General Motors has said it will terminate its joint research on fuel cell-powered vehicles with Toyota – viewed as one of the main pillars in the two auto giants’ technological collaboration – at the end of this month.

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Kyodo News said GM is expected to seek to develop fuel cell vehicles on its own with the aim of achieving the possibility of mass production of such vehicles by 2010, in view of high growth potential in demand for the next-generation environment-friendly vehicles.


Kyodo News said reports noted the companies will no longer collaborate on fuel cells because that technology is moving out of the research stage and into the more proprietary development stage. But both companies remain open to other research projects in mutually beneficial areas.


Toyota and GM also said they have agreed to extend their advanced technology collaboration agreement for two more years with a focus on safety and congestion-related technologies, and industry codes and standards, according to the news agency.


The GM-Toyota collaboration, which began in 1999 and would have expired at the end of this month, will be extended to 31 March, 2008 and covers information exchange and collaborative research, the two automakers reportedly said.

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Toyota, which is ahead of GM in the area of environmental protection technology, had called on the struggling U.S. auto titan to extend their cooperation in the field of fuel cell vehicles, industry sources told Kyodo News.


Toyota-GM talks, however, hit a snag partly over the handling of GM-owned patents related to fuel cells, leading to an end to their collaboration in that field, the sources reportedly added.