel Cell cars any earlier as the sustainable and the economical nature of the technology were recently realized.
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I am into the auto blogs field for quite a long time. Living my passion of reviewing cars.
Tagged: Toyota Cars India, Toyota India
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