THE ‘EXHAUST’ IS WATER
Driving to a hydrogen-powered future in the Toyota fuel-cell Mirai,
OYAMA, JAPAN— A couple of short laps on a test track can help to show if a car is overhyped junk, and there’s been a lot of hype recently about the new Toyota Mirai. The hydrogen-powered, massmarket sedan has been in development for more than 20 years, since before the first Prius hybrid even hit the streets. Fuel-cell technology is not an easy process to develop, but Toyota’s now confident enough in the car so it’s selling the Mirai outright to new owners — or at least, it’s selling it in California, Japan and some countries in Europe. They’re the only places with enough public refuelling stations to make it viable.
There are only a handful of public hydrogen filling stations in California, but more than 50 are planned before the end of this decade. Another refuelling network is due to be built soon in the U.S. Northeast using clean hydro from Quebec.
In Canada, there are just two filling stations open to the public — one in the Vancouver area and the other at the Université du Québec à TroisRivières.
Once the U.S. networks are established, it shouldn’t be a stretch to start opening stations in Canada, especially in the busy Windsor-Quebec corridor. The target date is 2020.
Mirai is the Japanese word for future. So is it worth it?
It’s an all-electric car, large and heavy. The weight comes from the fuel cell stack, which creates a vehicle that weighs 1,850 kilograms. This is unheard of for an electric car — they’re always as light as possible to add range. The Mirai, however, isn’t so concerned with range because it can drive 500 kilometres on a full tank of compressed hydrogen. When it needs fuel, it takes no more than five minutes in total at the pump.
I covered a fraction of that distance here in Japan, following a pace car around the Fuji Speedway. We didn’t exceed100 km/h, though we did wiggle through a slalom and slide the tires around some curves.
The Mirai is not nimble and doesn’t try to be, but it’s easy to drive, with light steering and only one gear.
It takes around nine seconds to accelerate from zero to 100 km/h, which is unremarkable but sufficient. The car is not slow, but it’s more torquey than powerful. Allelectric motors make maximum torque right from a standstill and the Mirai’s motor creates a strong 247 lb.-ft., but it’s only good for 151 horsepower. In comparison, a similarly sized Camry with the base 2.5-litre gasoline engine makes 178 horsepower and 170 lb.-ft. of torque, but it weighs 400 kilograms less.
It also costs less than half the price, and that’s the fully loaded Camry. The Mirai is a luxurious car with all the features of a premium vehicle because it’s expensive and its buyers will be wealthy “early adopters” who value their comfort and convenience while saving the planet.
Heated and cooled leather seats are standard and a heated steering wheel is too. It’s for the same reason the electric Chevrolet Volt comes loaded — if people are already paying a premium, they don’t want a strippeddown car.
In California, the Mirai will cost $58,395 (U.S.), and it is the first massproduced hydrogen-powered vehicle you can buy and own — every other fuel-cell vehicle is still in the testing phase and owned by its maker — drivers can only lease them.
You can lease the Mirai too, if you prefer, for $499 a month over three years with $3,649 down. The first 300 cars coming to the U.S. this year and next have already been sold, mostly to people who’ve never driven it.
At least they can rest assured their new car is not just overhyped junk. My drive here in Japan showed that. It is a car that does what a car is supposed to do: no muss, no fuss, just powered in a completely different, Earth-friendly way.
It sounds expensive, but the price includes an extensive warranty and after-sales care. Oh, and all the hydrogen fuel is free for three years. That’s a biggie.
Is it realistic to think the Mirai will be sold in Canada before the end of the decade? Stephen Beatty seems to think so. He is Toyota Canada’s vicepresident in charge of, among other things, marketing and communications, and he figures if somebody builds the infrastructure, fuel-cell drivers will come.
“We should be looking at close to 2020,” he says, which is after the U.S. Northeast refuelling infrastructure opens up. “But I don’t think it’ll take much longer than that.
“There’s a very high level of interest in fuel cells, but the issue, of course, is can you make it approachable and affordable for consumers? (The Mirai) has a 500-km range, three-tofive minutes for a fill-up and pricing two-thirds the cost of a Tesla. It’s a value proposition that opens it up to a lot more consumers than anyone could have expected a decade ago.” How does hydrogen fuel work? A fuel-cell vehicle (FCV) mixes hydrogen and oxygen in a chemical reaction to create electricity that drives an electric motor. The hydrogen is stored in a pair of high-pressure tanks, while the oxygen is sucked in through the large air intakes beneath the headlamps.
The hydrogen and oxygen are separated in the fuel cell stack by a plati- num membrane that’s just fractions of a millimetre thick. The hydrogen atoms are broken down into electrons and protons, but only the protons can move through the membrane where they’re drawn to the oxygen.
There’s now a surplus of electrons on the hydrogen side and a deficiency on the oxygen side, so a positive cathode pole and negative anode pole are formed. When these are connected, they create an electrical current that powers the motor.
The unneeded protons combine with the oxygen to create water, or H2O, discharged through the tailpipe.
Hydrogen is most commonly created as a byproduct of oil refinement, but it can be easily produced anywhere and is in unlimited supply.
A hydrogen filling station is more complex than a gasoline station, however. The challenge comes in creating the very high pressure within the fuel tanks: hydrogen is lighter than air and the Mirai stores 11 kilograms of hydrogen under full pressure of 700 bars, or about 10,000 lb./ sq. in.
It takes three to five minutes to fill the tanks to this pressure, then the pumping equipment needs to build pressure again, which takes about the same time again. Consequently, a filling pump now can only completely refuel about six cars an hour.
The Mirai’s fuel tanks are very strong to handle the pressure, but they’re also shockproof, bulletproof and flame-proof. If a tank is somehow ruptured, the hydrogen will dissipate quickly and harmlessly into the air.