So Is the Toyota Mirai Part of Your New Year’s Resolution?

Speaking of bad habits, driving a gasoline or diesel powered car could make it for the list of things you don’t want to do in 2015. This could mean buying a new plug in electric car, or a hybrid or, if you feel a little bit of a pioneer, getting a fuel cell.

For the latter, it’s quite easy to choose, because Toyota is the first automaker to mass-produce such a car. It’s called the Mirai and is already on sale in Japan. In fact, it proved to be more successful than expected there and the carmaker decided to ramp up the production to meet demand.

Currently, the Toyota Mirai is being assembled pretty much by hand at the former Lexus LFA building shop at the Motomachi plant in Toyota City. Although it’s considered to be the future, this happens at a small scale for now because it’s still some king of experiment and Toyota can’t just invest in a huge plant if the hydrogen infrastructure won’t be ready soon to encourage these vehicles.

Hydrogen to electric power

In case you skipped our fuel cell classes, the Toyota Mirai is powered by hydrogen and oxygen from the surrounding air to create electricity in a fuel cell mounted underneath the car. The hydrogen gets stored in two 70 Mpa bullet resistant tanks, while the oxygen is collected from air passing through those massive intakes at the front.

The whole process is explained in one of the videos bellow, but the main thing is that the Mirai offers the convenience only a combustion-engine-powered car could give, but also at “zero emissions”.

Toyota says it takes about 3 minutes to replenish the hydrogen tanks and then you’re ready for another 300 miles (483 km) while emitting only some water vapors. Sounds great comparing to standard EVs which need at least one hour of recharging before going somewhere, which makes them impractical for, say, a road trip.

However, we said “zero emissions” because, just as all other EVs, the infrastructure could turn these green vehicles into ones that are more polluting than gasoline-powered cars.

How can a vapor-emitting car be polluting?

Well, it’s not like we have a big shaft somewhere to extract hydrogen from, despite being one of the most abundant elements on the planet. You can’t find pure hydrogen in nature so you have to use energy to separate and store it accordingly. Sort of like refining oil to get gasoline.

And it’s this process that can be more polluting that gasoline-powered cars. Probably the simplest way of achieving hydrogen is to separate it from oxygen in water form using electrolysis. That uses electricity which in turn can be obtained from burning coal, which as some studies say it spews more dirty stuff in the air than diesel burning vehicles.

So, if we want to get the hydrogen cars going, we firstly need to extract hydrogen in an efficient and clean way. There are different plans on doing that, some relying on wind or solar power to create electricity and power remote electrolysis stations.

Same goes for electric vehicles too if you plug them in into a grid fed by burning coal or other fuels to create electricity. So there’s not such a big difference here. Of course, it’s easier to make your own green electricity at home, which gives EVs the upper hand.

Costs

And maybe the price is also a determinant factor. The Mirai will cost about as much as a decent entry level luxury sedan when it comes to the US market in 2015, with all incentives included.

Which will make it available only for the wealthier clients curious to try out such a thing and not the common guy wanting a cheap, green way of commuting. And let’s not forget that this market doesn’t think like the one over in Japan, where they’re already crazy about the Mirai.

The hydrogen infrastructure will surely expand enough in the near future to sustain these fuel cell vehicles, but you, as a buyer, will sustain them? Will you be like one of the first Prius drivers and spend your money on an odd-looking sedan with a mildly plasticky interior that works on a non conventional fuel?