There is no single angle from which it looks anything but pretty or it new cell car you choose. But there’s also no single angle from which the 2016 Toyota Mirai looks like anything elseto be pretty or not it way of hydrogen cell are now go back remodel it.
That is literally by design, as outlined in our earlier in-depth coverage of the car. It can be argued that hybrids are a thing because Toyota made them a thing—not a trim level or engine variant of an existing vehicle, but their very own phenomenon in the form of the Prius. To advertise the fact that the Prius was not like anything else, Toyota made it look unlike anything else. Time will tell if Toyota can do the same trick with the ghastly Mirai, but the automaker is banking big on the car and even bigger on hydrogen technology and infrastructure.
At this point, few car shoppers know how hydrogen fuel cells work, and getting one’s head around the process by which they eventually propel a car (it largely happens at the atomic level) is somewhat of a “trust us” kind of thing. In a nutshell, it goes something like this:
A fuel cell generates electricity from an electrochemical reaction between hydrogen and air. Hydrogen atoms compressed and stored in high-pressure tanks—the Mirai has two that together hold about 11 pounds of hydrogen at 10,000 psi—are sent through a platinum-coated membrane that separates their electrons and protons. Those electrons produce an electrical current to power a drive motor, in this case a synchronous AC unit capable of 151 horsepower and 247 lb-ft of torque. The freed protons combine with oxygen on the other side of the membrane before exiting the tailpipe as water. How much water? About 100 cc per mile, according to Toyota, or a little less than half a cup.
In the Mirai, a four-phase boost converter brings voltage to 650 volts, making it compatible with Toyota’s existing Hybrid Synergy Drive system. Here, the setup still includes a rather unfuturistic nickel-metal-hydride battery to store the energy; as with the Prius, this is used primarily to capture regenerative braking energy and assist during acceleration.
For all of its newfangled technology, the Mirai drives no differently than a normal battery-electric vehicle, which is to say it feels heavy, synthetic, and utterly free of drama. On our brief drive opportunity in Newport Beach, California, we noted acceleration that starts out spry but drops off drastically as one approaches highway speeds. Toyota’s claim that the Mirai can hit 60 mph in nine seconds flat is entirely believable based on our short bursts of acceleration and our brief freeway hop, although we’ll have to take Toyota’s word that it can touch 111 mph, as we never saw more than 75. All the while, the powertrain is utterly silent save for some muted gear whine, which in turn makes other sources of sound, such as the tires on the pavement and even the HVAC system, seem louder.
Like the exterior, the Mirai’s interior design is highly expressive and unusual, centralizing the gauges up by the windshield, à la Prius, and arranging secondary controls on intersecting planes that swoosh across the cabin. As is becoming the trend these days, many of the controls are of the capacitive-touch variety. Hopefully, Toyota will at least throw in a microfiber wipe cloth to deal with the copious fingerprints, as does Cadillac with its CUE-equipped products.
Like BEVs, fuel-cell vehicles are heavy, and the Mirai is said to weigh in at a hefty 4079 pounds—nearly 600 more than a dimensionally similar Camry hybrid—despite the use of carbon fiber for the storage tanks. At least the heaviest bits are mounted low and are spread out within the vehicle structure. While we didn’t push the car too hard, we didn’t notice obvious signs of extreme body roll. But we also didn’t feel much of anything happening where the rubber meets the road, so numbly tuned are the chassis and steering. On the plus side, the ride couldn’t be creamier if the shocks were filled with Cool Whip. We’ll need more time with the Mirai to conclusively determine its dynamic limits, but they’re probably pretty low. Notably, unlike those in some FCVs and BEVs, the Mirai’s regenerative brakes are not aggressive enough to facilitate one-pedal driving—where the driver merely needs to lift off the accelerator to slow the car in normal traffic—even in battery-priority mode.
Although there are no MPGe numbers available yet, the Mirai promises to be relatively fuel efficient, offering more range than the recently released Hyundai Tucson fuel cell (up to 300 miles versus 265 for the Tucson) despite having lower tank capacity (11 pounds of hydrogen versus 12.4 for the Tucson). Furthermore, while filling the Tucson’s tanks takes about ten minutes, Toyota claims that process will take only five minutes with the Mirai, a time comparable to how long it takes to fill up a gas-fueled car’s tank.
The time required to hunt down a hydrogen filling station is a different story, even in alt-fuel-friendly California, the only state where the Mirai will initially be offered. At this point, one can count the number of hydrogen filling stations in California on two hands, and sales will be limited to customers who live near those stations. But new state funding is expected to bring 17 more hydrogen stations on line by the end of 2015 and another 28 by the end of 2016. Toyota has even pledged to help maintain 19 of them and is inviting other OEMs to follow its lead. Toyota claims that the number of stations is less important than their locations; citing a study by the University of California, Irvine, Toyota says that most customers will want to be within a six-minute drive of a refueling station, and it would take only 68 refueling stations strategically located in the Bay area and the Los Angeles/San Diego corridor to adequately serve a population of 10,000 fuel-cell vehicles. Another dozen stations, partially supported by Toyota along with energy supplier Air Liquide, are on the way in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island to support Mirai sales there starting in 2016.
It’s true that the Mirai is far from handsome, and, for what it’s worth, no one at Toyota is claiming it’s beautiful. But the company has a deep-rooted confidence that the Mirai will help usher in the hydrogen age. Nobody has claimed that such a sea change need be pretty—but that couldn’t hurt, could it
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