2022 Toyota Mirai Review – Is Hydrogen really the fuel of the future ?

hey guys and welcome to petroped and welcome back to my handy long term of the toyota rav4 plug-in hybrid now i must admit i am a bit of a fan of a plug-in hybrid it gives you that lovely balance between eevee running on short trips and a petrol engine to back you up on a longer trip but in my time while i've been doing petroped in fact in my time while i've been driving i've driven lots of different types of propulsion systems in cars i've driven all the different variants of petrol engine with the exception of a w16 i've driven normally aspirated diesel turbo diesel i've driven hybrid plug-in hybrid and a whole range of evs but every time i drive a navy there is one type of car that people always bring up in the comments and one type of car i've never driven before or more specifically one type of propulsion so i am on my way to toyota uk to test drive a car with a propulsion system that i've never experienced before i have a feeling today is going to be really interesting [Music] so welcome to the secret bunker that houses the toyota heritage collection there is everything in here that you could imagine there's a beautiful mark 1 and mark ii mr2 over there there's some really early toyotas but what am i going to be driving today well sadly it's not this stunning lfa with its screaming v10 engine i have actually driven a v10 before so in my intro i did say today i was driving a power train that i've never driven before could it be a formula one car no sadly not although that would be very cool as well now today i'm going to be driving a car that toyota one of the few manufacturers to have a commercially available vehicle today is all about hydrogen hydrogen fuel cells to be specific and the car i'm going to be driving is parked outside let's go and take a look so i've been driving my long-term rav4 over there for a couple of months now and i love the styling of that car i love living with that car on a day-to-day basis the plug-in hybrid drivetrain is just a really really good fit for my lifestyle short runs you're on ev long runs you can rely on the hybrid and for me that is a really good example of toyota at their best however what toyota are also really good at is pushing the boundaries of technology and this i think this car demonstrates that better than anything else this is the toyota mirai and it's powered by a hydrogen fuel cell so over the past few years i've got to drive my fair share of hybrid and battery electric vehicles and some of them have impressed me a great deal but the one thing in common whenever you do a review of especially full-blown electric cars somewhere in the comments someone is going to say albert ped the solution to all of this kind of range anxiety and charge times and public charging infrastructure is hydrogen hydrogen's the future hydrogen fuel cell cars that's the way we should be going well today i thought i would explore that a little bit more by driving my first fuel cell car the toyota mirai now this is actually the second generation mirai a full fuel cell powered car so the question is what exactly is a hydrogen fuel cell how do they work how does the refueling thing work there's an awful lot to unpack so very shortly i'm going to be joined by someone from toyota to help us deep dive into all of that so in this video i want to really get a better understanding of hydrogen and what part it could play in our future for automotive especially here in the uk when from 2030 new car sales can't be internal combustion engine cars we've kind of backed the whole battery electric vehicle thing here in the uk and the question is is that the right way to go is that the right decision was it made with all the facts or are there other ways forward and i think it's a really interesting debate but i also want to drive this car and review it as a car how does it drive what's it like and i'm really excited to do that so before we deep dive into all the technical stuff let's just take a very quick look around the car because it's a handsome looking car and we'll start off at the back so i guess the first thing to say about the mirai is you probably don't see many of them around this is the first one i've had a really good look at that hasn't been at something like festival of speed because if you don't live near a hydrogen fuel station and we'll talk about how many of those there are in the uk and where they are then really you wouldn't buy one of these in fact toyota wouldn't sell you one because you wouldn't be able to live with it so they are a rare car i think it's a handsomely styled car it's a kind of four-door fastback style the spec of the car is very similar to my rav actually this particular spec white with black roof black privacy glass it looks really really smart now we often talk about battery electric vehicles housing having zero emissions well unfortunately this car does have emissions but don't worry because the way that the fuel cell works we'll delve into in a bit more detail very shortly but basically take hydrogen and oxygen and combine the two together to help power the car along but the byproduct of that comes out the exhaust pipe and it's water so this is an emission creating vehicle but the emission is water now for me this film is all about the technology that sits underneath this and i really want to deep dive into that so the next thing we're going to do is get someone from toyota to help us understand a bit more about how this car works and a bit more about the overriding strategy around hydrogen and where that sits in the if you like the technology mix of vehicles going forward but from an aesthetics point of view i really like this now then guys welcome to the channel david from toyota now you're going to tell us everything we need to know about hydrogen right yeah morning ped uh let's start the beginning what you're going to drive today is an electric car but not in the traditional sense of the word in the way that we've grown to understand it you don't plug the mirror in to charge its battery uh it's fueled by hydrogen um and if we look under the bonnet what we see here is the fuel cell stack yeah and the converter yeah so the hydrogen combined in there where there's 330 fuel cells uh with oxygen then creates the electricity that powers the car so there's no is there a battery bank like you would have in a traditional bev yes there's a battery yeah but it's far far smaller yeah than the battery you'd need to deliver the 400 mile range that the mirai can drive okay so let's take a step back for so those guys who've not any idea if we go start off with the hydrogen side of things so hydrogen gets put into this vehicle yep as a liquid correct under pressure correct 700 bar the bit you said to me 700 baht that is immense yeah and then if you looked at the technology that creates those fuel tanks the carbon fiber fiber weave it's really interesting and there's all sorts of videos online yeah the r d between behind those tanks bullets being fired into them to prove the safety of hydrogen and so on and so forth but but i guess a normal petrol car has a petrol tank full of a highly combustible fluid in it right so this is so the the fuel tank that holds the hydrogen how much hydrogen would be on on board uh there's about six kilos six kilos of hydrogen under pressure at 700 bar yeah in a carbon fiber fuel tank correct see that's cool you've got carbon fiber already in the fuel tank and then it gets fed into where does the the oxygen and hydrogen mix gets done there so where there are fuel cells and gas channels in this stack the chemical reaction occurs in that stack and then through the converter we create the electricity that powers the car wow okay and the oxygen does it just get from the atmosphere yes yeah and that leads us on to another interesting quirk of the mirai yeah so to some extent the mirai will clean the air as it drives so so there is there is a a filter that has an electric charge applied to it and while the car is driving the air that hits that charge is then effectively cleaned so almost 100 of pollutants up to 2.5 in diameter will be removed as the mirai drives wow so this is actually kind of solving global warming by cleaning the atmosphere let's not get carried away so okay so in terms of the so let's talk electric numbers and relate them to a normal electric vehicle what kind of uh power and and so on have we got so in terms of power as we'd understand it when we traditionally talk about cars uh the mirror has about 170 horsepower yeah now if we go back in terms of the progress of toyota fuel cells and the mirai this is the second generation mirai the old car had about 150 horsepower but the advance in technology means that we have a fuel cell powertrain that is 50 lighter than that old system but still manages to produce about 12 13 percent more power right okay okay so so okay can we talk hydrogen in the if you like the ecosystem of cars and the future and fueling so you need hydrogen for one of these yeah you can't get that from a normal fuel station and unlike an electric car you can't have it at home how many stations are there in the uk whereabouts are they what's the sort of the situation there there's 11 or 12 and i say 11 or 12 because um one or two are just in the process of opening so there's a new station that's opened up in t side uh there's soon to be one in derby last year there was one that opened in birmingham so things are growing in terms of infrastructure but we're nowhere near the stage where we can consider hydrogen fuel cell vehicles mainstream in the uk yet yeah and i say in the uk because it's interesting looking across the rest of the world uh if you look at germany for example uh in europe uh they have 90 refuelling stations to our 10 or 11. what why does that surprise me okay so the other thing talking off camera we talked so a lot of people say okay how do you distribute the hydrogen to these stations you say some of them they effectively create the hydrogen at the station rather than having it tankered around in big hydrogen's the most abundant element in the universe you can create hydrogen on-site at a fuel pump uh you electrolyze uh using uh hopefully green energy um you you can electrolyze using excess energy from the grid so energy that is otherwise wasted can be used to create your hydrogen so um if the investment in the infrastructure is there to deliver these green electrolyzing fuel stations i think that's a really uh strong way forward so obviously this is a kind of consumer passenger vehicle and in order to live with one of these under most people's journey profile unless it was just local trips and you live near a hydrogen station that's probably not a great thing but where does this hydrogen sit within things like commercial vehicles because it seems to me things like buses lorries tractors hydrogen sounds perfect for those because battery electric vehicle buses and stuff have real challenges in terms of range and charge times and if you live somewhere that's hilly yeah or if you're running a bus in the cold for eight hours a day yeah it might not stack up but you're right to talk about those other sectors and for toyota passenger cars is the tip of the iceberg toyota's been looking at fuel cell technology since the early 90s in terms of as a fuel what it can deliver in terms of reducing emissions not just in personal mobility but as you say heavy haulage uh trucks buses trains planes but increasingly we'll also see hydrogen being used to power homes to power industry heating lighting uh delivering energy for a cleaner world in fact toyota's building a city woven city in japan at the base of mount fuji which will combine all of those elements of a hydrogen society to demonstrate how you can use this fuel source to decarbonize yeah so i get because people kind of need to see this almost as a technology test bed as pushing the boundaries disruptive technology yeah because some people might look at like what's the point of a fuel cell car you can't fill it up you can't use it but that's not the point it is a test bed for toyota even though this is the second generation mirai and where does this sit in your your kind of hybrid because obviously i've i've turned up today in a plug-in hybrid toyota i know i thought you'd be pleased with that one um and i love it to bits and and you've clearly you're known for the prius and yeah and almost the the hybrid revolution you could pretty much put that at toyota's doorstep right it's you were responsible for a lot of that and they arrived with that whole mix for you yeah it completes the picture for toyota so the arrival of battery electric vehicles for lexus and soon toyota combined with fuel cell technology means that we can offer the whole package for consumers who want to drive vehicles with fewer emissions so we have our traditional hybrid electric vehicles you mentioned the prius as the start of that powertrain we have plug-ins we have fuel cell and we have battery electric there's not many manufacturers can say that i don't think there are any and that amazes me that that that everyone talks about fuel cell hybrid hydrogen's the future but very few manufacturers are actually doing it playing with it commercially having it available and i think that comes back to toyota's world view of the the benefits of hydrogen as a fuel that stretch far beyond personal transport so we see this as very much a small piece of the hydrogen society generally so the next thing i'll do is take it for a drive go for a spin i'm looking forward to that thank you so much for for giving us an insight into the the sort of toyota vision for fuel cell and helping us understand this a little bit more no trouble it does look really cool though you should okay are we ready to drive our first hydrogen fuel cell vehicle i'm so excited about this so first off just approach this car like driving an ev by all accounts um we talked about the fuel cell under the bonnet so that's where the magic happens where the hydrogen is combined with the oxygen to create the electricity to then drive the motor the motor is on the rear axle so it's a rear wheel drive vehicle hydrogen um storage is this three pressurized hydrogen tanks on the car one runs effectively under here where the transmission tunnel is there's one under the rear seat and one under the boot um there's a smaller capacity battery as well but let's start the car coming to life there you go some nice funky graphics i love the interior it got a really nice nice display very modern feel kind of very prius like gear changer um i recommend we just get going so i'll just push that and then down to put it into drive and then off we go so well that just feels like a normal electric car and i guess that's that's the thing with this right you just it just drives like a normal electric car but the energy that the electric motor is using is coming from a chemical reaction so i find it incredible within the uk we've got this fascination with battery electric vehicles and everybody's being forced to go that way and i'm not going to sit here and say that's right or wrong but i just think it's in my view a little bit too blinkered because there are other options so yes bev technology is better battery efficiencies are better than they've ever been i'm going to go up here i think i don't actually know where i am so i'm probably going to get lost in a big way um but yeah so we've got better battery technology better motor technology and i guess it's an easier fix or a quick fix because you know we've already got a wide range of battery vehicles out there and all manufacturers have now battery vehicle or battery electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles on their fleet but the challenges with a battery electric vehicle as i've documented in many of my videos is weight of the vehicle range of the vehicle and then charging now if you are doing local trips and you've got the ability to charge at home and one of the other things i get always thrown at me whenever i'm doing an electric car review is it's fine if you've got somewhere at home but if you are living in a flat or you don't have off street parking then charging your own car at home is is a real problem um and therefore you're then having to use public infrastructure and there's the cost associated with using that public infrastructure and the time and the pain and the hassle um my other issue with uh just going down the whole battery route is the uk government have just reduced vat on public electric charging because it was different to domestic v80 but you know the elephant in the room is how much money does the uk government currently make from duty on fuel i don't know what the exact number is but it's it's in excess of 80 pence in the pound is is tax right so what happens when we all start using electric vehicles and not not using petrol and diesel where's that tax going to come from well it's going to come from electric right they're going to have to increase taxes on electric that will make electric vehicles even more expensive to use and operate so for me hydrogen is is an interesting part of the mix yes there are some significant hurdles to overcome and the biggest one at the moment is the accessibility of hydrogen as a fuel source so you know for me i can rock up to it if i went to a hydrogen station which i won't do today as it happens because the car's full but i could go to a hydrogen station i can connect the nozzle to the back of this car and i can get a full tank of hydrogen in three minutes and that will give me about 400 miles of range this car will do around about 400 miles it depends obviously on how you drive interestingly it also depends on how much um or how efficiently the hydrogen delivery system is working so that very high pressure delivery system it might not always be the case that you can get the full pressure into the tank so you might you know be 20 or 30 miles off the theoretical maximum so i think for one of these sort of 300 350 miles is a realistic range on a full tank of hydrogen but you can get that in three minutes so although driving one of these cars is just like driving an ev there's also loads more stuff going on here that's all very new so the interesting thing is um if you think about a petrol car you'd be talking about miles per gallon if you're thinking about um an electric car it would be miles per kilowatt hour in this car you're talking kilograms per hundred kilometers so they kind of think about the hydrogen in terms of its weight rather than its volume which i think is really interesting and i have occurred at the moment we're doing uh 1.23 kilograms per 100 kilometers now i'm not entirely sure whether that's good or bad just like an ev this car is so quiet but it's also so smooth the ride quality is excellent and i think that's you know you might think of this car and think oh maybe it's a test but maybe it's not a great car but if you eve just take the fact that it's a fuel cell car out of the equation and just just take this car on its own merits as a car and it's a really good car i like it a lot and i've only been in it an hour [Music] but if you then add to the fact that it's it's a fuel cell car and it's got so much technology in it it's truly truly impressive and you know if this if this is what we could have if this is the future that we could have in terms of the car let's kind of deal with the whole hydrogen infrastructure problem but in terms of the actual car and you translate this technology into a passenger car into um goods vehicles and you know uh vans and buses passenger service vehicles tractors earth moving equipment for me actually as we said earlier on those are the types of vehicles that are crying out for hydrogen because bevs just simply don't work for them it's all very well and good elon musk talking about his tesla truck but really really in the big scheme of things i just don't see that working i i really don't see there's a truck coming the other way i don't see electric trucks working in in scale and i think hydrogen is the perfect solution for that this is more like it out of the built-up area onto a nice bit of road so let's now appraise the car as a car it's a really comfy place to sit it does feel like quite a heavy car it's quite softly sprung it's by no means set up as a sports car the turn of pace in sport mode is is ample it certainly gives a kind of punchiness to the drive as i've mentioned it's by no means going to set the world on fire but actually when you start getting a nice sort of set of flowing bends it's an enjoyable place to sit it's so quiet this car and it's so smooth it's got regenerative braking and the brake pedal feel is nice but it's not as aggressive as the sort of one pedal driving modes you might get in some evs and honestly i'm sitting here thinking you know if you didn't tell me this was a hydrogen powered car i wouldn't really know to be honest it just has the characteristics of of abev it's got that instant torque it's an electric car the only difference is how the electricity is generated rather than it's generated from an external source like i don't know a wind farm or a nuclear power station or a coal-fired power station and then stored in a battery and then delivered to the motor the difference is this thing generates the electricity on the fly by a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen and i think that's really really cool this car makes so many cool noises when you turn it off so what are my final impressions of the toyota mirai as it purges itself after our drive i have found today fascinating on so many levels i've wanted to drive a hydrogen fuel cell car for some time you might be able to see the the vapor coming out the back of the car and that's really cool but yeah i wanted to drive a fuel cell car for quite some time and and to be honest i didn't really know what to expect although i kind of thought it would just be like driving an ev and it is so if you've never driven a fuel cell car it's just like driving a normal electric car the only difference is that car generates his electricity on board using a fuel cell rather than storing the electricity in a battery as a car very impressive it's beautifully put together it's got so much kind of familiarity to me as having driven the the rav4 for the last couple of months it's a beautiful interior i think the styling's great i quite like the fact that it's a sort of fastback four-door saloon and not an suv i think it would look amazing as a shooting brake estate car though but for me this video is actually more about the fuel source rather than the car is hydrogen a viable thing for our motoring future you know is it something that we should be investing more money and should it be higher up the agenda and from what i've learned today i think the simple answer to that question is yes and i would love to know what you think please join the debate in the comments below at the moment the infrastructure in the uk anyway is at its infancy 10 stations although the advantage of that is you can turn up to a hydrogen station within three minutes you get 400 miles of range on your car it's done sorted you don't have to think about transporting large big tankers full of hydrogen because the fuel station can generate that hydrogen at source so it's an investment thing right it's a it's a will if the government said right actually part of the energy mix is going to be hydrogen and we're going to invest in it then i think things would be very very different hats off to toyota for for having what is effectively a showcase of technology but for pushing the agenda i think for um for for goods vehicles for buses and trucks and plant equipment and tractors hydrogen has to be part of the mix because just full-blown electric doesn't work for them and i think if we think about what's going to happen in not just post 2030 but what's the world going to look like in 10 20 30 40 years time hydrogen has to be part of that for me and today i've kind of really opened up a i feel like a bit of a pandora's box i want to learn more i want to explore this further but i would love to know what you think i have to say a massive thank you to toyota uk for inviting me up today to experience the mirai as i said it's been something i've wanted to do for quite some time so to finally get to do it's been fantastic i love to know what you think but i hope you've enjoyed that one if you have done so please give me a thumbs up comments below are always welcome and if you haven't done so already please subscribe to petrified for plenty more content to come but for now i've got the car for another couple of hours i'm going for a drive i'll see you on the next film guys you take care drive safe [Music] you

Channel: Petrol Ped

Views: 74,902

Keywords: petrol ped, ped petrol, petrol ped youtube, youtube petrol ped, toyota mirai, toyota mirai 2022, toyota mirai review, mirai review, toyota mirai uk, toyota hydrogen car, new toyota mirai, toyota fuel cell car, hydrogen car, how does a hydrogen car work, hydrogen car range, fuel cell car explained, fuel cell technology, new hydrogen car, hydrogen car review, hydrogen fuel stations, hydrogen fuel stations uk, toyota mirai range, hydrogen fuel station, toyota mirai price

Id: MPgmblsWoJ8

Length: 28min 4sec (1684 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 18 2022