Hyundai Plans To Enter Hydrogen Fuel Cell Market in 2012

Most of the media buzz in the past few months has been about electric cars and hybrids. Yes, they offer plenty of advantages over petrol cars, but so do hydrogen cars. Hydrogen’s only emission is water, if it is made from a non-polluting renewable resource. So where are the hydrogen cars?

Well, they are coming, and sooner than you might have thought. Hyundai has announced that starting in 2012, it will sell 500 hydrogen cars, ramping up production annually after that. That beats most of its competitors to the finish line. Is it too good to be true?

GM and Honda have been experimenting with hydrogen cars for quite some time, and both have sizable fleets on the roads testing them out, either through lease programs or paid car testers. Hyundai however plans to sell the first series production hydrogen car in just two years time, and like GM and Honda, it will likely lease the first 500 cars. By 2015 however, Hyundai wants to produce (and I assume, sell) 10,000 hydrogen cars annually.

There just aren’t a lot of facts going around right now, and there are plenty of problems to contend with… namely the lack of hydrogen infrastructure (though there are companies working on that). Another problem is cost; hydrogen technology isn’t cheap, though Hyundai plans to beat Toyota’s price of $50,000. How much would you pay for a hydrogen car, and do you believe we will really see them in the coming years, rather than decades?

Source: Gas2.0