Toyota goes ‘Back to the Future’ with Mirai Fuel Cell Vehicle

Today is the future. If you have been online today, then you definitely know it’s Back to the Future day where we are all supposed to get excited about hoverboards, future Pepsi, and self-lacing Nike shoes. Ford will let you order a fake Flux Capacitor for a mythical $1.2 million dollars using their Build & Price tool for the 2015 Fiesta and Focus vehicles. Today, Toyota wants to show us how they’ve made the future the present with their Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car. The scene where Doc fuels his Delorean to accept garbage for fuel at the end of Back to the Future II is used to tell the story of how Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle can use the decomposed trash to produce bio-gas that then is processed with natural gas to eventually hydrogen. All of this relates back to the Mirai’s campaign Fueled by Everything. With a Marty’s souped-up Toyata Tacoma truck, the story of hydrogen fuel is then walked through on a scale model of the town from Back to the Future. This is essentially a relateable way to tell a rather complex tale of how hydrogen vehicles can be fueled. One of the difficult things with hydgrogn is that people mostly think of the Hindenburg blimp and the explosion we all read about in our grade school history textbooks. This Back to the Future inspired tale gets us to think of hydrogen as a product of the future, not the past. So we are left with the feeling that what the Toyota Mirai brings to the alternative fuel equasition isn’t an exploding blimp, but a car we all dreamed of eventually having. Unfortunately it lacks a few essentials to complete the dream: a time machine and Delorean style. Bill Fay, Toyota division group VP and general manager, brings the connection home in his statement: “This ‘Back to the Future’-inspired milestone has taken 30 years to arrive, and Toyota has been developing hydrogen fuel cell technology almost that long. There’s no better way to generate excitement for a turning point in automotive history than with a film that celebrated the possibilities of the future.” Lastly, if you want to see Toyota go full “Back to the Future” check out their Toyota Tacoma concept released today.