2015 Toyota Mirai first drive
Toyota’s Mirai will be the world’s first mass-produced fuel-cell car and we’ve driven it. Who can honestly say that this technology isn’t serious now?
Toyota Mirai review
The Toyota Mirai's huge front vents are needed to keep the fuel cell cool
1:48PM GMT 19 Nov 2014
Andrew English
A
Motoring correspondent, Telegraph Cars
Get in touch
Welcome to the chicken and egg show, the most overused metaphor in the fuel-cell business. It probably wasn’t uttered by Sir William Grove in 1839 when he discovered the principle of producing electricity from an electro-chemical reaction between hydrogen and air, but I bet it was in 1955 when General Electric’s Willard Grubb and Leonard Niedrach produced the first proton exchange membrane fuel cell.
So which should come first? The chicken, a production fuel-cell car, or the egg, a hydrogen supply infrastructure? Speeches were filled with eggy chickens at this week’s launch of Toyota’s Mirai (meaning ‘The Future’), the world’s first mass-produced fuel-cell car; Honda’s FCX Clarity was first on sale, but was made in much smaller numbers than the tens of thousands of Mirais that Toyota is planning by the 2020s.
Over two decades and countless squillions of R&D blood and treasure has produced this - a state-of-the-art, showroom-ready, four-door saloon, capable of 111mph, 0-62mph in 9.6secs and a range of 300 miles on the 5kg of hydrogen stored in two tanks under its rear seats. Refuelling them takes about five minutes.
Toyota’s major innovations in this car are those immensely strong and lightweight woven carbon-fibre tanks, the 153bhp/247lb ft fuel cell and a revised power converter which steps up voltage 3 times to 650 volts allowing the use of a smaller electric motor. Toyota claims it has reduced the overall costs by 95 per cent compared with its previous fuel-cell car, the 2008 FCEV Highlander.
So what about the egg? Big Oil has shown itself remarkably uninterested in supplying hydrogen to the public, even though it creates a lot of hydrogen by steaming it out of natural gas for refining petrol. So Toyota is reluctantly becoming an infrastructure provider. In America the car maker is investing $7.2 million along with partners Aire Liquide to install a 12-station East Coast hydrogen highway between New York and Rhode Island to kick start sales. California is already familiar with fuel cells and there are about 10 filling stations with the Californian Energy Commission promising $200 million to build that total to 68 stations in the next two years.
In Britain the Government has promised £11 million to help provide 15 hydrogen fuel stations and some experts are predicting around 65 stations by 2020. But how many hydrogen filling stations do we actually need?
Toyota’s fuel-cell development chief, Katsuhiko Hirose, says: “As a first launch, the 15 stations the [UK] Government has announced is OK. You need to remember the car might not be a prototype but the infrastructure is. And while governments want a quick roll out, to go faster might be a bit dangerous (not in an explosive way!) for the way we deliver the customer experience, because very small bad experiences may put them off.”
He’s echoed by Takesh Uchiyamada, Toyota chairman and the father of the Prius, who says: “The success of the car will depend on the ownership experience.”
Toyota Mirai rear
The rear of the Toyota Mirai looks a lot more conventional than the front
It has to be said, the US customer experience appears munificent compared with the Scrooge-like European approach, where the car will cost about £52,587 without VAT tax and Government grants - so that’s £63,004 without delivery charges.
In the US, by contrast, the Mirai goes on sale this year priced at $57,500 (£36,761) to buy, with a lease deal of $499 (£320) a month for three years. Grants totalling about $13,000 (£8,310) are available in California, which means that buyers could get into one of these for as little as $44,500 (£28,446).
Zero emissions vehicles are allowed into Californian high occupancy lanes, which is a good perk if you’re commuting, and then there’s the free fuel, at least until the Californian state figures out how to track the pumps and charge customers. Air Liquide says hydrogen will cost about $10 a kg in the States and in the UK it’s about £12 per kg. That means a refill costs about £65. What’s more the Mirai’s $3,000 optional 9kW power take off (which won’t be offered in Europe) could power your household electrics with a tankful providing almost a week’s worth of power.
How green the Mirai is depends on who’s counting. Most hydrogen in Europe is steamed out of natural gas, a fossil fuel, but you can get the hydrogen out of electrolysis of water using renewably generated electricity or reformed methanol generated out of biomass. There are a couple of filling stations in Germany (Berlin and Hamburg) and a couple in Denmark supplying completely zero emission hydrogen, but for the most part, there will be a carbon implication of driving on hydrogen, just like there is with a battery car.
General Motors' fuel cell stumbling blocks in the Nineties were the cost of the platinum catalyst in the fuel-cell stack and the heavy and costly hydrogen pressure tanks. Satoshi Ogiso, managing officer of Toyota’s fuel-cell program, says the platinum in the fuel cell is now down to molecular-level thickness and is a third of that used in the last Highlander.
Professor Scott Samuelson, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center in California, reckons there are a number of factors that have contributed to cost reduction, including increasing the fuel-cell stack power densities, reducing the platinum loading by a factor of ten, the mass production of fuel cells and “the spun carbon pressure tanks, which Toyota is making themselves by going back to its roots as a automated loom maker; I think that’s fascinating”.
Another Toyota advantage is its hybridisation program, which started with the Prius in 1993. It’s given the company vast experience, a legion of skilled electrical engineers and a huge parts bin of electric drive components. So the Mirai’s nickel-metal hydride battery, power electronics and motor come from the Camry hybrid and the chassis is from the Lexus HS 250h.
“I’m sure you will all have an opinion about the Mirai’s styling,” says Ogiso, “but if the name of your car is ‘The Future’, it had better look futuristic.”
And the shape really is eye-poke weird, mainly because of those huge front air intakes. Toyota has been clever with water management (the Mirai’s fuel cell hasn’t got a humidifier like its rivals), but the immutable law is that water boils at 100 degrees and you can’t generate electricity in the fuel cell with steam, so you have to keep the cell cool, or you fail to proceed. Hence the big radiators. It’s strange really, because the rear of the car is pretty anonymous, meaning overtaking drivers on the LA freeway will get a rude shock when they get level with the Mirai.
The interior gets a sprinkling of the future, too. With a remarkable sculpted dashboard and a central instrument binnacle containing digital readouts for speed, economy and settings. Satnav and heating controls are on another black panel below it, while the electrostatic touchscreen switches are revolutionary and attractive, even if they feel a tiny bit plasticky. Similarly, the seat material, an artificial leather called Softex, isn’t that nice to touch. And while the front seats are comfortable and supportive, the steering wheel needs a better range of adjustment.
The Mirai is pretty well equipped, with LED headlamps, a heated steering wheel, heated and electrically adjustable front seats, air-conditioning and cruise control. In the back the seats are bisected by a huge centre console and you sit high (on top of the hydrogen tanks, remember) so there’s not really enough head room for six footers, though there’s plenty of leg space and the boot is reasonably big.
The driving controls are pure Prius, with a stubby return-to-centre gear lever to the right of the steering wheel. The car takes a few seconds to check the systems and then you simply select Drive and pull away.
I’d love to tell you how the car fizzed with hydrogen energy and how it felt as futuristic as Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine, but it didn’t. In fact the most remarkable thing about the Mirai is how unremarkable it feels. I think it’s probably the quietest fuel-cell car I’ve ever driven, but in the main it feels like a middle-market four-door saloon and that’s exactly what Toyota wanted.
The regenerating braking (not handled well on past Highlanders) is beautifully judged and you can drive the Mirai just as smoothly as you want. Pushing the power button squirts a bit more hydrogen in, causing the front wheels to chirp when the torque hits, and a trail of water to splash out of the exhaust. You can elect to hold the water in with an H²O button, but it eventually splashes out on the road.
On all-season American tyres, the handling isn’t the last word in finesse, but the steering is accurate and well weighted and the Mirai's body movements are well controlled, although there might be a few ride issues on British roads, and on concrete freeways there was quite a bit of tyre roar.
Toyota is planning to build 700 Mirais next year, increasing production gently thereafter. Europe will get between 50 and 100 examples in 2015 and the same in 2016. They’ll go mainly to Germany and the UK, with the balance to the other main areas covered by Europe's HyFive program, which is a £31 million, year-long fuel-cell initiative involving 15 partners including five car makers; Toyota, BMW, Daimler, Honda and Hyundai. The aim is to get 110 different fuel-cell vehicles on the road, testing, educating folk and working out what falls off.
So this is going to be a rare car, driven by a few select people at first, but it’s a huge step forward and it’s also damn good. I’ve been writing about this technology for a quarter of a century, championing it against sceptical peers and I don’t mind admitting that seeing the Mirai on the road in Newport Beach I almost had a bit of an unmanly moment.
I always trusted that this day would arrive and now it has. Gosh.
THE FACTS
Toyota Mirai
Tested: 100kg proton-exchange membrane fuel cell, 1.5kWh 60kg nickel metal hydride battery pack, single-speed step-down transmission, front-wheel drive
Price/on sale: £63,104 (including 20 per cent VAT but without delivery costs and Government grants)/late 2015
Power/torque: 153bhp/247lb ft
Top speed: 111mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 9.6sec
Range: About 300 miles
CO2 emissions: Only water vapour at the tail pipe
VED band: Zero rated
Verdict: Defining mass production is tricker than herding cats, but it’s pretty clear that Toyota will be producing more of this fuel-cell car than anything that has gone before. Whether you could live with the looks is another question entirely, but the Mirai performs and the interior is smart and well appointed with a touch of the futuristic. More like this please, but perhaps a bit prettier.
Telegraph rating: Four stars out of five
Friday 21 November 2014
Behold the first hydrogen car on the move
2015 Toyota Mirai first drive
Toyota’s Mirai will be the world’s first mass-produced fuel-cell car and we’ve driven it. Who can honestly say that this technology isn’t serious now?
Toyota Mirai review
The Toyota Mirai's huge front vents are needed to keep the fuel cell cool
1:48PM GMT 19 Nov 2014
Andrew English
A
Motoring correspondent, Telegraph Cars
Get in touch
Welcome to the chicken and egg show, the most overused metaphor in the fuel-cell business. It probably wasn’t uttered by Sir William Grove in 1839 when he discovered the principle of producing electricity from an electro-chemical reaction between hydrogen and air, but I bet it was in 1955 when General Electric’s Willard Grubb and Leonard Niedrach produced the first proton exchange membrane fuel cell.
So which should come first? The chicken, a production fuel-cell car, or the egg, a hydrogen supply infrastructure? Speeches were filled with eggy chickens at this week’s launch of Toyota’s Mirai (meaning ‘The Future’), the world’s first mass-produced fuel-cell car; Honda’s FCX Clarity was first on sale, but was made in much smaller numbers than the tens of thousands of Mirais that Toyota is planning by the 2020s.
Over two decades and countless squillions of R&D blood and treasure has produced this - a state-of-the-art, showroom-ready, four-door saloon, capable of 111mph, 0-62mph in 9.6secs and a range of 300 miles on the 5kg of hydrogen stored in two tanks under its rear seats. Refuelling them takes about five minutes.
Toyota’s major innovations in this car are those immensely strong and lightweight woven carbon-fibre tanks, the 153bhp/247lb ft fuel cell and a revised power converter which steps up voltage 3 times to 650 volts allowing the use of a smaller electric motor. Toyota claims it has reduced the overall costs by 95 per cent compared with its previous fuel-cell car, the 2008 FCEV Highlander.
So what about the egg? Big Oil has shown itself remarkably uninterested in supplying hydrogen to the public, even though it creates a lot of hydrogen by steaming it out of natural gas for refining petrol. So Toyota is reluctantly becoming an infrastructure provider. In America the car maker is investing $7.2 million along with partners Aire Liquide to install a 12-station East Coast hydrogen highway between New York and Rhode Island to kick start sales. California is already familiar with fuel cells and there are about 10 filling stations with the Californian Energy Commission promising $200 million to build that total to 68 stations in the next two years.
In Britain the Government has promised £11 million to help provide 15 hydrogen fuel stations and some experts are predicting around 65 stations by 2020. But how many hydrogen filling stations do we actually need?
Toyota’s fuel-cell development chief, Katsuhiko Hirose, says: “As a first launch, the 15 stations the [UK] Government has announced is OK. You need to remember the car might not be a prototype but the infrastructure is. And while governments want a quick roll out, to go faster might be a bit dangerous (not in an explosive way!) for the way we deliver the customer experience, because very small bad experiences may put them off.”
He’s echoed by Takesh Uchiyamada, Toyota chairman and the father of the Prius, who says: “The success of the car will depend on the ownership experience.”
Toyota Mirai rear
The rear of the Toyota Mirai looks a lot more conventional than the front
It has to be said, the US customer experience appears munificent compared with the Scrooge-like European approach, where the car will cost about £52,587 without VAT tax and Government grants - so that’s £63,004 without delivery charges.
In the US, by contrast, the Mirai goes on sale this year priced at $57,500 (£36,761) to buy, with a lease deal of $499 (£320) a month for three years. Grants totalling about $13,000 (£8,310) are available in California, which means that buyers could get into one of these for as little as $44,500 (£28,446).
Zero emissions vehicles are allowed into Californian high occupancy lanes, which is a good perk if you’re commuting, and then there’s the free fuel, at least until the Californian state figures out how to track the pumps and charge customers. Air Liquide says hydrogen will cost about $10 a kg in the States and in the UK it’s about £12 per kg. That means a refill costs about £65. What’s more the Mirai’s $3,000 optional 9kW power take off (which won’t be offered in Europe) could power your household electrics with a tankful providing almost a week’s worth of power.
How green the Mirai is depends on who’s counting. Most hydrogen in Europe is steamed out of natural gas, a fossil fuel, but you can get the hydrogen out of electrolysis of water using renewably generated electricity or reformed methanol generated out of biomass. There are a couple of filling stations in Germany (Berlin and Hamburg) and a couple in Denmark supplying completely zero emission hydrogen, but for the most part, there will be a carbon implication of driving on hydrogen, just like there is with a battery car.
General Motors' fuel cell stumbling blocks in the Nineties were the cost of the platinum catalyst in the fuel-cell stack and the heavy and costly hydrogen pressure tanks. Satoshi Ogiso, managing officer of Toyota’s fuel-cell program, says the platinum in the fuel cell is now down to molecular-level thickness and is a third of that used in the last Highlander.
Professor Scott Samuelson, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center in California, reckons there are a number of factors that have contributed to cost reduction, including increasing the fuel-cell stack power densities, reducing the platinum loading by a factor of ten, the mass production of fuel cells and “the spun carbon pressure tanks, which Toyota is making themselves by going back to its roots as a automated loom maker; I think that’s fascinating”.
Another Toyota advantage is its hybridisation program, which started with the Prius in 1993. It’s given the company vast experience, a legion of skilled electrical engineers and a huge parts bin of electric drive components. So the Mirai’s nickel-metal hydride battery, power electronics and motor come from the Camry hybrid and the chassis is from the Lexus HS 250h.
“I’m sure you will all have an opinion about the Mirai’s styling,” says Ogiso, “but if the name of your car is ‘The Future’, it had better look futuristic.”
And the shape really is eye-poke weird, mainly because of those huge front air intakes. Toyota has been clever with water management (the Mirai’s fuel cell hasn’t got a humidifier like its rivals), but the immutable law is that water boils at 100 degrees and you can’t generate electricity in the fuel cell with steam, so you have to keep the cell cool, or you fail to proceed. Hence the big radiators. It’s strange really, because the rear of the car is pretty anonymous, meaning overtaking drivers on the LA freeway will get a rude shock when they get level with the Mirai.
The interior gets a sprinkling of the future, too. With a remarkable sculpted dashboard and a central instrument binnacle containing digital readouts for speed, economy and settings. Satnav and heating controls are on another black panel below it, while the electrostatic touchscreen switches are revolutionary and attractive, even if they feel a tiny bit plasticky. Similarly, the seat material, an artificial leather called Softex, isn’t that nice to touch. And while the front seats are comfortable and supportive, the steering wheel needs a better range of adjustment.
The Mirai is pretty well equipped, with LED headlamps, a heated steering wheel, heated and electrically adjustable front seats, air-conditioning and cruise control. In the back the seats are bisected by a huge centre console and you sit high (on top of the hydrogen tanks, remember) so there’s not really enough head room for six footers, though there’s plenty of leg space and the boot is reasonably big.
The driving controls are pure Prius, with a stubby return-to-centre gear lever to the right of the steering wheel. The car takes a few seconds to check the systems and then you simply select Drive and pull away.
I’d love to tell you how the car fizzed with hydrogen energy and how it felt as futuristic as Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine, but it didn’t. In fact the most remarkable thing about the Mirai is how unremarkable it feels. I think it’s probably the quietest fuel-cell car I’ve ever driven, but in the main it feels like a middle-market four-door saloon and that’s exactly what Toyota wanted.
The regenerating braking (not handled well on past Highlanders) is beautifully judged and you can drive the Mirai just as smoothly as you want. Pushing the power button squirts a bit more hydrogen in, causing the front wheels to chirp when the torque hits, and a trail of water to splash out of the exhaust. You can elect to hold the water in with an H²O button, but it eventually splashes out on the road.
On all-season American tyres, the handling isn’t the last word in finesse, but the steering is accurate and well weighted and the Mirai's body movements are well controlled, although there might be a few ride issues on British roads, and on concrete freeways there was quite a bit of tyre roar.
Toyota is planning to build 700 Mirais next year, increasing production gently thereafter. Europe will get between 50 and 100 examples in 2015 and the same in 2016. They’ll go mainly to Germany and the UK, with the balance to the other main areas covered by Europe's HyFive program, which is a £31 million, year-long fuel-cell initiative involving 15 partners including five car makers; Toyota, BMW, Daimler, Honda and Hyundai. The aim is to get 110 different fuel-cell vehicles on the road, testing, educating folk and working out what falls off.
So this is going to be a rare car, driven by a few select people at first, but it’s a huge step forward and it’s also damn good. I’ve been writing about this technology for a quarter of a century, championing it against sceptical peers and I don’t mind admitting that seeing the Mirai on the road in Newport Beach I almost had a bit of an unmanly moment.
I always trusted that this day would arrive and now it has. Gosh.
THE FACTS
Toyota Mirai
Tested: 100kg proton-exchange membrane fuel cell, 1.5kWh 60kg nickel metal hydride battery pack, single-speed step-down transmission, front-wheel drive
Price/on sale: £63,104 (including 20 per cent VAT but without delivery costs and Government grants)/late 2015
Power/torque: 153bhp/247lb ft
Top speed: 111mph
Acceleration: 0-62mph in 9.6sec
Range: About 300 miles
CO2 emissions: Only water vapour at the tail pipe
VED band: Zero rated
Verdict: Defining mass production is tricker than herding cats, but it’s pretty clear that Toyota will be producing more of this fuel-cell car than anything that has gone before. Whether you could live with the looks is another question entirely, but the Mirai performs and the interior is smart and well appointed with a touch of the futuristic. More like this please, but perhaps a bit prettier.
Telegraph rating: Four stars out of five
