Hydrogen Car Partnership: BMW & Toyota

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 Joint Development, Production & Sales Collaboration




                                    Source: BMW & Toyota

Hedging Bets & Investments in Hydrogen Vehicles

An innovative partnership has just emerged between German luxury car maker BMW and Japan's Toyota to develop, produce and sell hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2025.  They have partnered on vehicles before like the BMW Z4 and the Toyota Supra sports car, but the scope of this collaboration is unprecedented.  It brings the smarts and expertise of two automotive behemoths together to create next generation, zero emissions hydrogen vehicles.  Hydrogen vehicles use hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity to fuel the vehicles.

Hydrogen's Advantages

Toyota in particular has depth of experience in developing hydrogen vehicles like the now 8-year-old Toyota Mirai hydrogen sedan. BMW recently introduced its next generation vehicle platform - Neue Klasse - that will be designed for building hydrogen vehicles as well as battery electric.  Hydrogen fuel cells offer many advantages over battery electric vehicles including a significantly longer range.  They can also be refueled in just 3 to 4 minutes.  However, the infrastructure of hydrogen fueling station networks is not in place to support any type of mass hydrogen vehicle usage. That needs to be addressed here in the US, in Europe and elsewhere.  Nonetheless, the new collaboration between BMW and Toyota is a harbinger of things to come.  It allows the two automakers to hedge their bets and share the very substantial investment costs to develop and produce zero-emissions hydrogen vehicles. They clearly believe that hydrogen powered vehicles will be a big part of the future of driving. 

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