The Paris 2024 Summer season Olympics are lower than two weeks away from their July 26 kickoff. The organizers are touting the occasion because the “greenest-ever,” with half the carbon footprint in comparison with earlier Video games. However a bunch of scientists, engineers and teachers are upset concerning the official automotive chosen for this occasion.
Toyota has been a significant sponsor of the Olympics for years, and in Paris, it’s utilizing a fleet of 500 hydrogen fuel-cell-powered Toyota Mirai sedans to shuttle athletes round. However whereas these automobiles do have zero tailpipe emissions, a coalition of 120 scientists from the UK and the USA have written a letter objecting to their use.
The Mirai mirage
The Toyota Mirai was imagined to be the way forward for transportation. With zero tailpipe emissions and the prospect of hydrogen fueling stations spanning at the least so far as conventional gasoline stations, it was the right answer. However the revolution by no means got here. With the overwhelming majority of economic hydrogen nonetheless coming from fossil fuels, a crumbling infrastructure and plummeting resale values, the Mirai grew to become an undesirable automotive that homeowners are struggling to eliminate. And now, scientists need it faraway from the Paris 2024 Olympics record of official automobiles.
“We’re writing to specific our concern that Toyota’s promotion of a hydrogen automotive is scientifically misaligned with net-zero and can injury the repute of the 2024 Video games,” the letter stated, as printed by Hydrogen Perception and CNN. “Alternative stays to reroute, and we urge that you simply require Toyota to switch the Mirai with a Battery Electrical Car because the official Video games car.”
The group, which incorporates scientists and engineers from the College of Cambridge, Oxford College and the College of Colorado, stated that 96% of the world’s hydrogen continues to be derived from fossil fuels like methane gasoline, making most hydrogen-fueled automobiles just like the Mirai way more polluting than pure EVs and solely marginally cleaner than conventional combustion automobiles.
Toyota Mirai at Hydrogen Pump
Attaining the 2024 Olympics’ formidable green-energy aim will contain utilizing huge photovoltaic arrays, buildings that can be utilized after the video games are over, and sure, use of the Mirai sedan. However even fueling hydrogen automobiles is as a lot a problem there as it’s anyplace.
To place issues into perspective, there are fewer than 10 hydrogen fueling stations in the entire of Paris–town that hosts this yr’s Olympics. In accordance with the European Hydrogen Refuelling Stations Availability System, a public-private partnership supporting analysis and innovation actions in hydrogen applied sciences in Europe, there are eight hydrogen stations in Paris, however three are unavailable on the time of writing this text. In accordance with the European Hydrogen Observatory, that quantity goes down to only three.
So how does Toyota plan on fueling the five hundred Mirai FCEVs that may ferry athletes and officers by way of France’s capital? With hydrogen derived from water and natural matter generated with renewable sources, the corporate stated, based on CNN.
Presumably that entails some moveable hydrogen stations that may disappear as soon as the Olympics are over, leaving the taxi drivers who will get the keys to the Mirais after the occasion caught with automobiles which are a logistical nightmare to refuel.
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To their credit score, Toyota and the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games organizers will deploy a fleet of over 2,650 electrified automobiles, together with 1,150 battery-powered EVs, 500 Mirai FCEVs, 10 hydrogen buses and round 250 battery-powered Accesibile Individuals Movers (APMs.)
Nonetheless, the Mirai has been a constant supply of controversy lately, notably within the U.S. Whereas Toyota continues to take a position closely within the fuel-cell expertise it pioneered, homeowners of the Mirai have filed lawsuits and demanded buybacks over the shortage of fueling stations, the extraordinarily excessive value of hydrogen and a common sense of being deceived by the producer.
Within the U.S., Mirai homeowners had been left scratching their heads after a number of hydrogen stations had been shut down, forcing them to drive dozens of miles to refuel, solely to find that there’s an extended queue or that the station is unavailable, as InsideEVs found after speaking to a number of homeowners of Toyota’s flagship hydrogen sedan. “The whole H2 car expertise is an experiment that’s failing,” one Mirai proprietor instructed InsideEVs earlier this yr. “I did not anticipate to purchase a car from Toyota and really feel duped, cheated, and misled.”
