Toyota shows off Fuel Cell Vehicle
The car company on Monday talks up its bet for electric cars, which will launch in California next year.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
For Toyota, the future of cars is vapor. In a good way.
At the Consumer Electronics Show, the automotive company on Monday is talking up its big bet for electric cars: fuel cell technology, which boasts no emissions but water vapor. The cars will hit the market in 2015, Toyota said.
While a competitor like Tesla uses pure battery power to make its vehicles run, Toyota's offering -- the first of its kind to be put on sale for consumers -- uses hydrogen to generate electricity on board the car. In layman's terms, how it works: pure hydrogen is pumped into the tank and combined with air to create water, a reaction that also produces electricity. The fuel cell channels the electricity to a drive motor, powering the car.
At the convention center, the company displayed two cars: a four-door blue sedan and an engineering prototype covered in camouflage that Toyota used for testing in North America. The company said that the car can travel 300 miles on one tank of fuel, and that fill up time would take about three to five minutes. It added that it can go from zero to 60 miles per hour in 10 seconds.
A Toyota spokesperson explained to CNET that the fuel cell vehicle had been a long time coming: The company started working on it over 20 years ago, in 1992, in Japan, getting the first model on the road for testing in 1996.
While the company said the car would the market next year, other than that, not everything has been decided. No price points yet, though Toyota said it wants the cars to be accessible and 'reasonably priced.'
Toyota said the car will initially launch in California. The biggest factor is building enough specialized fuel stations in a particular market for it to be convenient to an owner. The company said it is working with the University of California, Irvine, to map out locations for station sites from the San Francisco Bay Area to San Diego. Toyota said the state has already approved $200 million in funding to build about 20 stations by 2015, and a total of 40 by the year after that.
So what are the advantages over a pure battery-powered car? Toyota says that the fuel cell approach is better for longer distances. The company also notes that the refueling time is much quicker than the time it takes to charge a battery.
Generating electricity on board has other benefits, Toyota said. The company said in a press release that it is looking to develop a power supply device that would allow the car to power a house for a week in the face of an emergency situation.
Developing. More to come...
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