Hydrogen full steam ahead

Toyota is increasing its investment in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, designing lower-cost, mass-market passenger cars and SUVs and pushing the technology into buses and trucks to build economies of scale.

As Toyota concentrates on improvements for the next generation of its Mirai hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV), expected in the early 2020s, it is hoping it can prove wrong rival carmakers and industry experts who have mostly dismissed such plans as commercially unviable.

The maker of the Prius, the world’s first mass-produced ‘eco-friendly’ petrol-hybrid car in the 1990s, says it can popularise FCVs in part by making them cheaper. A fuel cell doesn’t burn the hydrogen. Instead, it’s fused chemically with oxygen from the air to make water. In the process, which resembles what happens in a battery, electricity is released and this is used to power electric motors that can drive the vehicle.

“We’re going to shift from limited production to mass production, reduce the amount of expensive materials like platinum used in FCV components, and make the system more compact and powerful,” Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of the Mirai, said.

It is planning a phased introduction of other FCV models, including a range of SUVs, pick-up trucks, and commercial trucks beginning around 2025, a source with knowledge of the automaker’s plans said.

The company declined to comment on specific future product plans. But it has developed FCV prototypes of small delivery vehicles and large transport trucks based on models already on the road, as Tesla develops a battery-operated commercial semi-truck from the ground up.

“We’re going to use as many parts from existing passenger cars and other models as possible in fuel cell trucks,” said Ikuo Ota, manager of new business planning for fuel cell projects at Toyota. “Otherwise, we won’t see the benefits of mass production.”

Toyota hopes to eventually build 30,000 fuel-cell passenger cars and buses a year, although it did not say exactly when it hoped to achieve that goal. It’s a major increase from the 3,000 fuel-cell vehicles Toyota said it built last year. The company expects its home market of Japan to account for about one third of that volume.Toyota already sells the Mirai fuel-cell sedan in 11 countries. The car is built in the same Motomachi plant that built the Lexus LFA, and like the LFA the Mirai is churned out in very small numbers. That’s due in part to lack of hydrogen fuelling infrastructure, as well as a high purchase price (the Mirai starts at $59,285, around BD22,000) in the US) owing to high production costs.

The company is also betting on improved performance. Toyota wants to push the driving range of the next Mirai to 700-750km from around 500km, and to hit 1,000km by 2025, a separate source said.

Driven by the belief that hydrogen will become a key source of clean energy in the next 100 years, Toyota has been developing FCVs since the early 1990s.