Singapore to offer tax breaks, testing ground for 'green' cars

SINGAPORE (AP): Singapore will give big tax breaks for environmentally friendly cars and offer itself as a testing ground for new kinds of "green" vehicles, the government said on Wednesday.

Experimental cars powered by nonpolluting fuel cells will be among the vehicles that will get "all the usual taxes" waived, said Yeo Cheow Tong, Singapore's minister for communications and information technology.

Singapore has long used huge car licensing fees -- usually tens of thousands of dollars per car -- to avoid the pollution and gridlock choking many other Asian urban centers.

The government will introduce new legislation "in the next few months" to implement the tax waiver plan, Yeo said.

Singapore is also launching an international program to bring together car makers, research institutes, fuel industry members and other parties to make the city-state a "test bed" for ecological transportation, Yeo said.

Vehicle maker DaimlerChrysler was expected to make an announcement soon on a "pilot project" under the Singapore plan, he said.

Yeo was speaking at the Global Conference on Transportation and Technological Advancements, an industry forum held in Singapore last Wednesday.

Singapore hopes its initiatives will bring in hybrid cars that combine gasoline and electrical power, as well as vehicles driven by fuel cells.

A fuel cell is an electrochemical device that combines hydrogen fuel and oxygen from the air to produce electricity, which can power a car.

Promoters say fuel cells create no pollution particles or gases and emit only water as exhaust.

DaimlerChrysler's Necar 4A -- the company's latest prototype fuel cell car -- was given its first test drive on Asian streets on Wednesday during the Singapore conference.

Singapore is one of four areas in the world where DaimlerChrysler is testing the viability of fuel cell technology, said Ferdinand Panik, chief of the company's fuel cell team.

DaimlerChrysler is also testing fuel cell cars, buses and other transportation systems in Europe, Japan and the U.S. state of California, Panik told conference delegates on Wednesday.

Fuel cell technology is rapidly approaching commercial viability and could change the world as much as the invention of the microprocessor, Panik said.

However, World Bank environmental specialist Jitendra Shah said on Wednesday that getting people in developing countries to change their driving habits and modes of transportation could be difficult.

"It is not appropriate to say that this was done in Los Angeles, and hence this is going to be done in Bangkok," he said at the conference.

"How do you get rid of an existing (vehicle) fleet in Delhi that, on the average, is 20 years old?" he said.

"My brother owns a car that is 38 years old. How do I convince him that he needs to upgrade his car, when the one that he has is perfectly functional?"