Toyota is designing hydrogen powered, lower-cost, mass market passenger cars and SUVs and shifting the technology into buses and trucks to build economies of scale, a media report said.
Reuters said the automaker plans improvements for the next generation Mirai hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (FCV) expected in the early 2020s, while hoping it can prove wrong rival automakers and industry experts who have mostly dismissed such plans as commercially unviable.
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Toyota said it could popularise FCVs in part by making them cheaper.
"We're going to shift from limited production to mass production, reduce the amount of expensive materials like platinum used in FCV components, and make the system more compact and powerful," Mirai chief engineer Yoshikazu Tanaka said in an interview with the news agency.
Meanwhile, a Reuters source said Toyota was planning a phased introduction of other FCV models, including a range of SUVs, pick-up trucks, and commercial trucks beginning around 2025.
But the automaker declined to comment directly to Reuters on specific future product plans. It has developed FCV prototypes of small delivery vehicles and large transport trucks based on models already on the road.
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By GlobalData"We're going to use as many parts from existing passenger cars and other models as possible in fuel cell trucks," Ikuo Ota, manager of new business planning for fuel cell projects at Toyota, told Reuters, adding: "Otherwise, we won't see the benefits of mass production."
Toyota also wants to expand the range of the next Mirai to 700-750 kilometres from around 500 now and to hit 1,000 by 2025, a separate Reuters source said.
Driven by the belief that hydrogen will become a key source of clean energy in the next 100 years, Toyota has been developing FCVs since the early 1990s, Reuters noted.
The report said LMC Automotive forecast FCVs to make up only 0.2% of global passenger car sales in 2027, compared with 11.7% for battery EVs. The International Energy Agency predicted fewer FCVs than battery-powered and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles to the end of 2040.
Reuters noted many automakers, including Nissan and Tesla, see battery-powered cars as a better, zero-emission alternative to petrol engines. Only a handful, including Honda and Hyundai, produce FCVs.
But sources familiar with Toyota's plans told Reuters the automaker thinks demand will rise as more countries, including China, adopt fuel cell technology. The company also sees FCVs as a hedge against a scarcity of key EV battery materials such as cobalt.
According to Reuters, Strategic Analysis, which has analysed costs of FCVs including the Mirai, estimated it costs Toyota about US$11,000 to produce each of its fuel cell stacks, by far the vehicle's most expensive part. Toyota has been building up production capacity to change that, as it expects global FCV sales climb to 30,000 units annually after 2020 from about 3,000. Strategic Analysis estimated this would allow Toyota to reduce costs to about $8,000.
"It will be difficult for Toyota to lower FCV production costs if it only produces the Mirai," a source told Reuters.
"By using the FCV system in larger models, it is looking to lower costs by mass-producing and using common parts across vehicle classes."
Reuters said high Mirai production costs are due largely to expensive materials including platinum, titanium and carbon fibre used in the fuel cell and hydrogen storage systems. The car is also hand-assembled in low volume.
The report said engineers have been reducing cost by improving the platinum catalyst, a key component in the 370 layered cells in the fuel cell stack, which facilitates the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen that produces electricity.
"We've been able to decrease the platinum loading by 10% to 20% and deliver the same performance," Eri Ichikawa, a fuel cell engineer at Cataler , a Toyota subsidiary that specialises in catalytic converters, told Reuters.
Strategic Analysis said using that much less of the precious metal would save up to $300 per fuel cell stack, based on an estimate that Toyota now uses about 30 grams of platinum per unit.
"By consistently focusing on these issues, we will be able to progressively lower the cost of FCVs in the future," Tanaka told Reuters.
