Toyota will start assembling hybrid Camrys in Australia in 2010 and plans to be manufacturing 10,000 of them per year. This would make Australia just the fourth country in the world to be mass-producing petrol-hybrid cars.

"We decided to build the Camry hybrid in Australia because Australians are keenly aware of environmental issues including global warming," said Toyota President, Katsuaki Watanabe, at a conference in Nagoya. Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who was also at the conference, said that Toyota would get $35 million in grants from the $500 million Green Car Innovation Fun towards the project.

The car will be assembled at Toyota’s Altona factory in Melbourne which currently builds about 150,000 cars a year – two-thirds of them for export to the Middle East.

Based on US pricing, the hybrid Camry is likely to cost about $32,500 in Australia – and a buyer would have to drive about 60,000 kilometres to recover the additional cost compared to the petrol version at current petrol prices.

In a separate announcement, Toyota has said that it has developed a fuel-cell hybrid similar to the petrol hybrid Prius. The fuel-cell version can travel 800 kilometres on a single refueling, uses no fossil fuels and emits no carbon dioxide. It will be demonstrated at the upcoming G8 conference in Hokkaido next month.

American version of the Camry hybrid

General Motors Corp has announced plans for a significant production run of its plug-in Chevy Volt.

Jon Lauckner, GM’s Vice president for Global Program Management said that the Company hopes to start production in 2010. "We’re talking about large numbers — in the tens of thousands. It’s not a niche market" he said. He acknowledged that the current high cost of batteries was a problem but said that GM expected prices to fall as production ramps up.

Plug-ins, such as the Volt, are designed for short trips powered entirely by an electric motor with a battery charged from an ordinary domestic power point. In the case of the Volt, a petrol engine will take over when the battery runs down after about 65 kilometres.

Meanwhile, the University of Technology, Sydney, has developed the first Australian plug-in. The vehicle is a converted Toyota Prius which can achieve 50 kilometres on a purely electric motor before the standard Prius hybrid kicks in.

The UTS vehicle haso has the ability to return surplus power to the grid – and to make toast! It is expected to make a its first major road trial, from Sydney to Melbourne, in March.