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Toyota's New Hydrogen Car First Drive: Produces Exhaust Water Clean Enough To Drink, So I Did

This article is more than 8 years old.

When Toyota emailed about their latest car I got very excited. To understand why I have to take you back a bit to a really old segment from Top Gear back in 2003. In that film James May drove a GM prototype called the Hy-Wire. Back then electric cars as we know them now were an impossibility, there was simply no battery technology to support them. The Hy-Wire was powered, instead, by hydrogen.

In the years after that film I was unable to stop thinking about hydrogen-powered cars, and that's why Toyota's offer to drive its Mirai was so appealing. If you haven't heard of it, the Mirai is Toyota's first fuel cell car and it works by combining hydrogen from its fuel tank with oxygen in the air to make electricity. It's chemistry 101, but there have been some difficulties getting here.

In some ways I think Tesla has helped. People aren't quite so quick to rubbish electrically-powered cars now, and the idea of having a hydrogen car that is driven by electric motors is one that feels like a more logical fit than it has in the past.

But the Mirai is a very accomplished car. Like the Prius, it has a lot of visible technology. It works in a similar way too, using Toyota's hybrid system. In the Mirai though the gas-powered motor is replaced by the hydrogen fuel cell. Really though, that's the biggest difference.

The car feels great to drive too. Not fast, but but with plenty of power for normal driving. It's comfortable, has a high driving position that I rather liked and it comes with a lot of gadgets to make driving more pleasant. The fact that it runs on hydrogen is cool as a fact, but it doesn't really affect the car apart from a slight whooshing sound when you accelerate that's to do with hydrogen being processed.

The car's exhaust is just water. It's drinkable too, so I did.

The best part though is that this car outputs nothing but water, which is why I had a little drink of the car's exhaust. It was pretty pleasant water too, no nasty taste, just a clear, refreshing drink.

So what are the downsides? Well, the price. In the UK it's £66,000 in the US it's $58,325 but Toyota is quite clear; it doesn't expect anyone to buy one. Instead these cars will be bought as part of fleets. In London for example TFL, which manages the capital's transport, will be using the cars to reduce emissions. There are currently three places in the whole of the UK with a fourth planned for the latter part of this year.

Hydrogen then is hardly practical at the moment. It's also not all that cheap, costing around the same to fill as a petrol car would. This won't be a problem for anyone who ends up with the car - at least in the UK - because Toyota's lease included fuel. In fact, I asked Toyota how people who bought the car would be charged, and it told me there was no infrastructure in place to actually do that.

On the plus side, hydrogen generation can be done with solar power or a wind turbine. Some companies are building units which create hydrogen using these methods in one enclosed unit. You can make a decent amount of hydrogen this way, and it's environmentally very friendly.

Of course some people are worried about driving a car powered by an explosive gas. These people presumably don't worry about their existing gasoline cars exploding, but even so Toyota is sensitive to the concerns. The Mirai's fuel tanks can withstand bullets, crushing and all manner of torture and the car monitors for hydrogen leaks all the time.

At the end of the 2003 Top Gear segment Jeremy Clarkson said "remember where you are now, because this is the car of the future". And so indeed it was, and while no one is pretending we're all going to be in hydrogen cars next week, the technology is viable now and production has begun.

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