The world’s biggest automaker is betting that hydrogen is the future of automobiles, so it’s calling its first mass production hydrogen fuel cell vehicle Mirai, the Japanese word for “future.”

A quick refresher: Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles run on the most abundant resource in the universe and emit only water vapor as a waste product. They are extremely clean in concept. The main problem is that hydrogen fuel is currently expensive to condense and there isn’t a broad national network of refueling stations. Gas prices have made the first issue less significant. Another hitch is that hydrogen is extremely combustible, but so is gasoline and so are the lithium-ion batteries in hybrid and electric vehicles.

Watch Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda boast about his new baby in the video above.

— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer

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