Toyota today announced that their Hydrogen only car, The Mirai, will be made available to the public from the 15th December of 2014 at a retail recommended price of $USD57,000.
The word “Mirai”, is Japanese for “Future”, and represents Toyota’s vision of a future car that has many advantages over an electric car without any compromise to the distance it can travel nor the low emissions targets which are wanted by all the manufacturers. It’s interesting to note, that the Mirai, and in fact all Hydrogen powered cars, emit only water vapor as emissions.
The Mirai can travel 650kms on a full tank of Hydrogen and can re-fuel in 3 to 5 minutes as would a regular car today.
The main advantage of Hydrogen over electricity is that it is as GREEN a fuel source as you can get to power a vehicle. The move away from fossil fuels is one that most manufacturers have agreed is the way of the future, however the argument against electricity as an option is that it requires burning of coal in sub-stations to create the electricity required. Many disadvantages to this include a relatively low range, heavy batteries and a long time to re-charge.
Although there is also a case to stay with fossil fuels and use smarter on board computers to provide better fuel efficiency, a Hydrogen solution is currently the most GREEN option as it uses an energy source that is abundant in our world and that is replenished by the water vapor emissions of the car itself.
A disadvantage being called out, is in the storage of hydrogen in the re-fueling stations. You cannot store Hydrogen at home as it is explosive, however this is no different to the fossil fuels being used at the moment which also cannot be stored domestically.
The cost of Hydrogen and therefore long term running of the vehicle is also yet to be confirmed.
Either way, this is the challenge that Hydrogen car innovators will need to solve, and like the electric car which took years for supported infrastructure to evolve, so too Toyota expects the sales of their cars to be slow in uptake as Hydrogen enabled re-fueling stations catch-up. In fact Toyota predicts that only 400 units will sell in 2015 and in the low thousands once roll-out commences in 2017 to the USA and the rest of the world.
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