Toyota Motor Corp. will start leasing fuel-cell cars to four central government bodies on Dec. 2, becoming the world's first automaker to launch a fuel-cell vehicle in any market.
The four customers are the Cabinet Secretariat, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry, and the Environment Ministry. Each will lease one Toyota FCHV (Fuel-Cell Hybrid Vehicle) for 30 months, a Toyota spokesman said.
Each agency will be charged 1.2 million yen per month.
The Toyota FCHV has become the first market-ready fuel-cell vehicle to be certified by the transport ministry, the company said.
In July, Japan's largest automaker announced it would market around 20 fuel-cell cars in Japan and the United States for a one-year period starting around the end of this year.
The four cars will be used by the ministries in the Tokyo metropolitan area, where hydrogen stations and other necessary infrastructure for fuel-cell vehicles will be soon installed, the automaker said.
The 4.7-meter car has a maximum speed of 155 kph and can carry five people.
Fuel-cell cars are powered by electricity that is generated from a chemical reaction between hydrogen, supplied by an onboard tank, and oxygen taken from the air.
Since water is the only byproduct of the hydrogen-oxygen reaction, the cars are quiet and do not generate pollution.
But a full-fledged switch to fuel-cell cars on a commercial basis will require the costly establishment of a broad network of hydrogen filling stations on the same level as gasoline stations.
Toyota and subsidiary Hino Motors Ltd. are also developing a fuel-cell bus called the FCHV-BUS2. In September, they obtained certification from the transport ministry to carry out testing on public roads.