Featured Toyota North American CEO to dealerships: "Stop delivering Mirai"

Actually Toyota should deliver them anyway . . . to the CARB parking lot. Put a card on the windshield, 'out of gas.' Then call the local news offices.

Bob Wilson

 

with the same logic, folks don't agree with robbery - then don't prosecute.

The trick for the hydrogen lobby here will be - how the bad news can be spun into a positive ... similar to trucking hydrogen to dealerships because the infrastructure is such a huge fail ... ever requiring more & more millions to go no where. The trucking fiasco was spun as "mobile filling stations" . In that same vein, I propose the hydrogen lobby suggest that there car sales are being slowed to "stop the stampede of buyers from trampling each other.
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Low Gas prices equal lower EV sales, stated by Elon.....your boat may be sinking as well

 

Something like this:

(Reuters) Toyota USA reports the fuel savings of the Mirai have exceeded expectations. Most of them are sitting on driveways waiting on hydrogen fueling stations so their owners are using bicycles and public transportation. "By joining 60 riders sharing a bus, the per-seat mileage is half that a Mirai might achieve," said a spokesman for Toyota.

Toyota went on to say they are offering substantial discounts to the CARB and supporting California representatives who support hydrogen, fuel-cell cars in the past. "We want them to share the joy of early adopters of this important, fuel-cell technology." In the meanwhile, the portable Toyota hydrogen filling station is making house calls to half-top off the cars. They are also offering cinder-block, tire savers.​

Bob Wilson

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA

 

Fast forward to March and I've met 2 other Mirai owners here in Orange County, CA who also took delivery within the past 30 days. All of us had ordered back in July. Toyota sponsored a get together last week for Orange County Mirai owners and 36 or so attended. I've put 2,600 miles on in the past 3.5 weeks with no fueling problems at 5 different SoCal stations. Off and running ! My understanding is that there are around 100 Mirai driving around CA now.

Mirai owner get together in Costa Mesa CA in March 2016 by OldNSlow posted Mar 14, 2016 at 7:03 PM

 

There should have been 130 leased between 2015-2/29/2016, so probably 145 now on California roads. There are about 70 hyundai tucson fcevs bringing the total of currently leased cars to over 200. There are of course some older clarities and f-cells and hydrogen equonoxes still on the road.

This roll out is going slower than planned, and anouncement of the tesla model 3 at the end of the month and low gas prices put the 3000 by end of 2017 in doubt. The bigger test is japan 2020 for the olympics. There the mirai doesn't have to compete with american made plug-ins and the government is building refueling stations faster.
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and UC Irvine has their Fuel Cell campus bus too ! Not sure how you did your estimates but it sounds better than my informal sourced information from last week ;-P

 

Source of mirais is insideevs, source of hyundai tucsons is green car reports. I didn't count the busses or fork lifts. There are 35 fuel cell busses in the US, 1 in Austin where I live, just moved to DC. The 1 here was mainly for education and research. UT is trying to do research to make small smr hydrogen stations less expensive.
NREL: Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Research - Hydrogen Fuel Cell Bus Evaluations

 

What was the report for maintenance on the buses? something in the magnitude of 4x more expensive to operate ?

 

4x more expensive than what ? If there are only 35 in US and 7 in California, they're probably pretty much bespoke builds. FC doesn't appear to require much maintenance that I can see - by operating costs are you talking fuel too ? If so, then that's to be expected at this stage of market development.

 

Seriously need some RED Mirai with those WHITE and BLUE

 

No kidding !! There were a couple silver and one black, a couple guys said they wished they would have ordered Stormtrooper White while looking at the cars together ;-))

 

The biggest system was in British Columbia, 20 busses with great data. Maintenance was 58% higher than diesel busses. The DOE helped fund this experiment along with the 35 US busses. The biggest cost difference was fuel costs though. AC transit in Oakland, CA now has the biggest number of busses 13. which report 3x higher maintenance costs than diesel (67 cents versus 21 cents/mi in 2013 report bellow) for 12 fcv busses versus 10 relatively new diesel busses . That program is scheduled to end in Q1 2017. Since these bus fleets have maintenance staffs, they were able to keep the fleets on the road.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy14osti/60527.pdf

The clarity and f-cell have done better, but they really don't have many hours on them. These mirai probably will act perfectly for the 3 month leases, and if there is a problem with durability past that I'm sure toyota will have a replacement part that does better.

 

Here's a news article with a little more information. The hydrogen was trucked from Quebec - for the geographically challenged, that's on the other side of the continent. Not sure if all those emissions were factored into the 'emission free' euphemism or not. Either way, it was a very expensive failed experiment.

 

Failed, look at the Wright Brothers, it took years before they got off the ground. Sometimes it takes time to get it right.....I believe Toyota will get it right.

 

Excellent!

That sure beats the Ioniq sales.

Bob Wilson

 

How is that? ioniq sales are projected to be 77,000 in 2017 and 0 for today. Ioniq is not late or over budget like the hydrogen station roll out.

Toyota projected 15 retail hydrogen stations and 200 mirai by the end of 2015. There were 6 and 74 respectively. Now we have hit mid march and its 12 and around 150 (my guesstimate of march sales not yet reported). To get to that level of sales toyota put in 6 temporary hydrogen pumps (that makes it 18 and there are 3 non retail stations the mirai can fill at). CARB still has a fiction that there will be 50 retail stations by the end of this year, but seeing as the 12 came in late and over budget that number seems like pure fiction.

Can Toyota make their number of 3000 by the end of 2017 in the US. Sure its a really small number. Its only 12% of tesla sales in the US last year, and they have 26 months to do it. Toyota says that a fuel cell car like the mirai is more desirable than a tesla model S, so given the extra government money they should be outselling tesla, I mean if their market research was correct. Toyota hand picked first element to build the stations, they claim its easy, they could probably build a bunch of the stations themselves ;-) My guess is it would cost about $6M to build a really good greenfield (new construction and land) station with on site SMR and filling for 300 cars a day. They aren't building any of those because? well they wanted to pretend stations would only need $1M subsidy each. Now its running like $2M subsidy/station but these stations have low capacity and high operating costs. Toyota could build 4 real stations for only $24M. They claim they have $60B in the bank, why not show first element how it is done if hydrogen is going to take off. They are spending money in japan and australia for this just not in the US.

 

I see Toyota has continued their tradition of limited color palettes.

Along with being cleaner, CNG powered ICE buses could also have lower maintenance costs. The cleaner part means fewer emission systems to care for, and the motor oil lasts longer between changes. These savings will be balanced against the eventual replacement of the CNG tanks, though the latest generation of type IV ones are good for 25 years.

Considering space shouldn't be an issue for the onboard reformer, I wonder if CNG FCEV buses have been considered for testing.

The Mirai is the seventh FCEV, not counting concept cars, Toyota has made.
http://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/intelligent_transport_systems/world_congress/2014detroit/pdf/History_of_Toyota's_Fuel_Cell.pdf
There was years of work before they got to the earliest car on that list. Plus even more time of FCEV development at other companies and national space programs.
The Chevy Electrovan was rolling around in 1966.

The Wright brothers started looking into flight in 1896, and had a contract with the US Army to supply airplanes and train pilots by 1909.
The Wright Timeline

No reason to be petty.

 

Using cng on fuel cell busses would reduce the fuel cost but not the upfront cost or maintenance costs. The fuel cell bus that was demoed in austin that is now in DC was a plug-in hybrid fuel cell bus. Ghg were much lower than the british columbia fleet because solar and wind electricity were used to charge the batteries and chill and compress the hydrogen, versus using renewable hydrogen and trucking it accross the country. Operating costs were also lower as the fuel cells were smaller and not taxed as much as batteries made up for much of the power. Still even though post grant to build the smr reformer the fuel was cheaper for these busses than the cng busses, the up front cost is too high. Infrastructure really is not a problem with a plug-in hybrid bus as long as you make the hydrogen on site.

I don't think we will see cng fuel cell busses because you could also make a phev cng bus that is as efficient as the fuel cell ones, but today's cost is lower. China is pushing electric busses now. The new clean diesel busses are much less polluting than the old ones. I expect fuel cell busses will stay fairly low volume until there is a cost breakthrough on the fuel cells. For a bus fleet hydrogen infrastructure is not a problem, but hydrogen cost is.