By Chang-Ran Kim, Asia auto correspondent

TOKYO (Reuters) - Less than a week after its biggest Japanese rival touted the economic and ecological benefits of hybrids, General Motors made a case of its own on Monday: only hydrogen-fueled cars will survive in the endgame.

As the debate heats up over what the car of the future will ultimately look like, auto makers are staging a loud public relations battle to play up their strengths and justify the huge spending on developing the technologies so far.

Just last Thursday, Japan's top auto maker, Toyota Motor, invited journalists to tour the production site of its new Prius hybrid to demonstrate how cheaply they could be built by sharing an assembly line with conventional mass-market cars.

But Larry Burns, GM's vice president of research, development and planning, said zero-emission fuel cell vehicles (FCV) will eventually make gasoline-electric hybrids obsolete, rejecting Toyota's view that hybrids will remain on the road even after FCVs become affordable for the average consumer.

"The race needs to be judged with a long-term view -- the goal is to get automobiles out of the environmental debate altogether," he told Reuters in an interview.

Hybrids use electric motors and battery packs to improve fuel efficiency, adding power during acceleration and reclaiming energy when braking and coasting, but still need gasoline to run.

GM has invested about $1 billion in developing fuel cells to power electric motors in vehicles, and wants to be the first auto maker to sell a million FCVs. It hopes to commercialize FCVs by 2010 -- one of the most optimistic targets in the industry.

Japan's Toyota and Honda Motor became the first to put a saleable FCV on the road last year, but the cars are only on lease since they still cost millions of dollars to produce.

Despite the many hurdles that remain to make FCVs commercially viable -- such as a lack of infrastructure and safety standards -- Burns said weaning the industry off gasoline would become imperative as fledgling car markets like those in China and India continue to grow.

"If you look at the growth of economies in the world -- whether it be the U.S., Japan, Europe, or Brazil, Russia, India, China and Korea -- commensurate with that is the growth in energy consumption," he said.

And with many countries relying almost 100 percent on foreign oil, they would eventually want vehicles that don't o conventional gasoline combustion engines in the interim before FCVs take over.

In a week-long presentation in Tokyo with its Japanese affiliates that started on Monday, the GM group will showcase other cutting-edge technology such as truck maker Isuzu Motors' clean diesel engines and Fuji Heavy Industries' research into next-generation car batteries.

GM, which also has a capital alliance with minivehicle maker Suzuki Motor and South Korea (news - web sites)'s Daewoo Motor in Asia, plans to begin selling its first gas-electric hybrid cars next year.

How about a car that makes hydrogen from an onboard battery and that hydrogen powers the car making water as the btproduct which is converted once again back into hydrogen.

cosmictraveler first:
It would be too inefficient. I assume you are talking about an on board closed cycle here, any other option would make you look silly. Current batteries are good, but not that good, and there would be fairly large energy losses involved in charging the battery, splitting water, and then burning it.

Methinks GM is being stupid here. The article says their 2010 date is the most optimistic in the industry, and thats still 7 years for hybrids to sell well. Hybrids will be obsolete when they work out how to cheaply and easily store Hydrogen, and thats still a long way off.

By using a coil to develop over 120,000 volts you could then have enough energy to make the hydrogen. When the car is operating it will have an 150 amp alternator that will recharge the batteries to keep them powerful enough to get the hydrogen.

Umm, could you run that by me again?
Where does the coils energy come from?

The coil gets its energy from the alternator.

So you have water. you break it up with a huge jolt of electricity. then you use the H2 gas in fuel cell RXNs to produce work, wich then, via the alternator, charges the batter back up. Given the friction of movement of the car and the friction of the alternator, you would need an addition source of energy here to suppliment that NRG which is lost to heat.
not Liquid H2, cause then you would have extra Hydrogen to get rid of. so I guess either solar or wall-socket electricity?

I'm guessing a very long extension cord.
Where does the alternator gets its energy from? presumably the batteries. So, you charge the batteries up, they then discharge creating hydrogen, losing energy through inefficiencies in the process, and the reultant hydrogen is used to power the car, and left over energy goes back to the battery? Of course, therell be far less energy going into the battery than coming out, sicne your propelling the car and due also teh thermodynamic losses, so its a no brainer, unless you want to travel really short distances. If you can invent a battery that stores energy as densely as hydrogen of petrol, you dont even need to use hydrogen or petrol, just use the battery. But charging a battery which is used to create hydrogen which is then burnt and used to power the car and charge the battery is just silly.

some return is better than none, but I'd bet that the currently used design of charging the battery when the car slows down would be more efficient that switching to hydrogen and back.

Good for GM. Hybrids are a joke.

Once fuel cell manufacturing is inexpensive enough for the private consumer (catalyst prices are coming down semi-annually already) we'll see them take off as energy storage devices.

However, we are still left needing a source of electricity to produce gas for the fuel cells though. Of course, if the public would get over their knee-jerk and uninformed fears, we could rely on our friend the atom for all of these. But that's another story.