Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (FCVs) are the future for Toyota. The Japanese automaker is reiterating its commitment to its FCVs by designing cheaper, mass-market passenger cars and SUVs, with goals of bringing the technology into buses and trucks as well. The hope is that the next generation of its Mirai hydrogen FCV will be made available in the early 2020s, a feat that many other automakers and industry experts thought would be nearly impossible — or at least, unprofitable.
Toyota believes that part of the problem in adopting FCVs is that they are currently still too expensive. By making these vehicles more affordable, the automaker hopes that FCVs will soon meet with the success of the hybrid. After all, Toyota has some experience bringing new eco-friendly technologies to greater audiences. The first Prius was made in the 1990s, far before other automakers were even considering their environmental impacts.
“We’re going to shift from limited production to mass production, reduce the amount of expensive materials like platinum used in FCV components, and make the system more compact and powerful,” Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of the Mirai, said in an interview with Reuters.
Moreover, Toyota wants to improve the performance of its Mirai cars. The next iteration of these vehicles should see an increased driving range of more than 460 miles, up from the 310-mile range the Mirai can currently achieve. By 2025, sources tell Reuters that the goal is for these FCVs to have a range of well over 600 miles.
This technology, at least for Toyota, has been a long time coming. Indeed, the carmaker has been developing these hydrogen-fueled cars since the early 1990s, and the company was the first to release a production FCV back in 2014 with the original Mirai. Of course, the high price tag associated with the vehicle (it’ll set you back $60,000), as well as the scarcity of refueling options, have stunted adoption. As it stands, fewer than 6,000 Mirais have been sold around the world.
But as a growing number of countries look to eliminate traditional combustion engines from the roads, interest in these new generation vehicles could increase. That’s certainly what Toyota is betting on.
The company is also betting on improved performance. Toyota wants to push the driving range of the next Mirai to 435-466 miles (700-750 kilometers) from around 310 miles (500 kilometers), and to hit 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) by 2025, a separate source said.
Driven by the belief that hydrogen will become a key source of clean energy in the next 100 years, Toyota has been developing FCVs since the early 1990s. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and stores more energy than a battery of equivalent weight.
The Mirai was the world’s first production FCV when it was launched in 2014. But its high cost, around $60,000 before government incentives, and lack of refueling infrastructure have limited its appeal. Fewer than 6,000 have been sold globally.
LMC Automotive forecasts FCVs to make up only 0.2 percent of global passenger car sales in 2027, compared with 11.7 percent for battery EVs. The International Energy Agency predicts fewer FCVs than battery-powered and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles through 2040.
Many automakers, including Nissan and Tesla, see battery-powered cars as a better, zero-emission solution to gasoline engines. Only a handful, including Honda and Hyundai, produce FCVs.
But people familiar with Toyota’s plans said the automaker thinks demand will perk up as more countries, including China, warm to fuel cell technology. The company also sees FCVs as a hedge against a scarcity of key EV battery materials such as cobalt.
HAND BUILT
For now, Mirais are assembled by hand at a plant in Toyota City, where 13 technicians push partially constructed units into assembly bays for detailed inspections. This process yields just 6.5 cars a day, a sliver of Toyota’s average domestic daily production of about 13,400 vehicles.
Strategic Analysis Inc, which has analyzed costs of FCVs including the Mirai, estimates that it costs Toyota about $11,000 to produce each of its fuel cell stacks, by far the vehicles’ most expensive part.
Toyota has been building up production capacity to change that, as it expects global FCV sales climb to 30,000 units annually after 2020 from about 3,000. Strategic Analysis estimates that would allow Toyota to reduce costs to about $8,000 per stack.
It has already begun to use parts developed for the Mirai in other models, such as the fuel cell stack, which is used in Kenworth freight trucks being tested in California, the Sora FC bus it released in Japan in March, and the delivery trucks it will test with Seven-Eleven stores in Japan next year.
“It will be difficult for Toyota to lower FCV production costs if it only produces the Mirai,” the first source told Reuterson condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue. “By using the FCV system in larger models, it is looking to lower costs by mass-producing and using common parts across vehicle classes,” he added.
The Mirai’s high production costs are largely due to expensive materials including platinum, titanium and carbon fiber used in the fuel cell and hydrogen storage systems. Engineers have been reducing that by improving the platinum catalyst, a key component in the 370 layered cells in the fuel cell stack, which facilitates the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen that produces electricity.
“We’ve been able to decrease the platinum loading by 10 percent to 20 percent and deliver the same performance,” said Eri Ichikawa, a fuel cell engineer at Cataler Corp, a Toyota subsidiary that specializes in catalytic converters.
Strategic Analysis says using that much less of the precious metal would save up to $300 per fuel cell stack, based on an estimate that Toyota now uses about 30 grams of platinum per unit.