Toyota fuel-cell car to feature range of 620 miles
Toyota is set to unveil a fuel-cell concept car that aims to offer 50 percent more driving range than its current hydrogen-powered sedan in a technology push that defies a rising wave of battery-powered vehicles.
Japan’s biggest auto manufacturer is targeting a 620-mile range for the Fine-comfort Ride concept
sedan under local standards, compared with about 400 miles for the current Mirai fuel-cell vehicle, according to a statement Wednesday.
The concept car, to be introduced at the Tokyo Motor Show next week, will include artificial intelligence and automated driving features.
Toyota is continuing to champion fuel-cell vehicles as the ultimate zero-emission cars, even as the falling cost of lithium-ion batteries has lured a majority of automakers to plug-in technology in the face of ever more stringent environmental standards worldwide.
While Japan has created a Hydrogen Society Roadmap to increase the number of fuel-cell vehicles on its roads to 40,000 by 2020, there are currently just 2,200 or so. Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the government will achieve only 60 percent of its target.
Other than the Mirai, which Toyota launched in late 2014, only Honda has a hydrogen-powered car for
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sale in the country, the Clarity Fuel Cell. Toyota’s luxury arm, Lexus, has also committed to bringing a hydrogen-powered model to the market, introducing a concept sedan in 2015.
The Fine Comfort-ride sedan can accommodate six people, and seats can be rearranged so that they all face inward. A Toyota spokeswoman declined to provide additional details of the powertrain or self-driving technology.
Although hydrogen vehicles can
be refueled in about three minutes and have a substantially longer range than electric cars, they suffer from a lack of infrastructure. There are only 91 hydrogen stations nationwide, against the government’s goal of 160 by 2020, according to BNEF. On the other hand, Japan has about 7,200 public quick chargers, according to an estimate by Nissan.
Nissan’s Leaf, for instance, takes about 30 minutes for a single charge that offers a range of about 250 miles.
To encourage the establishment of more refueling stations, Toyota is developing hydrogen-powered commercial
vehicles, including a delivery truck it will use in a project with convenience store 7-Eleven Japan. A pair of Toyota fuel-cell buses began operation in Tokyo this year.
Toyota will display a new fuel-cell concept bus called Sora alongside the Fine-comfort Ride sedan at the Tokyo Motor Show, which begins Oct. 25, the company said in a separate release Thursday. The bus has room for 79 people including the driver, two more than its current bus.
Toyota aims to have a national fleet of more than 100 fuel-cell buses, mainly within Tokyo, before the city hosts the 2020 Olympic Games. A new fund will let robots pick stocks. The AI Powered Equity Exchangetraded Fund, which launched in the United States on Wednesday, will use IBM Corp.’s Watson artificial intelligence technology to pick several dozen stocks with potential to beat the market, the fund’s backers say.
The actively managed fund chooses stocks based on a set of rules created by Equbot LLC that uses artificial intelligence to analyze up to 10 years of data on thousands of stocks, including market sentiment, regulatory filings, news articles and social media posts.
It ranks each company based on the forecasted probability that each will profit from current economic conditions and world events.
The fund technically does have two human managers, primarily responsible for making purchase and sale decisions based on information from the computer model.