Lexus: The hybrid debate blog

If hybrids are ever to become mainstream vehicles, they need to reach a "tipping point," a moment of transition from niche interest to mass appeal. But for now their purchase price is still a disincentive to most drivers of conventional, petrol-engined cars. And there are many technological barriers to overcome before that price becomes truly competitive.

You’d think car manufacturers would be keen to agree on certain standards for the design of hybrid power trains. After all, this kind of collaboration has led to major advances, cost-reductions and accelerated growth in other industries. Consider mobile phone and Internet standards, for example. Or Bluetooth, the radio technology used to network personal electronic devices, which was developed by a consortium including Ericsson, IBM, Intel and Nokia.

Equally, there are many examples of parallel standards forcing their developers to spend huge war chests. Perhaps the best known case studies here are Betamax and VHS, which competed for supremacy of the home video cassette market in the late 1970s. But just as serious is the present rivalry between the two leading high-definition standards for digital video discs (DVDs): Blue-Ray by Sony and HD-DVD by Toshiba and NEC. These kinds of "format wars2 invariably result in extra costs being passed onto consumers.

In the context of a hybrid car, the ability to choose, say, your battery supplier independently of your body-shell supplier, could drive down costs and increase consumer interest significantly (especially if plug-in hybrid vehicles become more widely available). However, the world’s major car manufacturers have traditionally been very secretive, and they don’t show signs of sharing breakthroughs or opening up their "platforms" to rivals any time soon. In the medium-term future, we can be sure that, as hybrid cars grow in number, they’ll grow in variety too.

The one area where standardisation will probably be necessary is in battery chemistry, since, to put a fleet of hybrid cars on the road in even a small country such as the UK, you’d need a massive, highly efficient supply chain for technologies such as lithium-ion.