Toyota is struggling to keep up with booming demand for hybrid vehicles because it is unable to make enough batteries that are key components of the popular “green” cars, a senior executive said Monday.
The battery crunch is likely to continue for the rest of the year, since new lines cannot be added to increase production until 2009, said Takeshi Uchiyamada, executive vice president of Toyota Motor, who oversees production at the leading Japanese automaker.
“Hybrids are selling so well we are doing all we can to increase production,” he said. “We need new lines.”
He was speaking as a hybrid rival and the second-biggest Japanese automaker, Honda Motor, began production of its newest fuel-cell car.
Honda’s FCX Clarity, a sporty-looking sedan, came off the production line Monday in Tochigi, north of Tokyo. The assembly line is the first at Honda to be dedicated to building fuel-cell vehicles.
Uchiyamada said battery production was critical in determining how many hybrid vehicles Toyota could produce.
Hybrids, including Toyota’s hybrid top-seller, Prius, offer better mileage than comparable regular cars by switching between a gas engine and an electric motor.
Toyota leads the world’s automakers in hybrids sold at about 1.5 million vehicles since coming out with the first mass-produced hybrid, Prius, about a decade ago.
The Prius and other hybrids are soaring in popularity around the world amid surging gasoline prices, and other automakers are also rushing to produce hybrids. Hybrids also have a green image because compared with conventionally powered vehicles they reduce emissions linked to global warming.
But Uchiyamada, who is leading a broad effort at Toyota to make auto production greener, acknowledged that such efforts had not yet extended to battery production because of the problems in keeping up with demand.
“That has to settle down first,” said Uchiyamada, an engineer who played a key role in the development of the Prius.
Toyota said last week that its hybrid-battery joint venture with Matsushita Electric Industrial would begin producing next-generation lithium-ion batteries in 2009 and move into full-scale production in 2010.
Toyota also said it would establish a battery research department later this month to develop an innovative battery that could outperform the lithium-ion battery.
Toyota has also announced its third plant in Japan for producing the nickel-metal hydride batteries now used in the Prius and other hybrid models on sale now.
Lithium-ion batteries, now common in laptops, produce more power and are smaller than nickel-metal hydride batteries. Toyota has said lithium-ion batteries will be used in Toyota plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a home electrical outlet.
Other automakers are speeding hybrid production. Honda has said it will increase hybrid sales to 500,000 a year sometime after 2010. Honda also will introduce a new hybrid-only model, its fourth, next year.
Nissan Motor, which has not yet developed its own hybrid for commerce, said it would do so by 2010. Nissan said its joint venture with NEC would start mass-producing lithium-ion batteries in 2009 at a plant in Japan.
Toyota plans to sell one million hybrid vehicles a year sometime after 2010.
Honda said the FCX Clarity would be sold through a newly established fuel-cell vehicle dealership network in the United States starting in July. In Japan, sales are scheduled to start this autumn.
“Fuel-cell vehicles, which don’t use fossil fuels and don’t produce carbon dioxide, are necessary for the environment,” Honda’s chief executive, Takeo Fukui, said Monday. “We would like to make them more popular.”
Fuel-cell vehicles are widely considered the longer-term alternative to today’s conventional cars because they run on an inexhaustible and cheaper source of fuel, hydrogen, produce no harmful tail-pipe emissions and do not compromise driving performance.
The FCX Clarity, which uses a lithium-ion battery, can go 620 kilometers, or about 385 miles, on a single fueling as measured by the Japanese fuel-efficiency test method, and has a top speed of 160 kilometers per hour, or 100 miles per hour.
