Toyota to showcase fuel-cell vehicle at SETA

Yoshikazu Tanaka, chief engineer of the product planning group at Toyota’s Technical Centre, will also participate in a forum and share with the audience Toyota’s next-generation vehicle strategy and the development of Mirai fuel-cell vehicle (FCV).

Mirai, Japanese for “future”, the culmination of Toyota’s FCV developments over 20 years, is among the first FCVs for commercial sale. It was developed to cope with increasing concern for the environment and global warming, as its motor is powered by electricity produced from a chemical reaction with hydrogen whose only emission is not a gas but water.

“Mirai’s development concept is ‘H2 pioneer for the next century’, |an automobile that leads the way for the next 100 years to realise a hydrogen-energy society. We developed |it aiming for a vehicle that provides |a totally new value,” Tanaka said.

With the newly developed, compact and high-performance Toyota fuel-cell (FC) system, the hydrogen fuelling time for the Mirai is about three minutes, and the cruising range is about 650 kilometres under Toyota’s standard measurements, giving it the same usability as a normal petrol-engine vehicle. 

“For the accomplishment of |FCV popularisation and a hydrogen-energy society, we need a lot of automobile companies [to enter] the fuel-cell business. As an extraordinary measure, Toyota has announced free usage of our 5,680 FCV-related patents.

“With further FC-system cost reductions and performance improvements, we think that it is important to continue putting in efforts on an ‘ever better FCV’,” Tanaka said.