Toyota Mirai hydrogen car depreciation: 65% value loss in a year

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.

Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.

An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.

It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off.

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...

I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.

Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.

With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.

Edit: typo

It's got the EV problem, but 100x worse. No only do you have to worry about where to find a place to refuel, there are far fewer of them, and level 1 charging isn't a fallback. It also doesn't have the EV upsides.

Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.

Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car

A full tank would cost $200 for about 300-350 mile range.

Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km.

This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).

Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?

I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...

This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.

The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.

Cars are not investments.

I've seen exactly one of these in person while in San Diego for a month or so. I never did see a fueling station for it though.

If you think depreciation on a few cars is bad wait until you find out how many hundreds of millions taxpayers spent to build hydrogen stations for cars that don’t exist.

At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.

Not that much worse than an ev.

I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.

Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.

In the US. How does their value fare in Japan?

When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.

An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.

Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.

I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.

I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.