Toyota To Build Hydrogen Fuel Cell Trucks In UK
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on The Times.
These are the first two paragraphs.
The UK’s first mainstream commercial vehicle to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells will be built at the Toyota plant in Derbyshire, holding out the prospect that the Japanese group will choose Britain as its European manufacturing centre for the next-generation zero-emission technology.
Toyota will announce today that it has chosen Burnaston to produce six prototype hydrogen versions of its popular Hilux pick-up trucks.
It may be only a few vehicles initially, but if Toyota choose Burnaston, as their European manufacturing centre for the next-generation zero-emission technology, this could be large.
The Anonymous Widower 
It can’t be easy for all of the long established automobile companies to reprofile their production to fit the current revolution in drive technology. Just witness the rapid shift in policy at Volkswagen, who 8 or 9 months ago dismissed the potential for fuel cells only to reverse that stance in the last month.
Toyota’s Burnaston plant should, I’d guess, be relatively secure given they appear to be weathering the effects of leaving the Single Market, after all it is car production facility irrespective of whether the vehicles are powered by batteries, fuel cells or internal combustion engines. Hilux production in Burnaston? Seems a bit odd to me, according to Wikipedia apart from a manufacturing plants in Argentina and South Africa the other four factories involved in their current production are in Asia.
Deeside’s future however may be more problematic since a year ago the company decided that their second generation fuel cell module production in Europe would be allocated to Belgium.
Comment by fammorris | December 3, 2022 |
I am going to write more on this, as I have a story about Ricardo doing the engineering for Toyota. It seems Ricardo have seen the writing on the wall and are becoming a hydrogen company. If there’s any company with the knowledge to produce a two litre hydrogen ICE, it must be Ricardo.
Toyota have said that Deeside will make fuel cells. But I would have thought that a HiLux was a classic vehicle to have a hydrogen ICE. Especially, if you could convert your current HiLux to a H2Lux!
Comment by AnonW | December 3, 2022 |