Toyota: 'We will sell more than 200,000 hydrogen powered vehicles by 2030'
Japanese automaker remains bullish on H2 transport despite only selling 3,900 units last year
Japanese automaker Toyota believes it will sell more than 200,000 hydrogen-powered vehicles by 2030, despite selling a little over 3,900 vehicles last year.
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“This may be a strange way of putting it, but 200,000 is not a big number,” chief technology officer Hiroki Nakajima told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. “We believe this number and more can be achieved.”
The company will shift focus from selling the Toyota Mirai in California, where only 2,904 were sold units in 2022 — a 20% drop on the year before — to pushing both hydrogen-powered trucks and cars in Europe and China, executives said.
Nakajima said that demand for hydrogen vehicles is higher in Europe and China, but that does not seem to be the case right now.
SNE reports that only 315 fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) were sold in Europe between January and May this year, compared to 348 over the same five months in 2022 —a 9.5% year-on-year fall.
China is the only country where hydrogen vehicle sales are increasing, according to SNE, saying that volumes grew from 703 in the first five months of 2022, to 1,857 in the same period this year — a 164.2% increase, compared to a global sales fall of 12.4%.
Nakajima also said that Toyota would look to strengthen ties with other automakers. In May, the company agreed to co-operate on hydrogen technology with Germany’s Daimler Truck, while merging Daimler’s Japanese unit Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Toyota’s Hino Motors subsidiary.