The world’s most favored automaker and green car pioneer, Toyota Motor is only one year away from its yet another dream project Fuel Cell Vehicle’s market release. Toyota’s ultimate green car, the hydrogen powered FCV (fuel cell vehicle) is going to be a reality in the year 2015.
The Japanese car major has been flaunting its dazzling blue futuristic looking FCV concept vehicle at the various auto shows. This water drop shaped 4-seat sparkling sedan was showcased at the 2013 Tokyo Motor Show first and recently at the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
The Fuel Cell concept car from Toyota is still codenamed as the FCV, and its prototype model has been subjected to extensive road tests by the company in the roads of North America.
The Toyota FCV sedan has two hydrogen tanks to power it. The basically electric vehicle uses the power of Hydrogen which is combined with oxygen from the atmosphere to generate electricity to drive the vehicle. The sedan’s fuel cell system can generate 100 KW of horsepower propelling the car to get burst into a speed 0-100 km per hr in just around 10 seconds. On full tank, this hydrogen powered sedan can traverse around 483 km, while emitting only water vapor back into the atmosphere. Thus, it is the most efficient fully green car ever.
Moreover, the hydrogen tanks of this vehicle can produce energy enough to power a household for about a week. Toyota is also working on this, to make the car a part time household UPS as well, when there is scarcity of electricity. The car’s power train consists of two hydrogen tanks that are connected to the fuel cell, a boost converter as well as an electric motor along with a PCU.
Toyota has always believed in the potential of the fuel cell and has been investing on the research of this technology for about two decades. The major hindrances in using this technology practically were its very expensive development costs and missing refueling infrastructure. Toyota says that it has drastically reduced the fuel cell car’s development costs up to a massive 95 percent.
Toyota’s FCV is all set to launch initially in California in 2015, owing to the state’s increased enthusiasm to set up hydrogen refueling pumps by up to a hundred pumps by the year 2024.
Apart from negating an electric vehicle’s disadvantage of range restriction, the fuel cell cars can also be refueled in minutes. Toyota claims that its FCV takes merely around 3 minutes to get full. However, the lack of hydrogen refueling stations in the globe is a problem now.
Toyota is working in collaboration with the University of California to help decide the potential locations for the set up of new hydrogen fueling stations. Toyota says that the correct positioning of the pumps will require fewer pumps catering to the needs of a huge number of fuel cell vehicles.
Toyota is thus all ready to make another green car dream possible, very soon.
This post was written by
I am into the auto blogs field for quite a long time. Living my passion of reviewing cars.
Tagged: Toyota Fuel Cell Sedan
Leave a Reply