Toyota Mirai: All Dressed Up But Unable To Go

The 2016 Toyota Mirai is now available for sale to a select few customers i.e. people who happen to live in California. The rest of the world will have to patiently wait. The question of whether it gets to the rest of us though, may well determine the success of the Mirai. No ordinary car, this pure electric vehicle is hydrogen powered with its only emissions being water. From the outset, this car is hard not to like.

So what’s the problem? Well as a highly unconventional sedan, it does not have a combustion engine to take even a drop of petroleum and unlike other pure electric vehicles like the Tesla, you don’t plug this battery up at a wall socket to get it re-energised. The car’s unique refuelling requires a hydrogen station, of which there are only a few in California and pretty much nowhere else in the world for commercial use.

Yet, if you gloss over this humongous barrier, the Mirai in almost all other respects represents a highly desirable luxury car. While we think we like the exterior design (the jury is still out on that one), the inside design is unanimously given a thumbs up. Beautifully fitted with stylish finishings, it has all the evocative luxury normally found in its cousin, the Lexus.  Pushing out 150 horsepower, the Mirai is not a performance vehicle as it makes a 0-100km/h in sprint in a sensible 9 seconds.

Once fuelled the Toyota Mirai has a range of around 482 km and refuelling to a full tank only takes about five minutes. Furthermore in order to create incentive for potential buyers, Toyota announced that it will foot the bill on the hydrogen fuel for the first three years of ownership or up to $15,000. To help allay early-adopter concerns the powertrain has an eight-year or 100,000-mile warranty.

The path to greatness is never easy and it certainly doesn’t come cheap either. The Mirais represents the culmination of 23 years of development and approximately 5,680 patents taken out by Toyota. Yet with each unit being sold at $58,325, this price tag puts it out of reach for most of us and yet is a miniscule return for Toyota. All in all this doesn’t make the case for a great return on investment. Nevertheless, Toyota has a delivery order of 200 Mirais to be delivered by the end of December, with a projection of another 2,800 cars over the next two years. A target that will be met as long as infrastructure can keep up with technology.

Read more of our articles on electric powered cars