[Auto] Toyota Doubles Down on Hydrogen With a New Mirai and Commercial Trucks

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Toyota Doubles Down on Hydrogen With a New Mirai and Commercial Trucks
While most of the rest of the automotive industry is adopting electricity as the fuel of an emissions-free tomorrow, Toyota continues to claim that hydrogen is going to be the way forward. Or at least a large part of the way.

Indeed, Toyota just revealed the second generation of its Mirai hydrogen fuel cell-powered car. The all-new 2021 Mirai will ride on a shortened version of the luxury Lexus LS platform. It will have a range of as much as 402 miles, 30-percent better than the first-gen Mirai, will seat five instead of four, and will cost about $9,000 less with a starting sticker of $50,455 before incentives, the latter of which are prodigious.

True, Toyota is not yet at the point of profitability with the Mirai, perhaps far from it, but that’s not the point in this early stage of the technology.

“We don’t want the price to be a hinderance (to purchase),” said Tenhouse. “We want customers in this vehicle. Someday we’ll get there (profitability), but (at this point) we consider it an investment.”

Toyota is working on hydrogen fuel cell-powered commercial vehicles, too, even as big as 18-wheelers, which could benefit from the use of hydrogen instead of diesel. Less than two weeks ago Toyota revealed its most recent prototype 18-wheeler fuel cell vehicle, a Kenworth T680 Class 8 truck, aka, a Big Rig. The truck houses six hydrogen tanks in the aft section of the cab and uses the same fuel cell system found on the 2021 Mirai, Toyota said. The prototype can go 300 miles towing the rig’s maximum weight of 80,000 pounds. Two of the trucks were scheduled to start working in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach this month, with eight more coming in 2021.

“After extensive testing with our proof-of-concept prototypes, we’re ready for the next step of putting more trucks into drayage operations,” said Andrew Lund, chief engineer, Toyota Motor North America Research and Development. “Moving toward emissions-free trucks is more important than ever, and the ZANZEFF project has been instrumental in getting us closer to that goal.”

What is ZANZEFF? Development of those fuel cell-powered Kenworth trucks is part of a $41 million Zero and Near-Zero Emissions Freight Facilities (ZANZEFF) grant awarded by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), with the Port of Los Angeles as the prime applicant. The port has a huge number of big rigs hauling containers around. Often the big rigs are idling, spewing diesel particulate matter into the air. With hydrogen fuel cell propulsion, tailpipe emissions would be only water.

“This is an important step in the transition to emissions-free heavy-duty trucks,” said Lund. “Our first prototype trucks proved that a fuel cell electric powertrain was capable of hauling heavy cargo on a daily basis. These new prototypes not only use production-intent hardware, they will also allow us to start looking beyond drayage into broader applications of this proven technology.”

If this works out, and if the cost of hydrogen ever works out to be lower than the cost of diesel fuel, Toyota would be in prime position to get a chunk of the 15.5-million-truck market in the U.S., two million of which are tractor trailers, according to truckinfo.net.