Yeah, I purchased a brand new Mirai in late 2022. I was excited about hydrogen, but the past year has been very rough, with dramatic price hikes on fuel as well as station reliability issues. Thankfully in Silicon Valley (where I work) I’m mostly unaffected by the closure of Shell’s stations since there was only one (South San Jose), but this is bad news for people living and working in areas where Shell was the primary provider of hydrogen; there aren’t many hydrogen stations to begin with, and the loss of a hydrogen station could be a nightmare for a Mirai driver.

The Mirai itself is a wonderful vehicle, but I don’t recommend purchasing one; for me I believe it was a huge financial mistake. I still owe about $35K but I’d be lucky to get an offer for $15K if I were to sell it now. I’m active in a Mirai Facebook group and I’ve heard stories of dealerships refusing to accept Mirais as trade-in offers, and I’ve also heard of trade-ins falling through because the owner’s Mirai loan was so underwater that attempting to roll over the remaining Mirai loan’s balance on another vehicle exceeds the lender’s loan to value limits.

Why did you even buy this? Is there any advantage this has over a BEV or normal petrol car?

Toyota was pretty much giving them away. Huge subsidies on prices, amazing load offers and I think you could get a card for 15k of free H2.

It was a good offer in theory, but the H2 infrastructure never caught up.

It doesn't answer for the OP. He still owes $35k on an experiment.

1. I wanted to drive a zero-emissions vehicle. In 2022 gasoline prices in California reached record-high prices, and I believed it was a good time to look at alternatives.

2. I live in an apartment complex that lacks EV chargers. My landlord has no plans to install them, so buying an EV meant being entirely dependent on public chargers.

3. The hydrogen situation looked more optimistic in 2022, with new stations being planned and with infrastructure improvements Coming Soon(TM).

Of course, gasoline prices fell, but hydrogen prices went through the roof in 2023. When I bought my Mirai in November 2022, hydrogen cost $19.70/kg at True Zero stations; most stations in Silicon Valley are operated by True Zero. A month after I purchased my Mirai, prices rose to $23.75, then again the following month to $26.75. These price hikes were blamed on the spike in natural gas prices that occurred in early 2023. But while natural gas prices did fall, hydrogen prices never fell; in fact, they kept increasing until it reached $36 in summer 2023, which remains the price at True Zero stations.

Thankfully True Zero’s stations in Silicon Valley have been relatively reliable. Every now and then there would be supply-related outages, but they have been resolved relatively quickly in Silicon Valley. However, the situation is different in Southern California, and I feel especially bad for Sacramento-area Mirai drivers, who are reliant on one Iwatani station that gets so much traffic that there is a waitlist app! People have waited hours in line for fuel there.

The silver lining is that my Mirai came with a $15,000 fuel card that I use for purchasing fuel, so I don’t have to deal with the direct costs now. However, at $36/kg my card will likely run out by the end of the year, and once it does I’m on the hook for paying nearly $200 for a full tank, with a range of about 300 miles. By comparison, the Prius c that I traded in upon purchasing my Mirai cost $56 to fill up when gas was $7/gal, and it had a range of roughly 360 miles.

I’m hoping that hydrogen production will increase this year as a result of the energy bill Biden signed last year, which has provisions for investing in hydrogen. The Mirai is a wonderful luxury car, but I admit that if Toyota announced a buyback option for the Mirai, then I’d hand over the keys immediately and revert to a hybrid like a Prius or a Crown.

> once it does I’m on the hook for paying nearly $200 for a full tank, with a range of about 300 miles.

That seems like terrible $/mile even if you were seeing your original price of roughly half. My cmax (phev, but i rarely charge it) does 500-700 miles on a 14 gallon gas tank depending on speed and style. Even at $7/gallon, that's way better $/mile.

Wow, you weren’t kidding. I just checked Autotrader and low-ish mileage 2017 Mirais start at $6k.

Business idea: buy Mirais, pull out and sell the H2 systems, and drop in battery packs to make them BEVs.

Retrofit would be between 15-20k a piece, are you able to sell them for 30-40k? Where’s the profit?

Or just LS swap them.

I can't imagine this would be easy to do, but I will 100% click the youtube video when someone does.

Isn't this an interesting opportunity for Japanese buyers to import back?

wrong side of road?

Probably shares enough parts with another Toyota to not be too difficult to swap it back.

And use their plentiful hydrogen stations?

Yes. Wikipedia says there are 167-181 stations in Japan, while USA had 58.

By way of comparison, there are just under 30,000 gas stations in Japan, which itself represents a 50% dropoff from previous peaks and leaves some people needing to drive long distances for gas (c.f. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01830/#:~:text=As%20th....). That's still pathetic.

H2 systems and electronics themselves are worth more than $6k probably.

I think you'd have to lift the entire cabin in order to fit a big enough battery underneath it. Still, not quite outside the realm of possibility. Sillier things have been done by individuals before.

If you look at cutaways of the hydrogen vehicles, there is an enormous amount of space used for tanks and the fuel cell etc. The battery layout could be closer to that of a Polestar 2 rather than the more common 'skateboard' battery pack. Not that it would be an easy project!

You can also just burn the hydrogen in an engine. The Mazda R8 could run on hydrogen thanks to its rotary engine. Still need the huge tank though :)

You can do that without having to make any changes to the fuel lines / injectors?

I believe fuel cell vehicles convert hydrogen to electricity and then have electric drive trains.

Buy it. Store it in an arctic tundra desert protected from the elements. In some decades, some country will roll out mass nuclear and dirt cheap H2 and you'll export it there as a $$$ vintage H2 car and make bank.

There are a few bits operators in the USA using or planning to buy hydrogen buses.

If the fueling system is compatible, perhaps they would use these cars as company vehicles.

I can't think of anyone else that would have a private hydrogen fuel station.

Have you see the fuel price for those things? It’s obscene.

And it’s not like you can make your own fueling station at home. Doing so it an hilariously difficult engineering with plenty of potential to blow yourself up. I mean it’s easy to make hydrogen. It’s just difficult to make hydrogen at this scale and even when you do it still has to be compressed.

To build one in California costs 1.5-2m, and I actually found the company that owns the patent on the home hydrogen refueling system, but I imagine that’s not cheap enough to make up for the money saved on the car.

https://residentialhydrogenpower.com/product/sfha-model-300/