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A long-time skeptic of electric vehicles’ green credentials, Toyota is turning its focus to hydrogen fuel cells.
In 2014, the company became the first to introduce a commercially available hydrogen-powered car: the zero-emission Toyota Mirai, a fuel-cell sedan that can travel more than 400 miles on a five-minute pit stop at a hydrogen pump, Toyota says, and excretes nothing but water from the tailpipe.
Mindful of the fact that hydrogen fuel stations are few and far between, and so Mirai buyers will be, too, Toyota is offering Mirai owners six years of free fuel, up to $15,000 worth.
But the company isn’t waiting for commuters and soccer moms to sign up.
Instead, it has partnered with CaetanoBus, a Portuguese maker of electric buses, and Air Liquide, a French supplier of industrial gases, for “closer cooperation in developing opportunities for hydrogen mobility projects in several European countries.”
The trio will focus first on hydrogen-powered buses, light-duty commercial vehicles, then heavy trucks, not only developing powertrains for them but also cost-effective “green hydrogen” production and building out a fueling infrastructure.
Toyota has been developing fuel-cell vehicles since 1992 and builds the Sora, a hydrogen-fueled transit bus used in cities in Japan. It also has tested prototypes of heavy-duty trucks running on hydrogen and is researching hydrogen as fuel for internal combustion engines.
Although BMW and Hyundai also are doing due diligence on hydrogen as a vehicle fuel, other car makers are ignoring it.
In June 2020, Elon Musk of Tesla renown tweeted “fuel cells = fool sells” and, a month later, chirped that “hydrogen fool sells make no sense.”
Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess also tweeted that “green hydrogen is needed for steel, chemical, aero and should not end up in cars. Far too expensive, inefficient, slow and difficult to roll out and transport.”
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Hydrogen is especially suited as a fleet fuel, where vehicles don’t range far from a base and the complex infrastructure of refining hydrogen and installing fueling systems can pay out in a reasonable time.
Hydrogen will become a meaningful part of the world’s energy mix, starting with fleets and making their way to more than a few personal passenger vehicles in the 2030s.