Toyota: Kick-starting Mirai

A great article. I changed the title because I think it suits better.

Only nine months after the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 struck Japan, Toyota engineer Yoshikazu Tanaka was told by his bosses to develop a fuel-cell vehicle. For Toyota, the project represented a big hydrogen gamble and its timing was far from ideal.

The Japanese car group had seen its net profit halved as it grappled with disrupted supply chains, higher electricity costs and the yen’s surge to record highs. General Motors and Volkswagen had overtaken it in cars sold.

Tanaka, who was in charge of the Prius plug-in hybrid at the time, also questioned whether it made sense for the company to take on an enormous risk in such an unfavourable environment. Soon afterwards, though, he reached a different conclusion.

“Dinosaurs became extinct because they could not adapt to the environment,” Tanaka says. “I realised not taking the risk would be a bigger risk for us. There is only extinction ahead if no action is taken.”

The apocalyptic forecast from Tanaka echoes a general sense of crisis shared by the global auto industry as it wrestles to build cars that do not harm the environment. Auto executives say the race to develop greener and safer vehicles is likely to generate the biggest technological revolution in the industry since the birth of gasoline-powered cars more than a century ago.

“We have no time to lose,” says Takeshi Uchiyamada, chairman of Toyota and also known as the father of the Prius hybrid car. “With the existing pace of transformation, we will not be able to keep up with the speed of destruction of this beautiful and diverse planet.”

The Toyota scheme comes as rivals such as Tesla and Nissan are banking on battery-powered electric vehicles. Volkswagen had placed a heavy bet on clean diesels, which now face a backlash after the German manufacturer admitted to cheating in US emissions tests of its diesel vehicles.

The Mirai has brought fuel-cell vehicles to the forefront of Toyota’s efforts to achieve what it calls “sustainable mobility”. But even at the Japanese company, fuel-cell vehicles had long been regarded as low priority compared with the Prius gasoline-electric hybrid, which established Toyota’s image as a pioneer in fuel-saving technology.

So when Tanaka was assigned in 2012 to develop the Mirai as chief engineer, the decision prompted scepticism inside Toyota. With the company’s financial conditions tight, the message from his bosses was also clear: the spending budget should be kept as small as possible.

“The hurdle was already very high to commercially launch a fuel-cell vehicle,” Tanaka says. “But we had to beat our brains to achieve that as efficiently and with as little money as possible.” To deal with the stress of the situation, Tanaka maintained a disciplined regime of running 5km each day before having his lunch in the cafeteria.

Looking back, the Mirai’s chief engineer now says the challenge actually helped to draw the company together. He asked for help from a wide range of departments to make sure his team could produce results using as few prototypes as possible to keep the costs down. From research that began with about three engineers in the 1990s, the Mirai project has expanded to include about 800 employees at Toyota.

“By raising the hurdle, everyone inevitably got pulled into the project,” he recalls. “In that sense, it really became a company-wide project.”

Toyota executives concede that sales of the $57,500 Mirai are just one part of the way towards the company’s goal of building a “hydrogen society”. Mass market penetration of fuel-cell vehicles cannot be achieved with the efforts of the company alone. To expand the market, Toyota released its fuel-cell patents last year, echoing a similar move by Tesla on electric vehicle patents.

One of the biggest problems is the lack of refuelling stations. The infrastructure has been slow to develop because hydrogen stations are far more expensive than petrol stations to build.

Toyota hopes the pace of infrastructure construction will pick up as more rivals enter the market. Honda, which has been collaborating with General Motors, plans to release its fuel-cell car later this year while a Nissan vehicle, jointly developed with Daimler and Ford, is expected in 2017.​

Much more at: Toyota: Emission control - FT.com