This Just In: Hyundai Still Planning Retail Fuel Cell Vehicle for 2012
By John O'Dell October 31, 2008We just can't help but be amazed, over and over again, at how the Web has no memory. Everything that happens now is new and never happened before.
We bring this up because there's been a flurry of postings about Hyundai's top executive remarking the other day that the company plans to begin selling a fuel-cell electric car in 2012.
That sounded familiar so we went back through the archives and there, on March 25, 2008, was an item in Green Car Advisor
titled "Hyundai Wants Piece of Expanding Hybrid Market."
Hyundai has been working on fuel cell vehicles for years and thinks they can go commercial as early as 2012.
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We don't mean to toot our own horn, others had the same report back then. In fact, Hyundai had said as early as 2006 that it wanted to do a commercial fuel cell vehicle in 2012. But our sense of what ought to be headline and what ought to be footnote gets ruffled when we see the same headlines being recycled as fresh news.
Reminds us of the old Saturday Night Live skit in which comedian Chevy Chase, playing the show's news anchor, would solemnly announce week after week in tones usually reserved for outbreaks of war or pestilence that: "This breaking new just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead."
In the real world, the Spanish dictator died in 1975, SNL's first year on the air, after a lingering illness. Chase was riffing on network news programs' efforts to keep the story going during Franco's illness by regularly reporting that he hadn't died yet. Chase kept the gag alive on SNL for nearly two years after Franco's death.
Our take on Hyundai Chairman Mong-Koo Chung's comments is that the news should have been "Wow, even in the midst of a global economic slump that threatens to last for years, Hyundai still sees possibilities in fuel cell vehicles and is willing to continue spending money developing them."
That, we think, is the real story.
"The fuel cell isn't the replacement for the internal combustion engine," said Hyundai spokesman Jim Trainor, "it is an alternative that can give eco-conscious drivers a green, zero-emission option."
Reducing fuel cell costs is the driving reason behind the company's ongoing development effort, he said, adding that company officials believe the market will be ready for a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle by 2012.
Roy Kim, a spokesman for the California Fuel Cell Partnership says all nine automakers that belong to the research group "all pretty much feel the same way. Everyone is looking at the 2012-2015 timeframe for higher volumes of fuel cell vehicles."
Kim said he's seen no sign that, even as other product development programs are being slashed as automakers try to cope with declining sales, that anyone is substantially cutting back on fuel cell development efforts.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
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