Toyota married to escape artist

The Toyota Mirai.

Toyota’s Mirai uses electricity to make hydrogen to make electricity again. Elon Musk of Tesla fame calls it bulls**t. Toyota said it sells more cars than anyone else and this is the future.

TAKING its opposite stance to both the VW Group and its former ally Tesla a step further, Toyota last week launched the Mirai at the LA Motor Show.

Mirai means future in Japanese and for Toyota this future now only means hydrogen.

The company has in recent times done an about face from the pioneering direction it set with the Prius hybrid and its collaboration with Tesla’s pure electric drivetrains.

Tesla’s Elon Musk called this direction “bulls**t”, but Toyota’s head of strategic ­planning Chris Host­etter told tech writer Jon Gertner of Fast Company Toyota has researched both battery and hydrogen drives thoroughly — going through about a dozen versions of the fuel cells and three versions of the vehicle — ­before the automotive giant decided hydrogen is the way to go.

Hey, where did my gas go!?

What is not mentioned in the press releases is how Toyota plans to solve the main problem in dealing with hydrogen — that it is Mother ­Nature’s greatest escape artist.

Being the element with the smallest molecule, hydrogen can diffuse through even solid steel to rapidly rise to the upper atmosphere.

A study by Frano Barbir entitled “Safety issues of hydrogen in vehicles”, shows hydrogen will escape through joints and invisible stress fractures 2,8 times faster than natural gas through the same microscopic hole.

To pump hydrogen into cars will require huge investments in new storage tanks at forecourts and the wholesalers will have to build the leakage into their pricing, which means the consumer will pay for a lot of air up there. Those who are currently making these investments say they do not see making any money from it before 2024.

At least the billions of dollars market analysts estimate Toyota has already spent over the past two decades to develop its hydrogen future should keep the gas in your Mirai.

Toyota states its hydrogen tanks have a ­three-layer structure made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic and other materials, and they store hydrogen at very high pressure — 70 MPa, or approximately 700 bar.

Hydrogen as safe as petrol

Modern hydrogen cars will be a lot safer than the first hydrogen airships — if your garage has a window or an extractor fan.

Barbir’s computer-generated simulations show a safety-engineered hydrogen fuel cell car “should have less potential hazard than either natural gas or a gasoline vehicle” in a collision on an open road. Should a hydrogen car crash in a tunnel, it will “potentially be less dangerous than a petrol or diesel car”.

Barbir states the greatest potential risk to the public appears to be a slow leak in an enclosed home garage, where an accumulation of hydrogen could lead to fire or explosion.

Dirty coal the reality

Toyota stated hydrogen can easily be generated from many different natural sources and man-made by-products — even sewage sludge.

It can also be created from water using natural, renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power. These are laudable and powerful sentiments, but for the foreseeable future, the reality in most developed markets where the Mirai will sell is that hydrogen will be generated en masse using electricity from coal-fired power stations.

This will make the upstream energy source as dirty as any old diesel truck engine, but twice as wasteful. All those opposed to hydrogen decry this electricity-to-hydrogen electrical loop, ­especially as both Chevrolet and Tesla already boast photovoltaic charging systems to load electric car batteries, making theirs the greenest systems under the Sun.

Toyota said it expects to sell between 50 and 100 Mirais in 2015 and 2016. Meanwhile the race is on to fast track the new generation of flexible super-capacitors, many metres of which can concertina into any gaps in a car, from where it can fast charge a flagging battery in ­minutes.