Toyota has been the most dominating automaker when it comes to promoting the Fuel Cell based vehicles in the world as its approach to new energy vehicles, but most of the time the company has suffered criticism for misleading marketing of its non-plug-in hybrids.
In its new claim for fuel cell vehicles, the company says that its new Mirai fuel-cell sports sedan is not just emissions free, but it actually cleans the air as your drive the vehicle.
The hydrogen fuel-cell requires air for the chemical reaction of splitting hydrogen atoms and that air is preferably clean and free of any unwanted particles and pollutants, in order to clean the air for use the system in the vehicle runs it through a special dust filter that eliminates particles as small as PM 2.5, then it passes through an electrostatic paper and fabric filter that removes other unwanted chemicals.
The company has included a dedicated air purification screen in the Mirai’s infotainment that displays the amount of air purified when driving through an easy-to-understand graphic of runners and digital display. It also allows the driver to view the contribution the new Mirai is making to the environment.
This sounds so great for the environment, but as usual there’s another claim that it also leads to emissions since the production of hydrogen is mostly through steam reforming natural gas, coal gasification, biomass gasification or oxidation of methane.
The same claim is made for BEV’s as they produce zero tailpipe emissions but the power generated for the vehicle is produced using coal and natural gas.
Green Car Reports noted that in their drive of Mirai for 1,351 miles the car cleaned 1,457 kiloliters (about 48,000 cubic feet) of air during the journey.
