As the German government proposed a new funding scheme to push electric vehicles includeing FCEV on the road, we gathered desktop research data on the current prices of FCEV around the world. Please let us know if you found cheaper prices and where and what your countries offer as incentive as the table do not include EU, national and regional rebates, incentives and tax breaks.
Hyundai has been the first carmaker to start mass production of FCEV in 2014 with the fuel cell version of its ix35 model, this car is currently available in 11 European States at €55.000+VAT. For 2017 is expected a new generation, chipper and more performant with an expected production of 10.000 units per year. In Norway this car is now getting cheaper than the same model in the diesel versio. Toyota started producing the Mirai, its hydrogen fuel cell car, in 2015 and is increasing its production year per year. In Europe, Toyota chose to intorduce the car only in three Memebr States in a first time (United Kingdom, Denmark and Germany) with a progressive extension from 2017. Honda Clarity is the last member of the fuel cell family. The new Clarity will be produced in limited volumes in the early stage. The company will start by leasing vehicles and expects to move to retail sales with increased market volumes and the growing of hydrogen refuelling station network. In Europe the Clarity fuel cell will be available in limited numbers through the HyFIVE project in UK and Denmark from September 2016.
In most of the EU Member States, FCEV are exempt from circulation and registration tax. Furthermore in some States such as France, Ireland and very soon Germany, governments provide financial incentives; the German government recently announced their intetention to fund half of a €4,000 rebate for a purely electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybrid, with the other half paid for by the car companies. Subsidies are expected to run until 2019 at the latest or till the 1 bln funding is reached covering also public fleets and BEV infrastructure (100 mln). The programme aims to help Germany approach its goal of putting 1 million electric cars on the road by 2020 (up from around 50,000 now out of Germany’s 45 million cars).
And what about new FCEV models? Volkswagen group on January 2016 presented their 5th generation of fuel cell technology. the Audi H-Tron will go into production in 2017. Ford Motor, which has put 1.3 million test miles on a fleet of 300 fuel cell vehicles over the last several years, recently cut a deal with Daimler, Renault and Nissan to develop a joint fuel cell technology that all four companies would share. General Motors has similarly tested its HydroGen4 car. GM partnered with Honda to co-develop new automotive fuel cell applications, but has so far not announced plans to retail a vehicle using the technology. Daimler announced that ………