Toyota GB heads consortium aiming to bring fuel cell Hilux to market this year

Frankly, if you don’t buy in to the idea that the world is about to end and it’s all our fault and the only way we can survive is to eat sludge produced by one of the intended WEF food hubs while driving an electric vehicle – then you’re an oxygen thief. However, not everyone got the memo.

Toyota UK, Ricardo, European Thermodynamics, Thatcham Research and D2H Advanced Technologies – they don’t sound like the sort of companies that will necessarily follow an eco-religion. In fact, Toyota is well known for saying that electric vehicles may not provide all the answers. In itself a heretical position that should draw the wrath of the modern-day Spanish Inquisition.

So what are those companies doing instead? What they’re doing is exploring, in a real-world, practical way, whether hydrogen fuel cells may be a part of the answer. Toyota already has the second-gen Mirai, which is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. But if we’re going to advance this technology it has to work in really practical ways.

Which is why the companies named above are working together on a two-year project to make the revered Hilux work when powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The starting point is obviously the system used in the Mirai, but taking what works in a sleek saloon with nice owners on their way to an amusing lunch isn’t necessarily going to work in a commercial vehicle driven by people with steel toecaps on their way to the nearest Greggs.

Somewhat excitingly, the group is planning on getting prototypes built this year – with even small-scale production on the cards. Adam

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Smith, who is the Senior Engineer at D2H, was talking about the off-highway, construction and utilities sectors and spoke about ‘the challenge of keeping these industries on the move in environments where battery-electric powertrains often prove impractical’.

He mentioned his pride at having ‘the opportunity to work with the other consortium partners who all represent the finest talent available within the UK’s automotive industry’. If they can do it, and give the venerable and eternal Hilux a new lease of life in the decades ahead, that will indeed be a significant achievement for the UK’s automotive talent.

And they’ll get the thanks of millions of fans around the world too. Some of whom have never even set foot in a Greggs.

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