Journalist Drinks Water from Toyota Mirai FCV's Exhaust - Video

eu! funny, when i was in the plumbing industry, there was a rep who used to come in and eat the teflon thread sealant paste to show us how safe it was to use on drinking water pipes.

he's no longer with us.

 

Now only if it could make vodka, that would be a real trick!

 

On a brand new car, I'd do it (once). One one with many miles/months of use, no way. Anyone ever cleaned out a home a/c drip line?

 

Yeah if I had a nickel for every mayor who drank questionable water on TV to show it was safe, or industry person etc, I have at least a million dollars.

 

anyway, with a fuel cell or bev, the pollution is at the other end.

 

Nice stunts by Toyota continue, question is how do they get us closer to a fossil-free future?

Rhetorical question of course

 

I am intently trying to contain my excitement for more gimmickry, but I may not be able.

 

Don't let me temp you with some hydrogen pump porn then.....

 

A couple of new takes out today, the first one very positive.
Here's Why the Fuel Cell Mirai Could Someday be Toyota's Next Big Car - Fortune

The other more realistic, with a repeat of the technical advance toyota thinks it needs to lease volt like volumes.
All Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Cars Are Compliance Cars, For Now (Page 2)

Really for a semiconductor equipment vendor like appllied materials that seems like a fairly easily solvable problem, but ... semiconductor type sollutions have very high fixed cost, something that ... you need volume of 500,000 vehicles/year not 30,000/year to absorb the cost.

Still what if METI paid for it, and Toyota, Honda, and Nissan - all the Japanese makers, shared the machines, and shared (sold at cost) the Japanese made fuel cells with their partners - BMW, GM, Mercedes, and Ford. Then maybe you can absorb the high price of machine development, or maybe a lower priced solution can be found. Then you have the problems of packaging the volume of the tanks and added cost for suspension and power because of the weight of the vehicles. These are similar to bev problems, and may be solved by the time the cost of the stacks come down.

Nissan To Launch Fuel Cell Vehicle By 2021 - HybridCars.com

Maybe its waiting for the breakthrough ;-). After that the hurdle is hydrogen fuel costs, which japan can solve simply by subsidy and taxing gasoline more.

 

Do you know what those words mean? Do you have information that contradicts toyota?

Under lean production methods of Toyota manufacturing system, you don't simply crank up production when you don't see demand. Toyota does not see much demand at this price even with the strong government incentives (3 million yen in some parts of japan, plus $40M/year of fueling subsidies). If they saw high demand they would have put the car into mass production. This date has been pushed off until around 2020. Putting it into mass production now would cause great waste. Instead of wasting the money on mass production now, Toyota says it is spending $168M to upgrade the serial production to produce a maximum of 3000 fcv a year. If they see lower demand they can shift the people to other factories. You can't crank it up.
Secretive Lexus LFA workshop now makes Toyota Mirai fuel cell sedan

Kaizen requires you have your manufacturing process established. This is not the case on the mirai. They are using the Production methods from the Lexus LFA car that was hand built there before. It again would be against lean to simply improve these methods a little. They are changing the factory and buying equipment to be more in line with 3000 units of mirai a year. Once those methods start they can improve. The car itself probably won't improve until the second generation.

Toyota says they may go mass production around 2020. I doubt they are planning this to be mass market. One of the next gen cars they brought to tokyo is a possible Lexus LS fuel cell. The gen I mirai is quite expensive. I don't think this competes with a corola eco or camry hybrid. Maybe 3rd generation they attempt mass market, but they look like they have aimed up market from their 2009 plans. This may have to do with seeing the sucess of tesla with this strategy. Ininial adopters didn't really like the imev or the EQ. Nissan gained traction when they added more up market features.

Yep. GM will learn from working with honda on the 3rd gen clarity, and will get feeback on the second gen that is being rleased next year. Ford and Nissan will learn from the current mercedes f-cell, and the next gen, probably out in 2018. As nissan says, they have bevs as zev solutions, so these companies are not in a rush to build a fuel cell vehicle before there are technical advances. Honda and Toyota need those compliance credits or they need to buy them from nissan or tesla.

 

This simply is not true, but the parts that are shared are not made in the mirai factory. The mirai works simply get them. A lot of the other parts also though not shared are not expensive to make by a supplier or the machine shop. The mirai team will is not using Kaisen on this production. For example I'm sure The camry nimh battery pack is just delivered. It was pulled from the standard toyota parts bin, it probably is not as good as designing a specific battery, but picking the standard part is less expensive. Improving the production of the battery will not speed up mirai production to "Crank it out" as you say.

As I said you probably don't understand the meaning of that word. In the toyota manufacturing system it has a specific meaning. The toyota manufacturing system embodies the lean production techniques of Deming. Yes you can litterally translate kaizen to "change for the better" but a lot is lost in translation. .Now I am also sure the mirai team, when they were producing LFA's then Bicycles implemented kaizen, but the production at the factory from the videos I've seen can not be improved much (0 additional cars a day) without the new equipment and then the changes will be different..

But here is what we know. The cost of producing these two parts are the biggest cost drivers, with the highest capital needed to increase production rate. My guess is both manufacturing processes need breakthroughs to bring cost in line with one of toyota's mass produced cars like the Lexus ESh. There is only a little feedback the workers can provide on this bottle nectk. Here scientist and engineers need to discover new techiques to bring cost down and quality up. The workers will crank out parts for 3 cars a day,until the new equipment comes in then they will crank out parts for 15 parts a day. Improvements on the current equipment will not help, but they can really start kaisen when the new equipment is there. Spending too much time to improve a process that is about to change does not really spell kaisen. Toyota can probablly eat the extra cost if they don't have breakthroughs in tanks, but they or bmw likely will by 2020, that is the lower risk technology (CFRP). CFRP is already cheap enough for the bmw i3. The bigger challenge is the fuel cell stacks. This is a science and engineering problem.

I don't think GM wants to mass produce a dedicated FCV in 2020. They and Honda appear to be looking at having a plug-in/fcv platform with the plug-in side selling the majority.

Then they and honda still have the same problem, tanks and fuel cells. Will there scientist and engieers figure it out first? Will Toyota? Either way it may be good to sell the fuel cell stacks to competitors as this lowers cost. Yes GM is now behind toytoa in fuel cells. Who was arguing about that. GM is focused on plug-ins.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic, unless you are starting to understand why toyota is not planning on simply cranking out a lot of fcv with the technology they have today. I don't remember toyota needing governments to roll out fueling infrastructure for the prius though.

 

I thought I was being optimistic about the possibility of a big cost reduction if a government is willing to spend enough, which I believe the abe government is prepared to spend.

I think its important to understand Toyota's production philospophy to analyze what they are doing with production and what they really expect as demand.