Did Toyota make a mistake with hydrogen and the Mirai?
No and yes respectively, and the no comes with a serious proviso
Toyota is a fascinating and incredibly successful company. From its beginnings in 1933 through its post-WWII growth through the OPEC Oil Crisis of 1972 which saw small Japanese cars suddenly hot in the USA through its pledge, successfully accomplished, to become the world’s largest car company, it’s fought challenging circumstances with intelligence, will, engineering excellence and hard work.
Which is what makes their obsession with hydrogen fuel cell cars so bizarre.
But it wasn’t always that way. It’s worth teasing apart whether their bets on hydrogen and the Mirai sedan were bad bets, and the answer is more nuanced than a flat no, although that’s the end result.
The nuanced part was that Toyota started their investment in hydrogen in 1992. At the time, very few people would have bet that lithium ion batteries would evolve so quickly. That was the year that the very early work was done that led to the battery form factor and energy that we see today, and it took 16 years after that for the batteries to appear in a desireable EV, the original Tesla Roadster.
Betting on hydrogen drive trains in 1992 was incredibly reasonable and forward…
