Meet the fast-charging, affordable ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates [View all]

Last edited Thu Feb 26, 2015, 10:26 AM - Edit history (1)

By Drew Harwell February 25 at 8:00 AM
@drewharwell

Toyota this week officially rolled out what it's betting will mark "a turning point" in automotive history — a sleek, affordable, eco-friendly "future" car that can drive for 300 miles, takes less than five minutes to refuel and comes with three years of free gas. ... It's everything critics of gas-guzzling car culture could love. And the biggest name in electric cars hates it.

Toyota's Mirai (meaning "future" in Japanese) will be one of the first mass-market cars to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which convert compressed hydrogen gas to electricity, leaving water vapor as the only exhaust. As opposed to getting plugged in overnight, the sedan will need only about three minutes to get back to full charge, a huge boon for convincing the world's drivers to convert to a cleaner ride.

But the green technology has found a surprisingly forceful critic in Elon Musk, the electric-car pioneer and founder of Tesla Motors, maker of battery-powered cars like the Model S. Musk has called hydrogen fuel cells "extremely silly"* and "fool cells," with his main critique being that hydrogen is too difficult to produce, store and turn efficiently to fuel, diverting attention from even better sources of clean energy.

"If you're going to pick an energy source mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick," Musk said** last month in Detroit. "The best-case hydrogen fuel cell doesn't win against the current-case batteries. It doesn't make sense, and that will become apparent in the next few years."