In the early ’90s, amid worries about dependence on foreign oil and global warming, the Japanese automaker Toyota mapped out initial plans for two revolutionary vehicles. One was the Prius, the car that arrived on American shores in 2000 and is largely responsible for popularizing hybrids here. (There are now more than 9 million hybrids on the road, globally.) A decade and a half later, the second vehicle is finally making its debut: the Mirai, which launched in California last year, is one of the first hydrogen fuel-cell cars available on the market. The zero-emissions vehicle has long been a goal for Geri Yoza, a 30-year Toyota employee who’s now the national manager of fuel-cell vehicles for the company’s American division. NationSwell spoke to her about the Mirai’s possibilities and Toyota’s next ambitious goal: to green the company by 2050.
First, can you walk me through how the Mirai works?
The vehicle is creating electricity through a chemical reaction in the fuel-cell stack. You fill up with hydrogen at a fueling station, and that combines with oxygen from the air to create electricity on-demand. Basically, you’re stripping off the electrons, and those provide power to the motor. Zero emissions come out of the tailpipe; the only byproduct is water vapor.
Why is this preferable to plugging in for a charge, as the Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Bolt all do?
All-battery electric vehicles typically have a shorter range than fuel-cell vehicles, and they often take several hours to recharge the battery. Batteries can be fairly heavy as well. Whereas, with a hydrogen fuel cell, vehicles have a range of 300 miles or more, and they only take about three to five minutes to fuel up.
The Mirai is currently priced at $57,500, a figure out of reach for most car-buyers. Over the short and long terms, how do you plan to make the car affordable?
Even when a vehicle has a high MSRP, there are incentives out there from both the federal government as well as states. For example, there’s an $8,000 federal tax credit if you purchase a fuel-cell vehicle like the Mirai. In California, there’s a $5,000 rebate that you receive if you’re a resident and you keep the vehicle in service for three years. They’re doing this because they understand that new technology is expensive — after your house, a vehicle is probably your second largest expense. In order to get the market going, sometimes you need these incentives.
Over the long term, if you look at the Prius as an example, we initially had a demographic of early adopters who were very highly educated and earning higher incomes. But as the vehicle was adopted by the mass market, you started to see broader appeal, with a greater range in education and income levels. As advanced-tech vehicles become more widespread, the production costs go down.
What do you tell skeptics who say there are too many obstacles, like a lack of fuel stations, for wide-scale use of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles?
There’s a challenge there, I will admit, in the infrastructure of fueling. We’re still at the beginning stages for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle adoption, but we’re making progress. We have 25 retail stations up in California, with more on the way, and Toyota’s working with Air Liquide in bringing a dozen stations to the Northeast next year. Building the fuel-station network will take time. We saw that with all-battery electric cars, it took a while to get the standards and codes together to educate municipalities on the permitting processes for plug-in charging stations. There’s room for both types of zero-emission vehicles, and consumers should be allowed to choose based on their needs and lifestyles.
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Where do we get all this hydrogen from?
Hydrogen fuel can be produced from almost anything, including raw materials like natural gas, water and biomass. For example, right now, the most common way is steam-reformed methane. You take natural gas and apply heat and steam to it. The methane in the natural gas reacts with the water in a chemical process that releases hydrogen. Another way is taking waste from water-treatment plants or landfills and creating hydrogen from biomass. And hydrogen can also be made from water via electrolysis.
Under the Zero Emissions Vehicle program, California requires automakers to sell a certain number of electric cars. How is that regulation affecting the way Toyota does business?
The way it works is that manufacturers get credit for selling all-battery electric cars, plug-in electric hybrids or fuel-cell vehicles. If some manufacturers generate more credits than they need, they can actually sell those to other manufacturers who might not be on the exact same trajectory of zero-emission vehicle product development, if necessary, in order to balance out their portfolio.
In terms of being at the forefront, the regulation has really helped move California toward its zero-emissions goals, but we’re not there yet. We have so many conventional vehicles on the road in the state’s metro areas that it’s really been important to continue reducing our tailpipe carbon-dioxide emissions and other tailpipe pollutants, since they have a negative impact from a public health and quality-of-life standpoint. Now, other states have adopted some of California’s zero-emissions-vehicle standards, and that’s important because it helps promote adoption of these vehicles nationwide.
One of the other big regulations came in 2012, when the Obama administration set a standard that all cars and light trucks must reach 55 miles per gallon by 2025. How do those fuel-economy rules affect whether more consumers go electric?
Across the company, Toyota has a portfolio approach. We don’t have just zero-emission vehicles or efficient hybrids like the Prius, which already has an EPA rating of over 50 mpg. We also have very fuel-efficient internal-combustion vehicles, and we continue to develop new technologies to reduce our emissions, as well as increase fuel economy. Sometimes, it can be a challenge with gasoline costs being as low as they are right now. The market is about 60 percent trucks and SUVs, and one of the reasons is because of the low cost of fuel.
We hear the word “sustainability” batted around, much more than in the past. What does that term mean to you, and why should it be a priority?
Sustainability, to me, goes beyond the vehicle, even beyond manufacturing. How can we benefit society as a good corporate citizen? Within the company, one of the challenges that Toyota has for 2050 is creating vehicles that are zero carbon emissions in manufacturing, putting in systems that promote recycling and optimizing the resources that we have. One example is reusing the hybrid vehicles’ batteries at the end of their life in other ways, like energy storage for solar. There’s a second life. So, we’re looking at those types of solutions.
Sustainability also goes beyond the corporate into the personal. Everybody has a role to play in the decisions that they make, including the cars they choose to drive. It’s important from the next generation’s standpoint. I really do want to leave the world in a better place, environmentally, than when I came into it.
Tag: environment-friendly vehicles
The Incredible Device That’s Revolutionizing How We Get to Work
Embedded within a sleek red disk that resembles a miniature flying saucer, it consists of three computers, 12 sensors, a 350-watt motor and a 48-volt lithium battery and can be attached to the back wheel of any bike with rear brakes. And if the device’s creators are right, this 26-inch wheel could change the future of urban transportation.
The Copenhagen Wheel, as the hack is known, transforms your ordinary two-wheeler into a electric-powered bike that can travel faster (up to 20 miles per hour) and farther (up to 31 miles per charge) than casual pedal-pushing will move you. Assaf Biderman, the wheel’s lead designer, says the add-ons will make bicycle transportation a more attractive option for commuters, unclogging streets, saving gasoline and cutting emissions in the process.
Biderman starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not a bike geek who wanted to put a motor on a bicycle.” His background is in physics, and as an associate director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s SENSEable City Lab, which focuses on how digital technology, sensors and handheld devices can transform urban areas, his vision is about changing the way cities function. Along with a team of a dozen MIT undergrads, he found that bikes were a preferred form of urban transit — as long as the trip was under nine miles long. (That distance varies by city: San Francisco, for instance, may deter bikers because of the hilly terrain.) To lengthen that distance, Biderman built the first prototypes of the Copenhagen Wheel, timed with the 2009 United Nations Summit on Climate Change hosted by Denmark — a predecessor to this year’s more successful summit in Paris.
In the years since then, Biderman’s inbox piled up with messages. In late 2012, he discovered that 14,000 emails were sent to the MIT lab from people who wanted to buy a Copenhagen Wheel. Shortly after, Biderman founded Superpedestrian, a robotics company in Cambridge, Mass., that is ramping up production capabilities for the Wheel.
An electric bike, perhaps surprisingly, is a very old idea. Around 1868, a Boston inventor named Sylvester Roper attached a coal-fired steam engine to a frame, a vehicle that could “out speed any horse in the world.” (In 1896, after swiftly pedaling through Charles River Park, Roper died of an apparent heart attack.)
Why did Roper’s bike never take off? When his invention debuted, just after the close of the Civil War, cities were still compact places, essentially big villages that obviated the need for long-distance travel. Around the same time that Roper’s bike coughed into motion, cities started growing skyward and spilled outward into suburbs. At that point, the electric bike may have been useful to those within the city, but the emergence of subways in 1904 and Ford’s Model T in 1908 both usurped the limelight. Cities, for the next century, built their infrastructure to accommodate the car.
Today, rural and suburban areas are declining. The world’s population is once again becoming concentrated in urban pockets. “Cities have been a focal point for centuries, but they are becoming even more so with urbanization of the developing world,” Biderman says. “We are building cities at the fastest rate in history.” That means more and more residents needing to travel daily from a metro area’s outer ring to the city center. Just ask any motorist in Los Angeles or Washington, D.C., if they could imagine dealing with ever-increasing traffic, and you can see why Superpedestrian is readying for tens of thousands of orders.
“You don’t need to be a scientist to realize this is unmanageable,” Biderman says. But he predicts that once people start buying the Copenhagen Wheel, infrastructure for bikes will follow, in the same way that highways were paved once every family had a vehicle.
Biderman adds that the difference in today’s cities, compared to a century ago, is not simply a matter of how congested the streets are. The success of Superpedestrian is also reliant on our technological connectedness. “The relationship between people and the place they live is mediated by machines: creating feedback loops, measuring how things change in real time, and analyzing the data,” he says. The Copenhagen Wheel’s computer system quickly learns how a biker rides, then imitates her pedaling — an experience Biderman has described as “seamless.” “People report that it feels so natural, and they feel so strong,” he says. “The best way to describe it is feeling like Popeye. You pop the spinach, and you’re Superman.”
Today, people live farther away from where they work than ever before. “The car enabled us to do that, but people want to switch out. They want an alternative,” Biderman says. Cities won’t be shrinking, but with Superpedestrian, bikes can take us farther.
MORE: Tomorrow’s Energy-Saving Neighborhood Is Being Built Today in Texas
Correction, 1/11/2016: A previous version of this article said that the Copenhagen Wheel can be attached to the back wheel of any bike; in fact, the device works only on bikes with rear brakes.
This City’s Public Schools Are Giving Free Bikes to Kids in Need
Adam* is a public school student who lives in the Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh—a place where the lack of public transit has long made it hard for him to get around. But when he received, through a partnership with his school, a free bike, helmet and lock, that began to change in a major way.
“Since he has been able to bike home … he has been given a burst of new energy, freedom, and independence,” Julie Mallis —director of the program that made Adam’s bike gift possible — told Sustainable Cities Collective.
Mallis leads Positive Spin, a program that partners with Pittsburgh Public Schools to provide over 300 students with access to bicycles and lessons in bike mechanics. Positive Spin is a local initiative of Marilyn G. Rabb Youth Empowerment, a national nonprofit focused on helping young people overcome the social and economic obstacles that face them.
None of the kids in the program had access to functional bikes before their enrollment in Positive Spin; in fact, about 15 percent of them had never ridden one before the nonprofit gifted them with their new wheels. After ten weeks in the program, Positive Spinners can not only ride their bikes, but fix them, Mallis says.
But the skills students hone in the program don’t stop there. As part of their discussion around why cycling is important, the young enrollees recently shot and directed their own rap videos about the environment.
No positive spin is needed in ticking through all the reasons why Positive Spin is great for young people and their communities: it’s empowering and encourages physical activity, ownership, and a sense of freedom all while fostering a love for a green means of getting around.
*Name changed for privacy reasons.