business

Toyota launches hydrogen-fueled sedan

13 Comments
By COLLEEN BARRY

The requested article has expired, and is no longer available. Any related articles, and user comments are shown below.

© Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

13 Comments
Login to comment

This could be Japan's biggest thing since the Walkman. Good luck.

Please make them in Japan though to benefit the Japanese worker.

3 ( +5 / -2 )

Go Japan, always in the lead for new things. I hope the rest of the world will follow.........

3 ( +5 / -2 )

Very positive news. Thanks Toyota.

4 ( +4 / -0 )

There are many reasons why Toyota is brand one and this looks like it's another winner for them. @Thedoc1 said he hopes the rest of the world follows, and I agree. It would be nice to think other Japanese companies look at what Toyota's doing and find ways to be as successful.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Go Japan, always in the lead for new things. I hope the rest of the world will follow actually Hyundai was the first automaker to sell a hrydrogen fuel cell car for mass productions in 2013. but with Toyota brand imgage and marketing power id say they have an excellent chance to get a large share of the ,market. I personally think that electric wehicles will also be a major player, as battery tech gets better and cheaper. Itll be cheaper to run your car on electricity than hydrogen especially if you have your own solar panels charging those batteries

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Here in Japan they are going to put up consumption tax but the government can afford to pay a 3 million subsidy on each new Toyota Mirai. There seems to be something very wrong somewhere.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Japanes automakers should go for this with full throttle.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

Go Japan, always in the lead for new things.

Oh really? Let's see. The concept of hybrid vehicle drivetrain is actually surprising old and Japan has nothing to do with its creation. In fact,

1) Back to 1901 (yes you read right, 1901), Ferdinand Porsche developed the Lohner-Porsche Mixte Hybrid, the first gasoline-electric hybrid automobile in the world.

2) Shortly after, in 1905, Henri Pieper of Germany/Belgium introduced a hybrid vehicle with an electric motor/generator, batteries, and a small gasoline engine,

3) In 1931 Erich Gaichen invented and drove from Altenburg to Berlin a 1/2 horsepower electric car containing features later incorporated into hybrid cars.

4) The regenerative braking system, a core design concept of most modern production HEVs, was developed in 1967 for the American Motors Amitron and later in the early 1980s by David Arthurs, an electrical engineer.

5) In 1989, Audi produced its first iteration of the Audi Duo (the Audi C3 100 Avant Duo) experimental vehicle, a plug-in parallel hybrid based on the Audi 100 Avant quattro. The second generation followed two years later.

6) In 1992, Volvo Environmental Concept Car was developed by Volvo.

What Toyota did is to be the first car company to mass market hybrid vehicles but wasn't in any way the original inventor of it.

And in case of the hydrogen car, the first hydrogen car invented was by Swiss inventor Francois Isaac de Rivaz in 1807 who designed the first 4-wheel prototype that ran on hydrogen and oxygen gas....and the technology evolved then through decades well before Toyota had any interest for the technology.

So let's put in rest the beliefs that Japan has a lead in invention or that Toyota is an innovator in car technologies. Both are factually wrong.

-1 ( +2 / -3 )

Hydrogen vehicles are very easy to make, the technology has been around for years if not decades. Hydrogen cars are basically electric cars that use hydrogen to generate electricity rather than a battery. The problem is that hydrogen is not a source of energy, there is no hydrogen extraction plant pumping out metric tons of the stuff per day, hydrogen is just a way of stocking energy, it still needs to be generated in some way.

To generate hydrogen, you can either use chemical processes that pollute a lot or do water hydrolysis, where you subject water to strong electric currents in a machine that allows it to separate in its components of hydrogen and oxygen, then recover hydrogen, stock it and distribute it to fuel cell vehicles. But that energy has to come from somewhere, so hydrogen vehicles are just like electric battery vehicles in being only as clean as the power source for the electricity they use.

Furthermore, hydrogen is a gas, so stocking big quantities of it to have an adequate fuel range is hard and any failure of the containment chamber will lead to the rapid dispersion of hydrogen in the environment. For now, the cost of providing batteries for electric vehicles has been judged less expensive than providing for the complex infrastructure required to distribute hydrogen to hydrogen vehicles.

The main advantage of hydrogen over classic electric vehicles is that an hydrogen car can quickly be refueled, just like a traditional gasoline car, whereas a battery takes a long time to recharge.

2 ( +3 / -1 )

Cool when battery cell recycling is not really well at all. Anyway, wait until we see the oil cartels squash this into oblivion. I recall Honda has an experimental home hydrogen refueling station.

1 ( +1 / -0 )

Where can I buy one?

1 ( +1 / -0 )

At a Toyota dealer near you.

2 ( +2 / -0 )

this is another reason to get the N reators back online, with a Hydrogen/ Electric vehicles they both require lots of electricity, if your from a country that generates much of your electricity from nuclear then having many hydrogen /electric vehicles slowly removes your dependance from the big oil cartel countries. Just another reason why the cartels are keeping oil prices low, theyre trying to kill off the competition in all fields, mostly the US/Canda shale/natural gas industries and also the emergance of electric/hydrogen vehicles.

0 ( +1 / -1 )

Login to leave a comment

Facebook users

Use your Facebook account to login or register with JapanToday. By doing so, you will also receive an email inviting you to receive our news alerts.

Facebook Connect

Login with your JapanToday account

User registration

Articles, Offers & Useful Resources

A mix of what's trending on our other sites