Toyota Spain has found a new use for four of its first-generation Toyota Mirai. This model, which was discontinued in 2020, is part of the group of the first hydrogen fuel cell cars to be registered in Spain. These four units are placed at the service of Cabify and its subsidiary company Vector.
The Mirai will be available in the Cabify Eco fleet, with a view to the corporate client who always requires low-emission models -or without local emissions- to move around the Madrid area. A catalog of hybrids and electrics ( such as Renault’s Mobilize Limo ) are joined by the first hydrogen VTC cars in Spain. Of course, they only have a gas station, sorry, hydroline.
It is located on Avenida Manoteras, near the A-1 and the M-30, and was inaugurated in 2021. It is a joint project of Toyota Spain, Enagás -through the startup Scale Gas-, Urbaser, Carburos Metálicos, Sumitomo Corporation Spain, and the Spanish Confederation of Service Stations. It is open to the public, but to any public that has been previously authorized by a company in the consortium.
From Toyota Spain they confirm that the hydroline still has a limit of two refuelings per day, so the issue will have to be organized a bit. The first generation Toyota Mirai also has 700 bar pressure tanks, like the current model. The car is compatible with refueling at 350 bar pressure, although it would only store half the hydrogen at 700 bar.
According to the NEDC homologation cycle, the one that corresponded to the first-generation model, it can travel about 550 kilometers with 5 kg of hydrogen. The EPA approval is almost 500 kilometers. To store so little mass of hydrogen, a lot of volumes are needed, 122.4 liters, so it is a four-seater model. Refueling takes 3 minutes.
The deployment of hydrogen cars in Spain is very, very slow. To build demand for hydrogen, you have to start with fleets and companies. The fleet of four Mirai for Cabify could be expanded at the end of the year, as the members of the consortium change the first generation models for those of the second. In the middle term before reaching the public, autonomous drivers, the current Toyota Mirai has been approved to work as a taxi since March, but not the first-generation model.
I live in Los Angeles County and own a 2019 Toyota Mirai. First of all never have I been able to refuel my car in 3 minutes! First of all I consider myself lucky if I find a pump that’s working correctly where I usually go to the Chevron in Baldwin Park that has two hydrogen pumps one on the South Island and one on the North Island for a total of four refueling nozzles. The nozzle sides are numbered one and two on the South Island and three and four on the North Island. I’ve only been able to get fuel out of number four once and to fill my car I had to fuel up three times! In other words the pump shut off I remove the nozzle started over again put some more in my car the pump shut off remove the nozzle and start it over for the third time More than 70% of the time you don’t get a receipt fuel had been $19.76 but it just went up to $23 74. You can check true zeros pump status map and it’ll say four nozzles available and by the time I drive the 12 minutes to the station the station could be out of service! This has happened to me on two different occasions were all four nozzles were out of service I called the true zero number and reported both times and then 20 minutes later when I looked at my true zero map it finally updated saying they were out of service! Luckily close by is a Home Depot Walmart and a Farmer Boys, s!. o I always have a shopping list with me and do some shopping and/or get something to eat in hopes at the pumps will be back online when I’m done. The EPA mileage figures are a flat out lie a 2019 mirage never got over 300 mi on 5 l tank as a state! When I fill my car up and this takes at least two times at the pump because the pump usually shuts off prematurely and I have to start over to get my gauge in the car to show full my car has never registered on the anticipated driving range more than 231 mi! When my refueling light comes on it says I have 40 mi left to drive but this is actually closer to 60. Orange County Transit authority has 10 hydrogen buses in service and an 18,000 gallon tank but they didn’t put in a pump out at the street for public use like they have with their CNG fueling. The same with foothill Transit who just put in a new hydrogen bus in service on route 91 this December and put in a 25,000 gallon tank but do not have a public hydrogen fueling station available like they do with CNG. There’s nothing in California for refueling at Barstow or state line on the 15 so if you wanted to go to Las Vegas you’d be out of luck and there’s nothing in Palm springs! Everything centered around the metropolitan area either Los Angeles San Francisco or San Diego with one pump available on interstate 5 if you want to try to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco or vice versa. My hydrogen car is amazing in regards to it’s driving abilities and how it handles after driving my Prius for 7 years! The acceleration factor from 0 to 60 is unbelievable and if you don’t watch it on the freeway it’s so quiet you can be going 80 and not know it! One thing that should be mentioned about EPA’s figures as they were using breaking to increase the mileage in reality you get more mileage when you’re in stop and go traffic then you do if you take the Mariah out on the road where you’re using the cruise control and not breaking! So you can’t drive anywhere out of California yet there’s no fueling stations except in California and Hawaii. Originally hydrogen was around $12 per liter and more hydrogen plants for being made and solar was being used to produce hydrogen so the cost of production should have been down and when you look up wholesale cost of hydrogen production it’s three to $5 per liter there is a solar plant in Las Vegas which is used by all the vehicles in the water district in the hydrogen is put straight into the tank for refueling there’s no delivery truck needed! All other hydrogen refueling stations need to have the hydrogen delivered to the station but how the price can go from $5 to now $23 is own been owns to me as to who’s making the huge profit? I’ve emailed Governor Newsome about the situation of the high price and of federally and state-funded transportation companies like Orange County and foothill Transit district getting hydrogen buses and putting in big fuel tanks but not making a public hydrogen fueling station available at the location like CNG! Toyota is now announcing a pickup truck and an SUV running on hydrogen but they need to put in a bigger tank than 5 l and get more infrastructure around the state so people can go somewhere like Las Vegas or Laughlin or Palm springs or to the redwoods in Northern California without fear of running out of fuel! Toyota continues to sell the cars but the salesman never tell you the real story about the refueling logistics and I’ve never been able to refuel my car in 3 minutes as your article states! First of all they’re so few pumps that usually when I go to the one in Baldwin Park I have to wait for one or two cars ahead of me and when I’ve been waiting the driver will walk back to me and tell me that the pump just shut down and is not working anymore! This has happened to me twice at the Baldwin Park fueling Station! The other day I was in Orange County and on my way back I stopped at the hydron refueling station at the Chevron at orangethorpe in the 57 freeway and it set up like Baldwin Park with two pumps and four nozzles and only one nozzle was working and I had to wait for a car in front of me and then when I refueled I had to refuel three times because the pump shut off saying I was full when it only pumped 3/4 of a liter the first time the second time it pumped 1 l and the third time it pumped one and a half liters! It’s never mentioned by anybody that if you’re older person like myself who’s 80 and has some arthritis in their hands it’s very difficult to get the nozzle disconnected from your car especially when the humidity is up and it freezes solid to the input port on your car! I finally learned you have to wait a minute and then twist the nozzle to the right and the left to break the ice from the freezing of the fuel being dispensed all the time while you’re doing this and waiting there’s another Mirai in line waiting to refuel! When any municipality or transit district gets federal funds and possibly state funds it ought to be mandatory that they put in a public refueling pump for hydrogen customers otherwise the infrastructure is going to fall on its face and hydrogen vehicles will only be good at larger sizes and for commercial use! There is some good news out of Australia where they’ve taken a diesel truck and converted it to run on 2% diesel fuel and 98% hydrogen but this doesn’t do any good for the average person that would like to drive a 100% clean vehicle who’s only exhaust is water! Beware of Toyota and in my case I was at Longo Toyota that overpriced their used Mirai by $13,000 above Blue book and gave me $4,000 more for my Prius over its Blue book price to entice me to buy the Mirai the Mariah was certified and I got a $15,000 hydrogen fuel credit card but my driving habits over the last 7 years with my Prius averaged out to 4,..890 miles per year except for my 7th year where I only drove 2,900 mi. If you have a murai and you’re new to the system I suggest that you carry a little notebook with a pencil and paper if you want to write down how many liters you’re getting to see what kind of mileage you’re getting so far I’ve been getting between 48 and 50 mi gallon equivalent (liter). So if I ran my tank dry which is a 5 l tank the furthest I could go would be 250 mi! From my house to Las Vegas is between 238-243 miles and there’s no refueling in Las Vegas so unless they put something at Barstow or state line and maybe we could get the casinos involved then it eliminates people with a MRI from the Los Angeles area making it to Las Vegas or back! Maybe once you got there you wouldn’t want to bring your car back You might want to hock it! Anyway hydrogen vehicles are fantastic they don’t have as much batteries in them as compared to Tesla’s so there’s not that item to have to get rid of in the future and the only thing they expel is water but the infrastructure and the hype is way overrated in the public isn’t being told the truth by the car dealers especially Toyota! By the way the Toyota Mirai has the worst resale value of any car on the road because when people bottom they got $20,000 federal tax credit and somewhere between 5 and $10,000 state tax credit which knocked the price down by 25 to 30,000 plus they got the $15,000 gas card so if they are driving a lot of commute miles then they got their money back and they weren’t interested in making much on the car that’s why Blue book carvana CarMax or any other car value rating system that you look a will rate my 2019 Mirai with the 7,900 mi it had on it because it came out of a 3-year lease in the people must have only used it to drive their kids to school and back was in the San Fernando valley because Longo Toyota Did not erase any of the information out of the mapping system or the phone system and I had to bring the car back to him to get it re-detailed because there was dog hair down between the seats! Toyota says he put new wiper blades on it but the last rain we had here the wiper blades were dragging and they said they put a new battery in it for me cuz the batteries are only rated to last 3 years but I’ll have to check that out myself when I go down there. I’m just saying buyer beware, BUYER BEWARE! I was told by my salesman that hydrogen was 12 to $14 per liter so when I went to fill up for the first time and saw that it was $19.76 I was shocked! And now it’s $23.75 a liter. AGAIN BUYER BEWARE IF THE TOYOTA DEALER IS OFFERING YOU MORE FOR THAN BLUE BOOK FOR YOUR TRADE-IN THEY’RE PROBABLY OVERCHARGING YOU FOR THE MIRAI! REGARDLESS IF IT’S CERTIFIED OR NOT THE CERTIFICATION IS NOT WORTH THE ADDED EXPENSE NOR THE GAS CARD WHEN YOU COULD BUY ONE FOR 13 OR 14,000 CHEAPER THAN FROM THE DEALER! The money you save could be used for the fuel and especially if you’re a low mileage driver you’d be way ahead to buy your Mirai from a private party or some place like carvana or CarMax that are reputable resellers of used vehicles!
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