Toyota rep: If you buy the Mirai, you pay for the hydrogen yourself

This is pure speculation based on a comment from an unreliable source (car salesman).
The Lithium batteries don't "die sitting on the lot" as a general case.
These may have had the batteries go bad and the cars had been collected their.
The 12v batteries may have gone bad and GM told the dealer they won't cover the 12V battery and the dealer is cheap.
The sales rep may be full of it and not know what he is talking about.

There is simply too little information from the car sales rep, and too much information showing how reliable the batteries have been in the field.

 

Charger infrastructure would be much cheaper to build than a hydrogen one. PHVs do not need this.
Home charging means plug ins can be adopted faster over the entire nation; no waiting for hydrogen stations to be built nearby. Home CNG fuelers were expensive to buy and maintain; home hydrogen generators and fuelers will be more so.

 

for now, i can't argue with that. 10 years from now? i have no way of knowing.

 

What specifically? The big hurdle for hydrogen FCEVs will always be the infrastructure that would need to be built from the ground up. Building a basic gas station can be a costly enterprise, and there is already a distribution infrastructure in place. Putting in DC fast chargers might actually be cheaper.

 

we the process of moving from horse and buggy to cars was taking place, did the government intervene in any way?

 

Hydrogen has been the fuel of the future for the better part of 4+ decades. I won't hold my breath thinking this is the magical decade (because Toyota!).

 

me neither, just bought a snorkel.

 

I don't think so, but it was, like, over fifty years between the first car and governments figuring that maybe they should regulate the safety and emissions of them. You could also buy stuff from the pharmacy back then that requires permits and licensing now.

I'd say the building of paved roads was the biggest thing the government did for cars.

 

what about oil subsidies?

 

I'm sure the oil barrons tried to get all that they could from governments back then, as with all capitalists, but fuel for the automobile wasn't a major source of demand back then. Oil's first major use was as a cheap replacement for whale oil in lamps.

Petroleum powered cars would come to dominate, but keep in mind that there was competition between them, steam, electric, and even electric hybrids in the early days of the car.

 

seems like convenience ruled the day. didn't women switch from electric to gas when electric start came out?

 

I think many switched to gas with electric start. The hand crank risked broken arms and dislocated shoulders, but steam took time to build, well, steam.

 

B) Is old news ,nothing surprising there. Chevy dealers have be confronting the Volts "glued" to their lots for a while now. They are tring to run a business moving product (Cruze, Spark, Malibu, etc) and making a profit. Its' much more tougher to move a product very few want - Volt.

DBCassidy

 

^Kinda' like the Toyota Mirage er Mirai, amirite?

 

Did they say there would only be 10,000 prii sold in the US in the first 2+ years? No they didn't, but toyota has said that only 3000 will be sold by the end of 2017. The infrastructure then will only support 13,500 cars, and toyota loses money on every one. It is not like the prius that sold 41,000 cars in the same relative time period 2000-2002, before taking off.

Even if toyota wanted to take a loss on more cars, the infrastructure couldn't handle it. Look at the poor hyundai fuel cell drivers today. One guy has had his fcv sitting for 5 weeks because the stations by him are down. They need to work out kinks with the infrastructure before all the companies combined even lease 10,000 fcv, that is total cars not per year. CARB estimates that will be the end of 2018. The prius did 15,600 its first full calendar years in the us 2001.

An interesting tidbit from the OP article, toyota estimtes 10-15 hydrogen fueling locations by the end of the year operating well enough to fuel a mirai. CARB estimates 44 stations in its july report.
merged

Oil subsidies did not come into play until world war II (really government oil purchases).

The texas railroad commision had the most power until nixon. They set production quotas and regulations in texas so that the price would not be too high or low. Since texas dominated us production it set the policy for the nation.

 

That's why Mirai is a long-term project, with low-volume for quite a number of years and only buyers who are well aware of the situation... like making sure they are willing to pay for the fuel.

 

Absolutely in the first case. In the second case, no, I think that toyota is making clear that they want customers to lease not buy the car, and they, and/or the state of California, will pay for the expensive fuel during the lease.

We seem to have 2 mouths in toyota's case. One that seems to be saying fuel cell vehicles will be wildly popular in the next 10 years, but those plug-ins just have too many problems. The other seems to have realistic expectations and acknowledges that fueling costs are a problem and that along with car cost are going to limit sales.

When people get all excited from the first group, you know the guys that acted like the mirai would explode in sales like the prius, well the prius sales in california which were probably at least 30% in the first years, I just want to bring us back to the honest group.

This isn't really even the first generation of fcv, its more of a precommercial phase. All the car manufacturers were surveyed by carb this year, and thought that in 6 years, the end of 2021 they could have 34,000 fcv on californiias roads, but CARB said that even with the high fuel subsidies there will not be enough fueling, so a smaller number of cars. Those are the numbers we should assume. After that if station cost is still expensive, we still can't see a prius like sales explosion with the next generation. It will have to be at least 10 years down the road.

 

Please Note my use of the word "Similar" and the context to the original response.

 

What did you mean by similar? How many mirai do you expect on american roads by 2021? In the time period 2000-2006 there were 330,000 prii on american roads. Yes these were subsidized by japanese and american taxpayers, but to a much lesser extent per vehicle than the mirai.

The reason that those that don't expect sales to take off like the prius is simple. The infrastructure is simply too expensive to build fast and get that number of cars. If toyota or you meant something else by the idea that sales will be like the prius, let us know. We may agree with you. Otherwise expectations of high volumes of fuel cell vehicles hurting plug-ins as Elon Musk said are just so stupid. We should see it clearly in a few years, but read the latest carb report, and remember they are part of the fuel cell lobby and don't think even 10% of the prii 33,000 could run on the infrastructure they are planning to build by the end of 2021.

 

I

I'll type slow.
It's pretty simple.
My original short sentence response was to this statement:

" They keep wasting time and money on these cars no one wants."

My response was:

"Hmm...wasn't really all that long ago that similar statements about The Prius were made."

The similarity is to THE STATEMENT.,..not the vehicles or situation.

And YES...in the early years of The Prius you did hear that Toyota was wasting time and money on a vehicle that people in mass would not want.

The American Automakers in particularly laughed at the Prius...until they weren't laughing any longer.

I really don't get this defensiveness or insecurity about the existence of The Mirai.
I don't really care that it's not the perfect product at the perfect time, I still applaud Toyota for it's creation.