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Honda Motor Company announced it will launch a new hybrid car low-cost market in Japan, North America and Europe at the beginning of 2009, aiming to overcome the Toyota race car production environment.
Despite the pressures exerted by high oil prices and worries related to climate change, environment-friendly hybrid cars occupy a small niche globally, in part because of high costs, both for consumers and for manufacturers.
Honda is the number two Japanese production of cars with low consumption, both gas and electricity, but Toyota has led the standings due to sales successful Prius model, available only in hybrid version.
SBInvestments analyst firm, Koichi Ogawa, said it’s hard to tell if Honda could threaten the position of Toyota.
“When you say hybrid, think the Prius,” said Ogawa. “Honda is very dependent on the U.S. market, which is reorienting to hybrid cars.”

By combining conventional engine with an electric one, the price of hybrid cars to get to 5,000 dollars over that of a vehicle on the gas, the amount the executive director of Honda, Takeo Fukui, hopes to reduce to one of 2,000 U.S. dollars in the next generation hybrid cars.
Honda Vice President, Koichi Kondo, said the group hopes the price of a hybrid car to be under two million yen (19,290 U.S. dollars).
Honda currently sells only one hybrid car model, a model version of the Civic, which starts at the price of 2.3 million yen (22,125 U.S. dollars).
Honda estimated annual sales of 200,000 units for the new hybrid. Sales at Toyota hybrid cars are estimated at 500,000 units a year by 2010.
Honda stated that the new hybrid model will be five doors and will have five seats. A new production line for electric motors will be added to the Honda factory at south of Tokyo, to double the speed of production and reduce costs.
Honda, which plans to improve the consumption of large cars with diesel engines, is expected to sell over 4.5 million vehicles and 18 million motorcycles worldwide in 2010. Last year, the company sold 3767 million cars and 13.48 million motorcycles.