Toyota Mirai review: it’s not perfect, but it’s pointing the way forward

Forget electric. Toyota’s Mirai — which is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell — points the way to a much more sensible future.

“A power station in a car-shaped wrapper”: the Toyota Mirai

Politicians rarely think about the long term; they want flattering headlines now, not praise in the history books. That’s why we are on a headlong rush to rid ourselves of cars with internal combustion engines. Politicians know that right now there is an electric alternative that sort of works, and that can be just about charged up using renewable energy. So that’s two boxes ticked.

I had an electric sports car on test recently and it was wonderful – lovely to drive and fast beyond belief. But there’s no getting round the fact that child slave labour is used to source some of the materials in electric car batteries. And those batteries don’t last forever, of course.

It’s not just me who has concerns. Carlos Tavares, the CEO of Peugeot, Citroën, Opel and Vauxhall, wonders, “Who is taking the 360-degree view?” He explains that European governments, for example, get 448 billion euros ($723 billion) a year by taxing petrol and diesel cars – what will replace that when we all go electric?

Carlos Tavares. Picture: Eric Piermont / AFP

Tavares also reckons the seismic shift in the way we move about will cause runaway inflation, and few if any countries are able to provide a satisfactory charging infrastructure. Most importantly, though, he says that if we charge headlong into a new electric future, we will be screwed if, in 10 or 20 years, a better alternative comes along.

Which brings me to the car you see here, the hydrogen fuel cell Toyota Mirai. It looks like a car, but it’s actually a power station in a car-shaped wrapper. You fill the tank with hydrogen in the same way you fill up now with petrol and then off you go, in silence, with nothing but water coming out of the exhaust.

The science sounds simple: hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe but it doesn’t like to be alone. It likes to bond with something else, oxygen mostly. So here’s what you do. You pass the hydrogen down a tube and on the other side of a membrane there’s air. The hydrogen can sense the oxygen. It can smell it. And it becomes as desperate as a teenage boy in lockdown. It wants to bond. It wants to mate. And in its desperation it creates electricity. And then, when that has happened, and the car is moving along, the hydrogen and the oxygen are allowed to merge to become... drum roll... H2O.

Brilliant. And elegant. And wonderful. But sadly there are only a handful of hydrogen filling stations in Britain (and three in Australia). So you couldn’t actually go anywhere in a Mirai, even if you’d just spent $100,000 on one. If it were to catch on the cost would come down, but how will that happen when everyone is charging down the rechargeable electric route? It’s like we’re all buying laser discs because we don’t know the internet is coming.

For years I’ve been tearing my hair out over this, convinced that fuel cell technology is the way to go, and I was delighted that Toyota was swimming against the tide with the Mirai. But then I went to see some engineers at the excavator giant JCB and I’m not so sure any more. They explained that the Mirai needs a rechargeable battery to fill the holes where the fuel cell isn’t working at its peak. So it’s not quite as elegant as I’d imagined, and I found that a bit sad. There were a host of other issues too, mainly to do with the pressure needed to fill the tank. And then they explained that JCB had made a normal internal combustion engine run on hydrogen. They took me out to a quarry and showed me: it was powering an excavator that functioned as normal, but the only stuff coming out of the exhaust pipe was steam. This is very intriguing.

The internal combustion engine has been around since the 1800s. We are all familiar with it and we are now very good at making it reliable and cheap. So I now find myself consumed with the idea of using the familiar technology but tweaking it to run on hydrogen. Yes, hydrogen is difficult and expensive to make – it doesn’t like being separated from oxygen – but it is possible, even using solar or geothermal power.

There are legions of engineers working in the car industry and they are simply not being consulted on what route we should take. We must do something; everyone agrees on that. But before we commit to rechargeable electric cars, which is extremely risky, we must pause and seek advice from those who know what they’re on about. And we should start with Tavares.

TOYOTA MIRAI

ENGINE: Hydrogen-powered electric motor (135kW/300Nm), rear-wheel drive

RANGE: About 600km

PRICE: About $100,000 (currently fleet-only in Australia)

STARS: ★★★½