Toyota’s Fuel Cell Vehicle will probably cause as much surprise as the first Prius did, fourteen years ago, but in a much better way. Instead of concocting innovative design elements of any kind, like more or less windows or doors, FCV features everything you already see in most familiar sedans: three-box silhouette, three windows on each side, four doors, everything. Even Toyota’s current design identity, expressed as a narrow front grille which connects both headlights and carries the company logo. The biggest difference is that they were all given whole new proportions. So the resultant feeling manages to start with normality, due to the overall look, and then gives room to a series of small surprises, one for each detail.
Up front, for instance, one can gaze upon what are probably the biggest lower grilles ever fitted into a non-sporty sedan. But instead of looking just weird, like the Mexican Chevrolet Chevy’s, the aforementioned work with the proportions gave an imponent look, which can also be labeled as sporty even without spoilers or chrome inserts. The sides, in turn, show Toyota was clearly worried with finding a compromise between aerodynamics and good looks: the reason why both overhangs look longer than usual is keeping the sedan silhouette as much as possible, in order to avoid Honda FCX Clarity’s solution. The only misstep is surely the rear lighting, whose design tried to repeat the front graphics but looks just odd.
However, do not let FCV’s “alternative” proportions fool you: it is only slightly larger than a Corolla. Toyota did not try to make it a big, luxurious vehicle because there is a much more interesting reason for it to be expensive: this sedan is powered by hydrogen. There is not too much official information about its powertrain, as usual, but it does not go too far from the general idea about this: it is essentially an electric vehicle, with the difference of using a high-pressure hydrogen tank as source, instead of batteries. The results include very similar performance numbers to those of a gasoline-burner, but with advantages like higher autonomy (Toyota estimates 480 km), the ability to power the owner’s house as a generator, quicker recharge and emitting nothing but pure water.
The biggest problem with this kind of automobiles is poor infrastructure: it gets too expensive to build so many recharging stations without many customers to use them, but at the same time it is hard to convince many people to buy these cars without having many places to refuel them. In United States, for instance, Toyota is subsidizing the construction of 100 stations in California, along with the state government, by 2024. At first, FCV will only be sold in those countries which already have at least some of these, which basically refers to Europe, Japan and United States. The latter two will receive this vehicle respectively around 2015’s first and second quatrimesters, at the price of seven million Yen for Japan.