The world's biggest car company is ready to kick gasoline to the curb, according to Bloomberg via MSN. Toyota's $62,000 four-door family sedan's angular design help keep the polymer fuel-cell stack cool... and just looks cool. Toyota's Prius was the first hybrid vehicle available to the average customer and Toyota hopes the Mirai will be the first mass-market hydrogen car.
The Mirai started selling in Japan on Dec. 15, but won't be available in Europe or the United States until 2015. With a driving range of 300 miles, the Mirai can out-drive plug-in electrics, according to Bloomberg. Hydrogen is the most copious element in the universe and leaves behind only heat and water when expended, so it makes no contributions to global warming or pollution.
"This is not an alternative to a gasoline vehicle," said Scott Samuelsen, an engineer and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California at Irvine, according to Bloomberg. "This is a quantum step up."
The quantum step doesn't mean quantum speed: the car can only reach 62 miles per hour in 9.6 seconds (still faster than a Prius), according to Bloomberg.
Hydrogen fuel cells were proven to be solid technology during the Apollo missions in the 1960s, but the future of hydrogen-powered autos is still shaky. Toyota (along with other companies) has made hybrids, plug-ins and longer-lasting batteries hugely popular, so hydrogen fueling stations might not be the wave of the future. "Every manufacturer has multiple hybrids and electrics coming," said Mike Jackson, CEO of AutoNation, according to Bloomberg. "And here you have Toyota saying, 'We're not going to go full electric. The ultimate answer is fuel cells.'"
There are nay-sayers in the industry like Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn, Nissan Motor's Carlos Ghosn, and Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk, according to Bloomberg, but Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor's president and the heir of the founding family, dismisses the negativity. "Fifteen years ago they said the same thing about the Prius," he said. "Since then, if you consider all [our] hybrid brands, we have sold 7 million of them."
"The automobile industry can contribute to the sustainable growth of earth itself," Toyoda said, according to Bloomberg. "At Toyota, we are looking out 50 years and even more decades into the future. I do believe that [the] fuel-cell vehicle is the ultimate environmentally friendly car. But the point is not just to introduce it as an eco-friendly car with good mileage. I wanted it to be fun to drive and interesting as a car."
