On paper, using hydrogen to power cars seems like a no-brainer. It’s the most abundant element in the universe, and the only byproduct of using it to power a car is pure water. The engines that use hydrogen to function exist today, right now, as do the methods to supply hydrogen at fueling stations.
Except, it’s still wildly impractical to own a hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicle. The cost to actually produce and store hydrogen has spiked to astronomical levels in recent years, and with Shell having abandoned its fueling stations in the U.S. in 2024, there are now fewer stations where hydrogen-car owners can actually fill up than, say, five years ago.
Yet Toyota won’t give up. It’s just renewed its sole hydrogen-powered car, the Mirai sedan, for the 2026 model year, virtually unchanged from 2025. The reason? It still believes in a hydrogen future.
The Impractical Truth Of Current Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles
Those consumer-level filling stations I mentioned? Well, there are only 56 of them in all of North America, by my count. And the vast majority are clustered on the California coast, with a few sprinkled in the Vancouver area of western Canada, one in Hawaii, and two more in eastern Canada. So from the jump, buying a hydrogen fuel cell car limits your area of travel to those places.
Hydrogen fuel is also expensive. Former Autopian writer Lewin Day actually did the math on this earlier this year, which shows just how pricey it is to run a Mirai in 2025:
Do the maths, and it’s obvious that hydrogen car owners are now in an awful situation. Take the Toyota Mirai, for example. It will drive about 72 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. At current prices of $36/kg, you’re paying 50 cents per mile in fuel alone. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, you can expect to pay $5,000 for gas. Hydrogen gas, that is.
Compare that to an old Dodge Viper, which achieves 12 mpg in the city with its 8.0-liter V10. Presently, premium gas is sitting around $4.80 a gallon in California. That pencils out to 40 cents per mile, making it $1000 cheaper to run those 10,000 miles than the Mirai. Alternatively, you could get a Nissan Versa, which does 32 mpg, and run it on regular gas for $4.40 a gallon. You’d be spending less than 14 cents a mile on fuel, saving over $3 grand a year on fuel!
Toyota, realizing this might scare off the already minuscule buyer base for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in America, began including complementary $15,000 fuel cards with every Mirai purchase, which would cover 25,000 to 30,000 miles of driving based on current prices. Hilariously, this has created a black market where people who are no longer driving their Mirais or have a fuel cell vehicle are selling “fills” at hydrogen pumps using their leftover cards.
And it’s not like these filling stations are reliable, either. A bunch of Mirai owners are actually in the process of suing Toyota over claims they were misled about the car’s practicality and ease of refueling, citing poor infrastructure, constantly broken fuel stations, and vastly limited supply. The lawsuit also touches on the Mirai’s intense depreciation, claiming the cars lose 90% of their value, due to all the shortcomings and limitations with regard to fueling and practicality mentioned above.
So, Why Is Toyota Still Selling This Car?
Despite the above facts, and the fact that Toyota has sold just 157 Mirais through September of this year (0.0008% of all of the company’s U.S. sales in that period), Toyota has nonetheless renewed the Mirai for 2026 virtually unchanged, save for a set of flashy 19-inch aluminum wheels. Why bother? Even Toyota’s technical chief, Hiroki Nakajima, admitted the car has “not been successful.”
At this point, it’s probably optics. Toyota, like BMW, Hyundai, and Honda, has heavily invested in a hydrogen future. In 2024, it renamed its R&D facility in California the “Hydrogen Headquarters (H2HQ).” Earlier this year, it reaffirmed its commitment to a “hydrogen society,” debuting its third-generation fuel cell tech, which it aims to use in heavy-duty trucking applications.
Toyota is going as far as to work with fuel station companies like Air Liquide and Iwantani to build more stations (and make current stations more reliable). It’d look bad if Toyota were seemingly all-in on hydrogen and canceled its only hydrogen-powered passenger car at the same time, even if the company basically sells none of them.
Hydrogen has been stuck in this impracticality loop for years now. It feels like EVs did back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, in that it’s limited by the infrastructure around it. But unlike the EV space, there hasn’t been a Tesla-like catalyst to launch it into the mainstream (not yet, anyway).
Still, hydrogen power has vast potential as a clean alternative energy for cargo boats, airplanes, and heavy commercial vehicles. Whether it’ll ever break out and reach that potential is unclear. But companies like Toyota want it to happen badly enough that they’ll continue to sell a car for a nonexistent market.
Top graphic image: Toyota
There are at least two Mirais cruising the roads where I live in Victoria, BC. I have no idea where they are getting fuel. I hope to one day see one in a parking lot so I can ask the owner how they do it.
Toyota should develop a hydrogen generator that people can put in their garage and use low cost solar to fill a tank during the day, and then refill the car at night or in the morning. Bonus points if it comes with extra capacity and a fuel cell to act as backup power for your house.
Yes I know electrolysis is horribly inefficient, but solar is cheap.
Hydrogen has made big inroads in the warehousing sector. Which is something I have seen zero press on. I think the concept of hydrogen is super cool, in a best of both worlds kind of way. I’m highly doubtful passenger vehicles will make the switch, but commercial vehicles might have a future.
The reason it works in warehouses is because the big companies value machine uptime and want to avoid toxic fumes especially in food warehouses. Someone like Walmart with massive, refrigerated warehouses essentially runs their power equipment like the Navy does beds. As soon as one shift ends, the next one starts. To have half your power equipment down for charging would require doubling the amount of power equipment to keep the same productivity. That’s why several companies have gone with PlugPower units instead of traditional battery (or even propane) power equipment. They still use the same Raymond or Crown equipment, but the battery unit is replaced with a fuel cell. In my experience a full fuel cell will last through an entire 10-hour shift for pallet jacks, but lift trucks need to refill more often. PlugPower applications are not isolated to just California.
The real news here is that they still sold 157 through September!
Who exactly are the 157 people that walked into a Toyota dealership, saw the Corolla and Camry sitting there then signed on the line for the car with virtually no refueling infrastructure and 90% depreciation?
It’s funny cause used Mirias may be the cheapest, newest, lowest mileage sedans on the market currently, haha. But I’ve been saying for years if Toyota (or anyone else) actually wants hydrogen to happen they need to do a Tesla and build their own infrastructure.
So, can I present this article to my wife when I tell her I’m buying a Dodge Viper for ‘economic reasons’? Look at the savings hon!
Baffles me why car professionals talk about this topic (hydrogen fuel and attempts by car brands to make it work) with a negative bias so strong that it could well be a clickety reel.
There’s nothing wrong with the tech (as the article confirms) and everything wrong with the infrastructure. For them this car is a research project and that’s worth appreciating when battery tech is toxic, EV infrastructure is a long way from mass adoption in the US and China will continue to dominate raw materials for batteries. The US needs 20 years to switch to a national smart electric grid – if they started now – and the current administration made sure it won’t happen anytime soon.
Toyota should offer EV and (gasoline) PHEV versions
I Can’t Believe Toyota Just Renewed The Mirai, A Car That Represents 0.0008% Of Its Sales, For Another Model Year
The future owner could say that, like my spotify wrapped for Sabrina Carpenter.
Man, I remember yesterday’s Morning Dump and people saying that “Toyota didn’t deserve that ridicule for their anti-EV stance”. But the fact is, them not investing in EV’s before the market segment slowed in the US was not “good business sense.” It was dumb luck.
If Toyota had good business sense, they wouldn’t have pissed away somewhere around $10 billion on fuel cell vehicle development that’s gotten them nowhere.
All they’ve done is cede future worldwide market share to China by being so late to the BEV game.
What you call dumb luck turns out was very sound policy implemented over years. Lots of folks saw from a mile away that EVs will stay a niche in the US for a long time, from battery tech limits to infrastructure, to raw materials and cultural headwinds. They were just more disciplined to implement their own decisions unlike zee Germans who jumped the gun.
So, hard disagree here.
And your problem is that you are only thinking of the US market. Toyota is currently the largest automaker in the world, and the majority of the world doesn’t have protectionist measures against cheap Chinese EV’s.
And your problem is failing to understand Toyota’s actual home, Japan, where the govt gives subsidies, perks, and advantages to those building out hydrogen technology. Until you account for any money given to them, and the monetary value of any advantages of keeping your home govt happy, you haven’t done the profitability analysis properly. sometimes, Its worth large sums of money to keep regulators happy with you, even if it never shows up on your bottom line.
This is the first comment to mention the Japanese government’s hydrogen subsidies. I’m not going to bother researching the numbers, but I’d bet you’ll find Toyota’s production of Murais exactly matches the thresholds to qualify for those subsidies…
At this point they should have called the car “Albatross” instead of Mirai.
As foretold in the poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mirainer.
“The funds did from their coffers fly,
Like hydrogen to O,
“Encourage sales,” Toyota cried,
“With gift cards!” Still, no go.”
Mirainer. Brilliant.
On the one hand, Toyota says they’ve taken current ICE designs as far as they can go. Their next-gen engines are supposedly a total redesign that uses some of what they’ve learned from their hydrogen program to build more efficient gasoline engines. From that perspective, this is a cool engineering program that’s helping them build more efficient cars.
On the other hand, they’ve already learned what they were going to learn from the Mirai powertrain development. Especially since the car is being produced largely unchanged. So yes, I agree this program seems to be kept on life support purely for optics.
I’m guessing the only reason they’re renewing it for 2026 is because they have built a bunch already and the only thing they can do to get rid of them is slap 2026 VINs on them and hope for the best.
“hydrogen power has vast potential as a clean alternative energy for cargo boats, airplanes, and heavy commercial vehicles.”
No it doesn’t.
If anything, hydrogen has an even worse case for those segments as those segments are even more TCO-sensitive than the consumer-grade automotive market.
BEV and hybrid electric tech will kill any chance hydrogen has in those markets too.
Hydrogen vehicles will continue to be a glorified low-volume PR exercise designed to give the false impression to those who don’t know any better that a given company is being “green”.
I’ll play devil’s advocate. It’s a good idea to work on various solutions. Putting all of our eggs in one basket is how we ended up with the current state of things with fossil fuels.
They’re not all going to be winners. Plus, often this research creates breakthroughs and developments for other tech and/or industries.
Now I’ll play the devil’s advocate against the devil’s advocate… going BEV is not ‘putting your eggs in one basket’
And the reason for that is that there are all types of batteries made with all different types of materials. If lithium somehow became unobtanium, there are other battery chemistries we could revert to that don’t use that material.
Also with electric motors, there is a lot of variation there as well.
And to power EVs you need electricity. But electricity can be produced in all sorts of different ways and end users can potentially make their own electricity through solar, wind or even with gas/diesel/NG generators. Hell, I’ve seen cases where some people generated their own hydroelectric power with streams that go along or through their properties.
To my knowledge, all current hydrogen powered vehicles are BEVs, they’re just using a fuel cell as a generator.
And all current hydrogen vehicles even have battery packs too!
So yeah, they are technically Battery Electric Vehicles… but with a needlessly expensive, complex, impractical and inefficient way of charging.
Yup, cause research into something other than “MOAR BATTERIES” is important. Even if the tech is currently impractical.
We haven’t given up on fusion yet, despite decades and untold trillions in research & development.
Hell, if we figure out fusion, we could probably make hydrogen production affordable.
With fusion, even if you get the hydrogen generation for free, it doesn’t solve the problem of the energy needed for compressing and distributing that hydrogen.
Nor does it negate other issues like having to replace the expensive hydrogen tanks in hydrogen cars every 10 years for safety reasons… such as the explosion risk you have with any highly compressed gas… let alone a flammable compressed gas.
If hydrogen is a byproduct of fusion, it would make more sense to just use that hydrogen on site by running it through a fuel cell stack and putting even more electricity into the already-existing electricity grid.
And in that picture, Battery Electric vehicles, with no hydrogen tanks or fuel cells, once again make the most sense from an economics, infrastructure, efficiency and practicality perspective.
Wrong. Hydrogen has one massive advantage over batteries- it is roughly two orders of magnitude more energy density than the very best batteries we can make in a lab today, to say nothing of those actually deployed in marketable vehicle.
All of those applications are far more sensitive to energy density than passenger cars.
Looking at commercial airliners in particular, the chance of a BEV commercial airliner barring a quantum leap in battery tech is precisely zero. This is because the energy consumption of an aircraft flying at constant speed scales with increases in mass as the doubling of a square. If you were to make an A320 or 737 with a BEV powertrain, you would end up with a functional range of maybe 100-200 miles, virtually all of which would be consumed by regulatory requirements for emergency reserves.
Hydrogen on the other hand is perfectly viable as a fuel for airliners and would actually increase their range and improve operating economics.
I will agree the economics of an H2 powered sedan are questionable, at best. But physics dictates different outcomes at different scales, and H2 is far more viable the larger, heavier, and faster your mode of transportation becomes.
“. Hydrogen has one massive advantage over batteries-it is roughly two orders of magnitude more energy density than the very best batteries”
That’s a false advantage that is more than negated by the hugely lower efficiency… not to mention other factors like a much greater explosion risk as well as factors like having to replace the expensive hydrogen tanks every 10 years for safety reasons.
Storing power in a battery and drawing power from a battery is far more efficient than spending a bunch of energy creating hydrogen, compressing the hydrogen to put it in a tank and then converting it back to electricity for an electric motor to use for propulsion.
Each of those steps hydrogen has to go through to be usable results in a loss of efficiency.
And the lack of efficiency and the far higher explosion risk greatly contributes to the bad economics associated with hydrogen.
Beyond low-volume glorified PR exercises, hydrogen has no future.
Cheap, abundant solar would mitigate inefficiencies. Replacing the tanks could still a big problem though.
It makes more sense to take the solar power and just put it in the electricity grid to be used to charge batteries or anything else people use electricity for.
Using it to subsidize inefficient hydrogen is the worst use-case for electricity generated by solar.
A) Hydrogen fuel cells are but one type of hydrogen powertrain, and frankly not the option that would be used in a ship or an airliner. Hydrogen can also just be burned in an ICE, where it’s thermodynamic efficiency is actually better than hydrocarbons, plus leads to more exciting options like precooling.
B) Powertrain efficiency != system efficiency. As I have to repeat every few weeks on this site, the design tradeoff of BEV vs ICE is BEVs have a very efficient powertrain, but very inefficient energy storage, and ICE is the opposite. Energy = force * distance and force = mass * acceleration. The practical engineering results of this physical reality is that the heavier and faster and longer range your transportation need is, the more important the energy density of your storage medium, and the relationship is significantly non-linear. Batteries are very heavy compared to hydrocarbons or LH2, even accounting for tankage penalties. That mass has an inefficiency burned just in having to move it about, and when you are talking about a container ship or an airliner, that inefficiency vastly outscales any powertrain gains by an order of magnitude or two.
I bet they already have the tanks and fuel cells to build another years worth of cars. So… 200 more cars at best?
“So… 200 more cars at best?”
Which should be good through 2027 for keeping it in ‘production’. LOL
I can’t believe they sold over 100 of these last year. I am pro-hydrogen, but can easily admit that there are a lot of issues with making it practical. IMO Toyota is doing this because theres a chance it might pan out and there seems to be commercial applications beyond cars.
A few breakthroughs and it could be a much more realistic option. And then Toyota is the only one with experience and has a huge head start. People do seem to really look negatively at it though, which has baffled me for years. As far as price comparisons. EV’s are in trouble because of Data centers eating all our electricity and prices going up, up, up. VS Gas though, well theres some serious head wind. Again, there needs to be some real breakthroughs in the industry. But if no one tries, how will they ever happen? Kudos to Toyota for trying.
Hindsight is 20/20. Toyota should have copied Tesla by building out the hydrogen fueling infrastructure similar to how Tesla built the Supercharger network.
Toyota is such a weird company. They’re typically very conservative. They stuck with hybrids when everyone else was going all in on EVs.
Them having this one super oddball car is like finding out the 70 year old organist at the seriously old school church in your community has a full compliment of genital piercings.
This is a very Torchpilled metaphor
I think I spend too much time on this site…
COTD
Oh, man, you had to put “finding out” in there. Now I can’t help thinking about how one would find that out. I gotta go bleach my brain out…..
MRI incident.
When these originally hit the market I thought these were the most attractive Toyota made since 2000. I kept hoping they would offer this body with the Prius hybrid system. Like what Honda did with their hydrogen chassis.
Since then, the crown, corrolla, and new Land Cruiser are finally bringing some reasonable design language back to mainstream Toyota products. But these are still a good looking car not just a good looking car for a Toyota.
Such a waste.