Toyota seems to be stepping up their tease on hydrogen fuel cell cars – do they know something the rest of the industry doesn’t?

The vision of hydrogen fuel cell cars as a “green and clean” alternative to vehicles powered by internal combustion engines has been teased for decades, but to date not much has materialized.

Although there are hydrogen fuel cell cars in production today, such as the Toyota Mirai, the Hyundai Nexo, and the Honda Clarity, to say that their presence in the market is limited is a drastic understatement.

Yet Toyota recently seems to have been steeping up an effort, though still relatively moderate, to increase public attention to the concept of hydrogen fuel cell cars. And my question is, why?

An emerging “awareness zeitgeist” surrounding the Toyota Mirai

As an illustration of what seems to be happening, I’ll share a brief account of my own increasing awareness of the topic over the last couple of months. The growth of my awareness has been slow and subtle, in an almost “under the radar” area of my consciousness. It started with a few comments I heard here and there, mostly centered on the Toyota Mirai, on some of the automotive podcasts I listen to regularly.

The gist of what I heard on the podcasts was that, in the U.S., the Mirai is a vehicle of minimal availability, with ownership being practical (and that’s a stretch) only in a very limited geographic domain—namely, in California. With a relatively quiet launch in 2014, the Toyota Mirai garnered some initial chatter. But that awareness subsided quickly as the share of attention owned by battery electric vehicles continued to grow.

And yet, something seemed to be happening to make a few podcasters start to talk about the Mirai again. It felt as if a nebulous little Mirai zeitgeist was starting to coalesce in the æther.

Then, on January 25, I went to the Washington Auto Show, where, accompanying the Supra, the new 86, the Rav4 hybrid—all of Toyota’s latest shiny objects du jour—an example of the new-generation Mirai was on display at the Toyota booth.

That struck me as strange, because the Washington Auto Show is an event of mostly regional scope.

It’s true that, every year, before the public exhibition opens, the Washington Auto Show hosts sessions that are of interest to such “insider” contingencies as academics and researchers in transportation- and energy-related fields, policymakers, lobbyists, automotive industry thought leaders, policymakers and, of course, the automotive press.

But once the insider sessions and “Media Day” are over and the doors open to the public, the Washington Auto Show is primarily a consumer-facing event.

It isn’t a show of international scope like the LA Auto Show, the New York International Auto Show, or the North American International Auto Show in Detroit—all shows where automakers tend to make their major announcements, show off breathtaking concept cars that will likely never see production, and stage major first-time reveals.

The Washington Auto Show, rather, is organized by the Washington Area New Auto Dealers Association. By and large, it’s an event that gives the retail automotive industry in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area a chance to drum up interest among consumers in vehicles available for sale at local dealerships.

The Mirai itself, painted in an eye-catching shade of blue just one notch up from royal blue on the vibrancy scale, was interesting. From a design perspective, the current generation of the Mirai is a huge step ahead from the staid original design.

Toyota pledged two years ago to stop making boring cars, and design elements of the Mirai reflect an effort to deliver on that corporate edict, as do just about all of the recent design refreshes or new generations within Toyota’s lineup.

That’s a good thing, because, if the Mirai is to succeed in shifting some of the attention away from battery EVs toward hydrogen fuel cell cars, it really needs to look interesting.

An interesting design is one of the few assets this vehicle could have at its disposal to generate excitement because, from a performance standpoint, the Toyota Mirai ain’t no Tesla. The Mirai takes its own sweet time to get from 0–60 mph in—wait for it—almost nine seconds. 

From a visual perspective, it isn’t too bad. It makes a general impression of a forward-thinking modern sedan, with a look that seems to hint at more performance potential than it can actually deliver. Naturally, the example Toyota brought to the Washington Auto Show got a lot of help from its snazzy blue paint job.

But it’s clear that Toyota put some thought and effort behind trying to make this environmentally friendly vehicle look like it isn’t just for tree huggers who don’t care if their car looks like an appliance. Yes, it still has the “angry maw” grille. But in the Mirai, that unfortunate cliché of contemporary automotive design is more subtly blended into the curves of what is essentially a ponton form at the front end.

So Toyota brought the Mirai to the Washington Auto Show, and it looked pretty good. That’s all well and fine. But here’s the bigger question: why this auto show—a consumer-focused event that’s intended in large part to help local dealers sell cars—in a region where owning a Mirai isn’t practical due to a lack of hydrogen fueling stations?

Does Toyota perhaps have plans in the works that will make filling stations for hydrogen fuel cell cars more pervasive in more areas of the U.S.?

On the Toyota website, there is a locator tool that can help users find gas stations with fuel pumps that can fill a Toyota Mirai’s hydrogen tanks. According to that locator, the closest Mirai fueling station to my residence in the Northeastern U.S. is over 2,600 miles away, in Torrance, California.

In fact, all of the fueling stations that Toyota lists for the Mirai are in California. That clearly excludes the Washington D.C. metropolitan area, the outer reaches of which are barely an hour away from me. And this limited availability is corroborated by data on hydrogen fuel stations on the websites of the Alternative Fuels Data Center and Green Car Reports.

Enter Toyota President Akio Toyoda with a brave new hydrogen-fueled vision

As if the presence of the Mirai at the Washington Auto Show wasn’t perplexing enough, another shoe dropped just a few days later, when a media alert about some remarks that Toyota President Akio Toyoda made at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show appeared in my inbox.

In the context of announcing that Toyota is building a “prototype town of the future” in Higashi-Fuji, Japan, Mr. Toyoda made reference to “an infrastructure of the future that is connected… digital and sustainable powered by Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell technology.”

So here we have yet another clue that Toyota has big plans for hydrogen, with this comment suggesting that the scope of those plans just might extend beyond the realm of vehicles.

But if it’s true that Toyota is ramping up for a bigger play on hydrogen fuel cells, it’s quite a contrarian play given the direction the rest of the industry seems to be taking. As an illustration, let’s look at the contrasting vision that the world’s largest automaker—Volkswagen—is currently articulating.

Hydrogen fuel cell cars vs. battery electric cars: Volkswagen’s position

The Volkswagen Group, if their public statements are to be believed, has expressed a staunch focus on battery electric vehicles, pledging to cease production of gas-powered vehicles by 2026.

That pledge does not in itself preclude the possibility that hydrogen fuel cells could be the source of electricity for Volkswagen electric cars. But for now, there is a clear, stated emphasis on battery-powered electric vehicles, according to Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft, an investor-relations website operated by the company, even though subsidiary Audi has a hydrogen-powered vehicle scheduled for release next year.

To grasp how wide the difference is between the hydrogen approach and the battery approach, it’s important to first understand at least the big picture of how hydrogen fuel cell cars work.

As the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) explains it, hydrogen fuel cells generate electricity from energy that comes from combining hydrogen and oxygen. The only “byproducts” released back into the environment are water and heat, while the electricity generated by the reaction is harnessed to charge batteries that, in turn, power electric motors that run the vehicles.

Sounds pretty clean and green, doesn’t it?

The benefit, according to the UCS, is a range of about 200–300 miles between refueling stops, comparable to most vehicles powered by internal combustion engines—and beyond that of most plug-in EVs on the market that depend entirely on their batteries.

According to Toyota, the Mirai’s range is 312 miles before the hydrogen tanks need to be refilled. Assuming ready availability of fueling stations—which of course, currently, is not the case—312 miles should be more than adequate to allay range anxiety concerns.

Nevertheless, Volkswagen makes a case centered on the basic engineering and supply chain behind the energy production in the hydrogen fuel cell model to support their decision to direct their efforts cars powered entirely by on-board batteries.  

In an article on Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft that quotes two academic researchers in the energy field, Professors Maximilian Fichtner of the Helmholtz Institute Ulm for Electrochemical Energy Storage and Volker Quaschning of the Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft (University of Applied Sciences for Engineering and Economics) in Berlin, Volkswagen basically argues that it’s a question of scale.

As with gasoline, hydrogen fuel cell technology requires a lot of transportation and storage resources get fuel to hydrogen takes that are installed in the vehicles. It takes energy to power tanker trucks that would get hydrogen to local fueling stations, and energy to power those fueling stations. In Professor Fichtner’s words, that creates a situation of “very poor energy efficiency well-to-wheel” in fuel-cell cars.

In Volkswagen’s view, it makes a lot more sense to generate electricity at scale, with centralized power stations delivering electricity through a grid that the consumer can plug into for battery electric vehicle charging.

Yet Toyota is still putting their hydrogen-powered Mirai in a bit of a spotlight. Maybe it’s a differentiation play that comes, in part, from the automaker taking a thorough look at their full portfolio of branded assets.

Volkswagen is indeed the largest automaker at the worldwide level, with nearly 11 million vehicles sold in 2019 according to Statista. But Toyota is only slightly behind. And in the coveted U.S. market, Toyota exceeds Volkswagen substantially. According to CarSalesBase, Toyota, holding a 12.2 percent share of the U.S. market, sold 2.1 million vehicles in the U.S. in 2019, dwarfing Volkswagen’s 2.1 percent market share and 363,322 units sold.  

That disparity between the two automakers is reflected by how many dealerships each operates in the U.S., which is home to nearly 1,500 Toyota and Lexus dealers according to Toyota USA Operations, but less than half as many Volkswagen dealers as of 2018, according to Automotive News.         

On top of that, the loyalty of existing owners to Toyota’s brands looks fierce. Their Lexus marque topped all other luxury brands in J.D. Power’s 2019 Automotive Brand Loyalty Study. And among mass market brands, Toyota in the same study was second only to Subaru in brand loyalty, besting all U.S. brands. Volkswagen trailed far behind.

So where could Toyota be going with hydrogen fuel cell cars?

Here’s where I’m going with all this. Granted, Toyota isn’t exactly making an all-out push for hydrogen fuel cells with their recent efforts to shine some light on the Mirai. But the recent actions we’ve looked at here do suggest that they’re at least testing the waters.

As we already see with battery electric vehicles, the greatest challenge to stronger market penetration of alternative-fuel vehicles is the refueling infrastructure. But what if Toyota decided to start rolling out hydrogen pumps at all their dealers, at least in selected major metropolitan areas?

For a comparative perspective, Tesla currently reports having 1,804 supercharging stations with 15,911 superchargers. With Toyota’s 1,500 dealers, they already own the real estate to theoretically rival this network in number and pervasiveness. But with hydrogen, Toyota could have a benefit in customer throughput.

While it takes about 75 minutes to fully charge a Tesla at a supercharger, Toyota claims that you can refuel a Mirai with hydrogen in about five minutes. That means that, with even one hydrogen fueling pump at a Toyota dealer, they could theoretically move up to 15 times more customers through refueling cycles than a single Tesla supercharger could in a given timeframe.

And what if they expanded that just a little? With just two hydrogen pumps operating 12 hours per day seven days per week, a single dealership could theoretically deliver over 2,000 re-fuels per week to hydrogen fuel-cell cars.

If you think it would be burdensome to manage the customer throughput for refueling, think again and consider how many automotive dealers are already managing heavy daily traffic through on-site car washes and express oil changes.

This is not to say that I have direct evidence that Toyota has these kinds of plans to back up the vision for the future of hydrogen fueled vehicles that seems to be gradually emerging in tentative, rough-sketch form.

But I do think my little thought experiment here does show that, if they want to, Toyota is entirely capable of creating at least a baseline infrastructure to support a larger market play for the Mirai, and maybe even more hydrogen electric models that they may want to introduce down the line.

And given Akio Toyoda’s recent remarks at CES, Toyota’s vision of the role of hydrogen in our future might even extend beyond the realm of individually owned hydrogen fuel cell cars. After all, Toyota has been one of the more vocal automakers about the transition toward being not an automaker but a mobility company.