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

It’s not just American cars that are gas guzzlers. The average Australian car now uses about 8.1 litres of petrol for every 100 kilometres traveled. This is close to the American average of 8.6 litres per 100 kilometres but far worse than Europe at 5.5 litres or Japan at 5.1 litres per 100 kilometres.

When light commercial and all-terrain vehicles are included, Australian vehicles average 11.4 litres per 100 kilometres. Despite all of the technical improvements of the last 40 years, this is the same average fuel consumption as was being achieved by Australian vehicles in the 1960s. All of the improvements in engine performance have gone into providing  bigger cars with more comforts like air conditioning, power steering and power windows and into allowing vehicles to travel at higher speeds on the improved roads.

As well as driving vehicles which consume more fuel, Australians drive greater distances than Europeans – the average Australian car travels about 15,000  kilometres per annum compared with 12,300 for Europeans. And Europeans are doing much more to reduce their fuel consumption. Electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles are being developed in several European countries and, in France, President Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to stop all new motorway and airport construction. Instead, funds will be invested in the rail network with the aim of moving freight off the roads.