Is Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai, the future of motoring?

I’ll be honest: I came to bury Caesar, not to praise him. I was quite prepared, without so much as having set foot in or near it, to write off Toyota’s Mirai as yesterday’s future.

Cynical presumptuousness? Certainly, albeit not without a factual basis. Hydrogen power has been for so long now the motorised equivalent of cold fusion, always inching along the long road to production, always at least 40 years away. Electric cars, by contrast, seem to be progressing in great bounds, and while the infrastructure needed for hydrogen refuelling is at the expensive and distant end of the scale, electric car chargers are already becoming commonplace. It seemed like a pushover win for electric cars.

Still, though, proving the old saying that there's nothing so convincing as a dedicated, solemn Japanese car engineer (or maybe that's just one of my old sayings), Yoshikazu Tanaka, the chief engineer on the Mirai project, had the answer to my cynicism.

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A hydorgen filling station in Aalborg, Denmark. A facility like this, built next to a regular filling station, could cost an estimated €500,000.

“EVs have their place,” he told me. “But it is primarily for shorter journeys and urban commuting. Yes, you can get an EV with 500km range, but to do so you need bigger and bigger batteries which are very heavy and need long charging times. We feel that there is no one totally correct solution to the future of transport. EVs will be good for short journeys, hybrid and plug-in hybrid for longer use, and fuel cells for long-distance and larger vehicles.

“Hydrogen is also a good solution for storing energy generated by intermittent clean power sources, and beyond that, electricity prices are increasing, especially as the world retreats from nuclear energy.”

Darn it, I can feel myself being won round . . .

The Mirai is disarmingly simple really. A fuel cell is really a type of battery. You pump compressed hydrogen (stored in two ultra-strong, supposedly crashproof, tanks at the rear of the car and under the back seats) into a cell, mix it with oxygen coming in from the outside air and the two combine, creating water (H2O) and an electrical current. That current is sent to both a 154hp electric motor driving the front wheels and a hybrid battery that stores excess energy for use under acceleration or when drifting lightly around town.

The stack is around 50 per cent lighter and smaller, yet much more power-dense than it was when Toyota began designing it in 2008. What's more, it's robust and works in all conditions. Originally, fuel cells couldn't work in extreme cold, because their fuel and exhaust is water in various forms. Now, though, Toyota says the Mirai will work in temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees.

There’s a power loss of roughly 1 per cent a year when the car is used in the toughest possible conditions.

Anyone who has driven a Prius recently will feel right at home in the Mirai. The cabin is more spacious and its quality is just about up to justifying its notional €80,000 price tag, but it’s also quite familiar. The basis for much of the Mirai’s metal underbelly and controls is the current, and outgoing, Prius.

Push a button and it beeps into life. Tug on the stubby gear shifter and you pull smoothly away. Very smoothly, with the Prius’s petrol-engine hum replaced by even quieter whooshes and whizzes from the fuel cell stack under your seat.

It sounds rather more like plumbing than something from the USS Enterprise, but around town it feels just lovely, with effortless 335Nm torque from standstill and a light, easy feel to the steering and chassis.

That light, easy feel makes it a bit disappointing on the open road, where it’s just too distant from the driver for any fun to be had. The steering feels light and a little too woolly, while a heavy right foot brings forth the strange sound of a compressor in action from beneath the bonnet. In the pantheon of Toyota’s model lineups, the Mirai shares few of the traits of, say, the GT86.

But that’s hardly the point, is it? More relevantly, it will maintain a steady 120km/h on the motorway without the fuel gauge taking a swan dive towards empty. Toyota says that the Mirai will go for 550km between refills of hydrogen, and that seems like a generally realistic figure. On a separate test, my colleague Michael McAleer – during Car of the Year trials – achieved a range of 350km on what was largely motorway driving. Even at that, certainly there’s no range anxiety.

Well, there’s no range anxiety in Hamburg at least, where we were testing the car, because Hamburg actually has a handful of hydrogen fuelling stations, and will have even more soon. The EU is putting up €650 million (a figure expected to be matched by the car and fuel industry) to expand hydrogen transport infrastructure. The Mirai is again disarmingly simple. There are none of the lengthy recharge times of battery cars. You pull up, connect a hose, wait five minutes, and off you head, full of single-electron fuel again.

However, you can't do that here in Ireland, as we have no hydrogen fuel station, which is why Toyota says the Mirai is at least five years away from being on sale here. Toyota expects to sell only a handful across the world this year – 1,000 next year, 3,000 the year after – building up to a notional 30,000 by 2020.

Ireland hasn't made a single move towards putting together a hydrogen strategy, but Toyota (alongside fellow car makers Honda, BMW, GM and Hyundai) is pressing for more. Wait until after the general election at least, says Toyota. There is also the distinct possibility being mentioned, sotto voce, that Toyota will invest some of its vast corporate wealth itself in getting H2 stations set up.

According to a Toyota spokesman, the cost of a hydrogen filling station ranges from €500,000 to €2 million at present. There are several firms specialising in installation and operation of the networks. Denmark, for example, currently has seven stations. However, it has only up to 30 hydrogen cars, leased or lent from manufacturers.

On the road a thin mist of water is emitted from the exhaust if you floor the throttle. Water, as all you secondary-school science boffins will know, is the end result of mixing hydrogen and water in the right combination. The Mirai creates an estimated 7kg of water for every 100km. Some of this is gathered near the exhaust outlet, or water pipe in a Mirai. And to avoid wetting your garage floor, when you pull up on your driveway, there’s a switch that lets you empty the little tank. Though Toyota says the water is not for human consumption, I’m sure you could make a cuppa with it if you were stuck.

Aside from its tea-making capabilities, the Mirai’s appeal lies in its quick-refuel ability, which far outstrips anything any electric car is capable of. If a fuel network isn’t in place, that appeal, and the car’s functionality, is gone. So we’re left with the egg-and-poultry scenario again. No one will buy one until there’s a network; no one will build a network until . . . you get the idea.

But I do think it would be wrong to dismiss the Mirai as folly, at least not yet. It’s too clever, too user-friendly for that. It may not be the ultimate answer, but then again there may not be an ultimate answer. The future of motoring doesn’t necessarily have to be a yes/no, VHS/Betamax question. It’s still too early to tell really.

If the Mirai is not necessarily the future, then it is at least the cracking open of a door to a multitude of possible futures.

Our rating: 3/5

Verdict: A vision of the future, but not one we can see on Irish roads any time soon