According to the following Reuters article which was published on May 26th, the Financial Times Deutschland reported that Toyota and Daimler might establish a partnership involving their hydrogen fuel cell vehicle programs.
Toyota started working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in 1992. And Daimler has been working on the technology since 1994.
I think it is safe to say that each company is probably ahead of the other in certain areas of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle technology. Therefore, a partnership that includes sharing technologies could allow the companies to bring affordable hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to market sooner than if each company were only working on their own.
Furthermore, here are a couple of comments made by Toyota (which invests nearly $1 million PER HOUR in R&D) and Daimler executives over the past year and a half regarding the cost of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles:
Justin Ward, advanced powertrain program manager at the Toyota Technical Center, told Ward’s Auto (subscription required for the article) last July that:
“We have some confidence the vehicle released around 2015 is going to have costs that are going to be shocking for most of the people in the industry. They are going to be very surprised we were able to achieve such an impressive cost reduction.”
Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche discussed this issue in general terms in the following excerpt from a Spiegel (Germany) article that was published in March 2009:
“But the question remains: When will hydrogen-fueled cars be mass-produced and affordable? Zetsche says that annual production of the new vehicles would have to reach 100,000 and that by around 2015, the vehicle prices could match those of conventional cars.”
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