Yahoo News Fuel cell cars emit nothing but water – brewing tea is the next logical step
From the driver’s seat, the Toyota Mirai feels like any other car. It has a spacious four-seat cabin, a practical dashboard layout, an upright but otherwise unremarkable seating position, and a relatively intelligent infotainment interface. In fact, you could be forgiven for finding it quite boring. Only a small button to the left of the steering column labelled ‘H2O’ reveals the Mirai’s secret – that its most interesting feature is what comes out of the exhaust.
The Mirai is a fuel cell vehicle. Put very, very simply, hydrogen and oxygen go in, and electricity and water come out. The electricity goes into batteries and ultimately into electric motors, while the water dribbles slightly apologetically out onto the road, via a small plastic pipe at the back.
We’re talking pure H20, a substance acclaimed for its thirst-quenching properties. Water as a beverage is an enduring favourite, and the stuff that comes out of a Mirai is no different. It’s fundamentally the same as comes out of a tap.
The only thing is, it tastes a little odd, and comes out tepid. By ‘odd’ I mean it inherits the flavour of wherever the car has been driving (yes, really) as well as the arteries of the vehicle itself, and by ‘tepid’ I mean that awkward temperature at which no liquid is enjoyable to drink. I’ve chosen to tackle these issues using an ancient British form of alchemy – by making it into tea.
I’ve turned up to Toyota’s headquarters in Epsom, Surrey, in search of this special morning cuppa. Here I find everything I need to make the brew of the future: a funnel, a mug, a tiny 12-volt water heater, two fuel cell vehicles and Jon Hunt, Fleet Marketing Manager at Toyota GB, who is holding a small selection of teabags.
Cars - brewing a cuppa using fuel cell exhaust water Toyota Mirai
The Toyota Mirai generally emits its water emissions as it drives along. It emerges from the car as a mixture of liquid water and steam, and its exit is barely noticeable to the car’s occupants. But it can leave a small puddle and, in recognition of the fact that this isn’t always desirable, Toyota has built in a method of expelling all the accumulated water in one go, thus enabling a few minutes of relatively dry motoring.
To do this, the driver simply presses the aforementioned ‘H2O’ button on the dashboard. This task is left to Jon, as I scramble under the back of the Mirai to find its exhaust hole. It’s not hard to find, but – as I learn when Jon presses the button – it’s actually quite difficult to collect much water in the vessel I’ve been given. The nozzle is indirect and distressingly urethral, its warm gushing flow mostly missing my mug and drenching my arm instead. The steam has also fogged up our photographer’s camera lens.
Thankfully we have another Mirai, and a short, 11-mile journey ahead of us. It’s hard to stop the car from relieving itself en route, but once we arrive at our destination – this time, the corner of a motorway service station carpark – we’ve gathered just shy of 350ml of pure water, or one-and-a-half teacups.
For this exercise we’re using an in-car travel kettle, which plugs into the Mirai’s 12v cigarette lighter socket and sits neatly in a cupholder. By using the car’s own electricity to boil the water, we’re creating a near-perfect system. Hydrogen and air go in, personal transportation and earl grey come out.
In the five minutes it takes for the kettle to boil, Jon concedes that the water could be put to use elsewhere in the car, such as for washing the windscreen, but explains that there’s little value in engineering such a system in. The existing setup – water dripping imperceptibly onto the road, unless intercepted by a journalist – is enough to give the Mirai its zero-emissions status.
With the kettle boiled, it’s time to make what must be the most elaborate and time-consuming cup of tea in the history of these fair isles. The unmistakable smell of earl grey fills the Mirai’s cabin and, as I take the first sip, I’m relieved to find that it tastes exactly as it should.
Like the Mirai, this cup of tea is superficially very ordinary. But also like the Mirai, there’s much more to it than meets the eye – this simple cuppa, enjoyed in the corner of a carpark on a drizzly February afternoon, is quite literally the best thing to ever come out of a car’s exhaust.
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