- The Mirai made financial sense AS A LEASE for folks in Southern California back in 2022 (possibly 2023) because:
- Car prices in general (including EVs) were fairly highly priced at the time due to demand, the chip shortage, etc.
- There were clean vehicle incentives to get a Toyota Mirai, including things like a hydrogen fuel fill up card to cover expenses.
- At the time there was some assumptions that hydrogen fuel costs would go down over time, but they actually went up.
The article does talk about the lack of investment in hydrogen infrastructure, this is true and theres been a huge split between announced infrastructure investments and what has actually happened (see https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3labfzi... for a chart going through 2021-2024). The current US political situation and its impact on clean energy probably doesn't help either.
But I got in near the bottom and got out before the market for it dumped.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
In general, "green hydrogen" makes the most sense if used as a chemical feedstock that replace natural gas in industrial processes - not to replace fossil fuels or be burned for heat.
On paper, hydrogen has good energy density, but taking advantage of that in truth is notoriously hard. And for things that demand energy dense fuels, there are many less finicky alternatives.
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.
Even if you assume that is true. It will always be more expensive then straight electricity.
> The more sensible project were the green steel project.
Not sure I agree. I think Boston Metal solution is better long term carbon free steel solution.
> natural gas with bio fuels
There was a huge 'bio' fuels hype around like 15-20 years ago if I remember correctly. Huge amount of controversy and false claims with politicians support.
Funny how this now comes back again and nothing was learned.
I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.
I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.
But I think battery / biofuel is the future.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
Synthetic fuels don't "make a lot of sense" for "heavy stuff", rail electrification has been the norm everywhere the capital costs were justified (it's at about 30% worldwide, 57% in europe, some countries like Switzerland are nearly 100% electric).
Synthetic fuels make sense for autonomy reasons when you can't tether the "heavy stuff", but fuel engines absolutely suck for heavy work loads, electric transmissions started being a thing before railway electrification even was.
And of course those are situations where hydrogen sucks, fuel is useful there because it's a stable and dense form of energy storage which is reasonably easy to move about without infrastructure, you can bring a bunch of barrels on a trailer, or tank trailers, to an off-grid site and fuel all your stuff (including electric generators). With hydrogen you're now wasting a significant portion of the energy you brought in trying to keep the hydrogen from going wild.
Trains is an easy one, over head lines.
Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.
Shenzhen electrified its entire 16,000-vehicle bus fleet in 2017 - that's almost a decade ago. Since then virtually all of China has transitioned to electric, and other countries aren't far behind. Electric buses have completely taken over the market.
And it isn't just rich Western countries playing around either. We're seeing countries like Slovenia and Romania at >90% electric, and even countries like Ecuador and Colombia and targeting 100% electric in 2030 and 2035!
All the hard technical and financial problems have been solved. If your city isn't adopting electric buses yet, it will be solely due to political reasons.
Trains no, electrify everywhere is clearly better. Maybe for really old legacy branch lines, batteries.
Trucks should as much as possible move to rail, much better solution.
For the rest, the waste majority of short-haul trucking, should be electric. In Europe, the amount of stopping trucks have to do already can be used to charge.
Only ultra long haul trucking has to stay on traditional fuels, and that a small %. And then you might as well just use conventional fuels.
Some aircraft is the only really good application. But I think not hydrogen, and instead syn-jet fuel.
Then when you attempt to explain that no, that's not how it works, we need to always separate the hydrogen molecules from another substance, which takes energy. A significant amount of energy. So much energy that it's better to shove the same amount of kWh to a battery instead.
The only vaguely useful thing for Green Hydrogen would be renewable overflow storage. When your solar/wind farm is producing too much energy for the grid, you shove it to an electrolysis station that converts water to hydrogen and pressurises it.
Then you pump that into a gigantic fuel cell when the sun is down or it's not windy anymore.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.
What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!
(I think it's called kerosene.)
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
The strategy clearly stated by Akio Toyoda is multiple power train technology. You can listen to his interviews on the subject, some are in Japanese, but as you have stated a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Toyota's policy I will assume you have that fluency.
(Automotive OEMs are assemblers, the parts come from the supply chain starting with Tier 1 suppliers. In that sense TMC does not do "making engines", but possibly the nuance and consequences here of whether not it "wraps it's head" to "makes things", vs if it has the capability to specify, manufacture distribute something at scale with a globally localized supply chain AND adjust to consumer demand/resource availability changes 5 years after the design start - in this context i ask you, can you "wrap your head" around the latest models that are coming out in every power train technology fcev, (p)hev to bev)
If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.
Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.
Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.
LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
Which is also the reason why its plug-in hybrids are so reliable, despite being dramatically more complex than either an EV or an ICE.
Toyota is very good at making engines, and it would be insane to throw away all that expertise to deliver a half-assed new product.
See: the Hindenburg disaster
afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.
The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.
wait...
Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.
But yea, subsidies. I've been on many a call where "there's govt funding available if we shape this like x" is one of the major selling points.
Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.
Shipping hydrogen is literally one of the dumbest things you can ever do.
Its pure and utter nonsense that is only getting pushed for political reasons. It has 0 actual viability.
Even if you were willing to pay 5-10x more for hydrogen, shipping doesn't make sense.
The only way we are ever moving any quantity of hydrogen anywhere is with pipelines. Literally everything about hydrogen makes it a complete nightmare to ship.
And nobody is likely ever going to build these hydrogen pipelines.
Hydrogen is completely idiotic as a 'energy move' medium.
> Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
No it doesn't and it never did. Only such a tiny amount were ever sold, and those were only sold because of massive subsidies and sold below value by car companies who wanted to push the concept (and farm subsidies).
EV by 2008 already outsold hydrogen vehicles and have grown every year, hydrogen vehicles never became more then marketing gimick and were never sold in numbers that even approach relevance.
This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.
Positive incentive please :)
That is how EVs got here as soon as they did.
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...
Correction, a very low density, lightweight fuel.
Burns clean though with no carbon in the exhaust.
But the upstream carbon emissions have not come close to zero when you look at total hydrogen use in the real world so far.
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.
Hydrogen was meant to replace Oil so that the oligarchs can keep their oligarchy rather than "pull themselves up by bootstraps"
You could say the same about EVs. Most people in the US who bought an EV decided to go back to ICE for their next vehicle.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
If you strip that away, you get to more reasonable price points already getting common all over Asia, Australia, and even the EU market right now. There you might find reasonably priced new vehicles at around 25K euros or even below 20K. A few years ago, those vehicles didn't exist and ASPs were closer to 40-50K for a cheap one. So, the second hand value of those older vehicles has indeed depreciated enormously. Because they simply are not worth as much relative to the much cheaper newer generation of cars. These vehicles got obsoleted by a better and cheaper generation of cars.
With hydrogen cars, companies sell them at a loss. They always have. That's why Toyota, the biggest proponent, sells more EVs than they ever built hydrogen cars. Pretty much every quarter now.
The better/cheaper generation of hydrogen cars never materialized. And it probably never will. The hydrogen distribution network never happened either. Because as it turns out, making hydrogen is really expensive. So aside from a few heavily subsidized filling stations, the economics for those is so terrible that they tend to shut down as soon as the subsidies run out. So, that's why they are relatively worthless as a second hand car. You are better off buying a second hand EV. And since those have depreciated a lot, hydrogen cars simply aren't worth more second hand.
And since there is no realistic prospect of ever producing hydrogen cars or hydrogen at price points that can match those of EVs and electricity, hydrogen based transport is at this point dead as a door nail.
The MSRP doesn’t matter. The S stands for suggested.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
H2 doesn't compete with ICE. It competes with BEV. That and in that comparison I do think it is much simpler. I'd be open to be enlightened why the killer feature of H2 is that makes it even worth considering with all these downsides.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.
Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.
Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.
The madness with hydrogen in Japan is that they produce most of it from imported LNG. If they'd solve domestic clean energy, they'd have no need for hydrogen in transport. EVs are a lot more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. So they'd need a lot less clean energy to power those.
Japan is slowly and belatedly figuring out that physics and economics just won't favor hydrogen, ever. The Mirai is an exercise in futility. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever. It never has. Toyota at this point is grudgingly producing more EVs per quarter than it ever produced hydrogen vehicles (in total). They only sell a few hundred per year at this point. The only reason they still make them at all is because they are being subsidized to do that.
But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].
The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.
On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.
Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/idemitsu-build-pi...
[1] - https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-pric...
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Edit: typo
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...
Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224...
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
EVs aren't cheaper to produce yet, but battery costs are still falling and they will reach parity with ICE vehicles soon.
There is no ICE in a Mirai.
Because batteries are very expensive. But they aren't particularly complex.
This argument just does not make any sense at all. Of course simple components can be more expensive. The cost of ownership is even less relevant, since it depends almost entirely on outside factors, which vary by region and government.
>It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
This is totally false. The hydrogen storage alone is enormously complicated. Hydrogen, especially at the pressures needed for a car to be viable is far more complex to store safely then fuel storage for a regular diesel/gasoline car.
Pretending this is not the case is just delusional.
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
1 Kg of hydrogen is SUPER EXPENSIVE (equivalent ~ 1 gallon of gas)
$17/gallong when I looked at the pumps
When the Mirai first came out, owners didn't care because the fuel was free.
But after that ended, they had to buy it for themselves.
who wants to pay that?
(also, stations weren't plentiful like EV chargers, and even though you could fill up faster than an EV charge, who cares when you can't go very far (distance-wise from home).
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
Not sure that a fuel cell vehicle isn't just an EV with extra steps, however.
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
Meanwhile, hydrogen trucks are nowhere to be found...
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.
None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.
Feasibility is key.
https://alpha.chem.umb.edu/chemistry/ch471/evans%20files/Pro...
Nothing fundamental has changed in the last 2 decades to refute the arguments Bossel made in 2006.
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
https://www.myartbroker.com/investing/articles/top-10-most-i...
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fal...
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
Teslas may not be anymore the future of EVs, but we can't deny that by building the Power Charger infrastructure, Tesla gave consumers the confidence to buy an EV knowing that it wouldn't be basically a geofenced vehicle.
I am sorry. ;-)
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
Is it more convenient than plugging in an EV overnight at home, and having a full "tank" every morning?
It is not.
Electricity supply is everywhere. More so than Gasoline supply, and far far more so than hydrogen supply.