Inside Toyota’s alternative path to the future of motorsport

Noise. A blessing or a curse. A delight or an irritation. For many race and rally fans, it’s one part of the essence of what makes motorsport so appealing. You can count Toyota’s chairman and former CEO for the past 13 years among their number.

“She said noise, but to my ears, it is more like a lullaby!” laughs Akio Toyoda, great-grandson of the company’s founder and inspiration behind the multi-championship-winning Gazoo Racing, as he picks up the misplaced nuance of his translator’s words when asked about the prospects of battery electric motorsport in the vein of Formula E and Extreme E doing away with one of the sport’s more visceral appeals.

“In my view, sound is a critical part of motorsport,” he continues. “In the case of Le Mans, where there are many cars circulating in the same space for a lot of laps, maybe there is less need to focus on this. But when I think about the World Rally Championship, with spectators stood in a forest or out in the dust and sand, what is the appeal of a silent vehicle approaching you? The excitement of hearing a car before you see it is a very important part of enjoying the sport.”

You can be cynical or accepting of Toyoda’s prosaic motivation for expounding combusting hydrogen in an engine as being the best solution to motorsport’s quest to reduce its carbon emissions and maintain one of its key facets – although I would challenge anyone who spent more than an hour with him discussing the subject, as I did, to hold onto the former view for long.

Yes, Toyota has been famously slow to develop battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), doubting they can provide the panacea for the climate emergency that many legislators are hoping for; while supportive of BEV development, Toyoda sees combusted hydrogen as a potential alternative solution to motoring’s emissions problems. As such, he’s not purely expounding the adoption of the technology for the benefit of motorsport fans, but rather a mutually beneficial development programme for the long-term health of his company – and the planet.

“People think I talk about hydrogen so I can use it as an excuse to enjoy motorsport,” he acknowledges. “But the reality is that we should use racing as an opportunity to accelerate the development of the product.

Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda is a passionate supporter of hydrogen and pushing the envelope

Photo by: Toyota Racing

“In a racing environment you have two unique possibilities; firstly, a lot of people are watching what you do, so you can promote a technology to a new audience; and secondly, there are a lot of different cars competing, to a schedule, and everyone wants to win. That sets deadlines for the teams to keep pushing to do a better job, overcome challenges and find solutions that can make it a reality from which we can bring costs down.”

Indeed, the very first engine to ignite a fuel was powered by hydrogen. Back in 1807, Swiss-French inventor Isaac de Rivaz fired up the first internal combustion engine using it as a fuel. While the idea didn’t have longevity, partly thanks to the superior energy density of petrol, the science behind it remains: burn hydrogen, and it will combine with oxygen to produce energy, crucially with no carbon emissions (and an exhaust byproduct of water).

The case for combusted hydrogen is not, however, as straightforward as that makes it sound. Unlike in a hydrogen fuel cell, combusting hydrogen results in the creation of an array of nasty nitrogen oxides (NOx), the root cause of a variety of respiratory diseases and more. Diesel’s demise was largely a result of the same issues, albeit amplified by the Volkswagen ‘Dieselgate’ scandal.

Under Toyoda’s watch, Toyota’s annual R&D budget has risen to a point where it is now nudging £7billion, and the world’s largest car maker by sales volumes isn’t prone to chasing rainbows

Toyota’s challenge is therefore highly technical, since it must work out how to run its engines as leanly as possible to reduce the NOx issues, as well as developing filters that can prevent any escaping into the atmosphere. Furthermore, beyond that lie the challenges of storing the hydrogen in cars, both under enormous pressure, and, if greater performance is to be extracted, at incredibly low temperatures.

There is also the complex issue of creating a refuelling infrastructure, not least because each charging station costs around £1million to install (the UK, for instance, had 15 in 2021, but demand has been so low that just five remain open). To give an idea of the scale of the issue, some question how enough infrastructure can be created at Le Mans to help maybe a dozen teams race there when its rules change from 2026, let alone creating a pan-continental infrastructure.

Insight: How close is widespread adoption of hydrogen in motorsport?

The upside, of course, is that refuelling can be done in minutes, not hours as with batteries, and that much of the technology is derived from today’s engines (estimates suggest an 80% carryover of parts is possible). Nevertheless, while combusting hydrogen has many potential positives, be in no doubt that they still need unlocking – a task that even its proponents suggest is likely at least five years away on any serious scale.

There is, then, an enormous amount of development still to be done. But under Toyoda’s watch, Toyota’s annual R&D budget has risen to a point where it is now nudging £7billion, and the world’s largest car maker by sales volumes isn’t prone to chasing rainbows. It is investigating every technology – batteries, sustainable fuels, hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen-powered engines and more – and feels that all have potential.

Toyoda has raced the GR Corolla H2 concept which has an ICE powered by hydrogen

Photo by: TOYOTA GAZOO Racing

As far as burning hydrogen is concerned, insiders suggest that road car applications – the money-making side of any automotive company that ultimately underpins any investment in motorsport – are about 50% of the way through from development from concept to reality. While stressing that there is no guarantee of success, they point to Toyoda’s enthusiasm as a huge endorsement that a breakthrough is realistic.

As such, over the past year Toyoda has already – suited, booted, helmeted and strapped in under the shroud of his racing and rallying alter-ego nickname ‘Morizo’ – demonstrated a hydrogen-powered Yaris at the Ypres Rally, raced as part of a team that completed the Fuji 24 Hours in a hydrogen-powered Corolla, and completed a demonstration lap in the same car ahead of this year’s Le Mans.

A concept car was also unveiled at this year’s Le Mans race, hinting at the look of a hypercar that will compete using combusted hydrogen from 2026. The expectation is that it will be fast enough not just to fight for the hydrogen class victory, but for the overall race win.

“I see my role from behind the wheel as important,” he says. “The general public still think that hydrogen equals an explosion. When we first proposed to drive the Yaris on the World Rally Championship we had a lot of questions from the organisers, asking if hydrogen was dangerous. At first they were very worried. One of the questions they asked was, ‘Who is going to drive this car?’ The answer was ‘Morizo’, and suddenly the response was very different. They said, ‘Go ahead!’

“If I put myself in that position then they know that I am confident in its safety. I know that, in turn, I must be fast enough, but my fellow drivers and I have a deal that I will stop if I fall too far behind them; at the moment I am delighted to say that I am closer than ever.”

But by talking about combusting hydrogen, Toyoda is also aware that he is putting a target on his – and Toyota’s – back. It’s a stark reality that the company sold just 26,000 BEVs last year, to Tesla’s 1.2m, and has been roundly criticised for lagging behind rivals.

It’s a criticism that overlooks its leadership in hybrids (it has sold more than 20million), a clear, scientific-led belief that the world’s infrastructure isn’t braced for a total switchover to a single technology, that the scarce battery resources unlocked so far would be better used in hybrids, where the battery is depleted each day rather than locked in big-mile EVs that typically use just fractions of their capability on each journey, and the fact that, until recently, it hasn’t had any confidence that the range and cost of batteries being used is anything like good enough to provide the mix of affordability and capability that most car buyers expect.

Le Mans will permit hydrogen vehicles from 2026, and Toyota is leading the charge to be ready

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Nevertheless, the critics are primed, and talking about hydrogen in a world where most legislators are focused on BEVs has risks.

“When I talk about hydrogen, people sometimes come to the conclusion that Toyota is three laps behind in the race to electrification, but it is my belief that battery electric vehicles will be a big part of the solution to reducing carbon emissions, but maybe not the only one,” says Toyoda.

“We are committed to them – in fact, I can tell you that we are already developing a Gazoo Racing BEV road car, with a gearbox and which makes sounds in the cabin, for enthusiasts – but we should all be doing what we can, now and in the future, to reduce carbon. My belief is that there is not one right approach, but many that we should take.

It will do motorsport few favours if its rulemakers embrace a technology that only a single or even a handful of manufacturers want to pursue longer term

“The truth is that on earth our natural resources are finite. That is why I believe we should look at everything. Today there are about a billion people on earth who do not have adequate connection to electricity. How can we say to them that BEVs are the only solution if we cannot be clear on how we supply the power to them?”

In that statement, Toyoda is nodding towards the so-called ‘energy trilemma’, used by governments, rulemakers and opinion formers the world over to guide policy for the energy transition. In brief, it highlights the need to find balance between energy reliability, affordability and sustainability for everyday people. Europe’s reliance on Russian oil and gas is one example of that triangulation falling down in recent times, for instance, while the cost and legislative red tape of linking green energy generation projects such as off-shore wind turbines and large solar panel installations to national grids is another.

Battery-electric propulsion may be the most energy efficient solution available today, but the majority of raw materials required for battery manufacture are concentrated in potentially difficult areas (Russia again, and China). Meanwhile, the infrastructure required to support a transition to mass charging, including, ultimately, a complete switch to renewable energy sources to ensure net zero transport, means it is unlikely to be the universal solution that many favour – at least in the sort of timescales that climate crisis experts suggest humanity must react within. Viewed in that context, Toyoda’s free-thinking and refusal to be channelled down a single technical route should perhaps be welcomed by everyone, not just motorsport fans.

Toyota competes with hybrid technology in the WRC and is refusing to be ushered down one single technology route

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

Nevertheless, it would be myopic not to acknowledge that by thinking like this, Toyoda is displaying what feels like an increasingly uniquely free-thinking position, driven perhaps by the fact that Japan is famously short on the natural resources necessary for the BEV transition, and that his company’s scale and success allows it to invest across a far broader range of technologies than many – perhaps any – of its rivals.

As such, while there are numerous pioneering companies in and around motorsport looking at hydrogen combustion initiatives, there are few mainstream car manufacturers openly pursuing it with anything like the same vigour as Toyota. It will do motorsport few favours if its rulemakers embrace a technology that only a single or even a handful of manufacturers want to pursue longer term.

It’s presumably one reason Formula 1 is looking at a future powered by synthetic fuels, why the organisers at Le Mans have twice postponed the introduction of a hydrogen-powered class prior to committing to 2026, and precisely the dilemma that WRC organisers are wrestling with, as they seek to roadmap its future. Toyoda, though, is making no apologies, or promises.

“I don’t have a model for the future, so can’t be certain that I will be correct, but I can say that the enemy is carbon,” he concludes. “Given that, we should all be doing what we can, now and in the future, to reduce carbon. My belief is that there is not one right approach, but many that we should take to achieve that, and exploring hydrogen through motorsport is one that should therefore be interesting to anyone who shares my passion.”