Once again it appears Toyota is leading the way in this new ground breaking technology. Although almost all the major auto manufacturers in the world today are working on some sort of fuel cell technology, it appears Toyota will be the first mass produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicle to actually be sold ( versus leased ) in the US.

Remember just a few short years ago, making hydrogen in a plastic bottle under the hood of your car and infusing it into the fuel system was all the rage. Seems as though everyone that was handy mechanically was either buying or building a kit to supplement the fuel in his or her vehicle with hydrogen power. Well that turned out to be a bust and produced nothing but a few cool explosions under the hood of some cars.

So what is a fuel cell? Simply put a fuel cell is a device that can use a combination of oxygen and hydrogen to create electricity. So essentially the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are hybrids. Toyota is using much of its Hybrid technology from its current line of cars in the new fuel cell powered vehicles. They will use the same high voltage battery system, electric motor, power control unit (the brains of the operation), and inverter\converter.

One caveat of course is the availability of fueling stations equipped to dispense hydrogen. Currently there are 14 fueling stations in the US. Most of them being in California. http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/stations_counts.html.  However that doesn’t count all the private ones, most manufactures have built and are building many more. The California Fuel Cell Partnership has plans for 40 stations to operate by the end of 2016 and 100 by 2020. The state of California is spending about $20 million a year on the project. The only emissions produced by hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is water. http://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2015/09/20/hydrogen-toyota-fuel-cell-despite-cheap-gas-toyota-launching/32473397/

These vehicles are quite expensive right now but Toyota has driven the costs down substantially and as other manufacturers improve their products I have serious leanings that this may be the future of automobile design.