highlights

Tokyo auto show spurned as firms eye China

(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-10-21 17:08

Toyota Motor Corp President Akio Toyoda speaks during the unveiling of the Lexus LF-A super sports car at the 41st Tokyo Motor Show in Chiba, east of Tokyo October 21, 2009. [Agencies]

Chief Executive Akio Toyoda, riding out on a Segway-like stand-and-ride motorized scooter, showed off an in-the-works two-seater Lexus luxury hybrid called LF-Ch.

To stress that Toyota was also bullish about electric vehicles, he showed the short-range commuter FT-EV II.

"Some say that hybrid vehicles and electric vehicles are completely different," he told reporters. "But Toyota hybrids can also run as electric vehicles. They are already half electric-vehicles."

Mamoru Katou, auto analyst with Tokai Tokyo Research, said Japanese automakers were vying to lead in green technology, even if some of the models were too experimental to be sold anytime soon.

"Ecology is what you push these days," he said in a telephone interview. "They are all trying to show where we are headed in the future."

Honda Chief Executive Takanobu Ito stressed the show is an opportunity to demonstrate the strengths of the Japanese in environmental technology, such as Honda's Clarity fuel-cell vehicle, which runs on superclean energy produced when hydrogen combines with oxygen in the air to produce water.

In addition to the Insight hybrid, which went on sale earlier this year, Honda is showing a near-commercial version of another hybrid-only model, the sporty CR-Z. It is going on sale in February in Japan, and later in the US and Europe.

But when asked about the absence of rivals from abroad, Ito could only say, "It feels lonely."