At the recent Australasian Bus & Coach Expo in Sydney, Toyota showcased the H2.City Gold bus that was developed in partnership with Portuguese bus manufacturer CaetanoBus and uses a hydrogen-fuelled Toyota Fuel Cell System that generates electricity and emits only water from the tailpipe.
I took the opportunity to talk with Matt Macleod, Toyota Australia Manager of Energy Solutions, to find out more about the plans for hydrogen powered buses in Australia.
So first question, a bit of background on you. How long have you been at Toyota? And how did you get into this role?
I work in the New Business Solutions, and I’m the Energy Solutions Manager, manager of energy solutions. So I’ve been at Toyota 21 years now and I’ve had a lot of different roles. I started off in engineering in the plant, and then we’ve moved into corporate affairs, and now into this new business area, which is fantastic. So my primary focus, right now is in the new energy space. So in hydrogen and energy programs in general. What do we do in the future? So it’s a pretty interesting areas.
I didn’t expect to see Toyota at the bus show. So why is Toyota here?
We traditionally we don’t do buses, but we’re a group company with Hino. So Hino worked with us to put this whole thing together. The main reason being here is we’ve got the Toyota Caetano H2 City Gold bus. It’s a really important thing for us to showcase that the fuel cell, the hydrogen fuel cell technology that we’ve been looking at and promoting with regards to passenger vehicles and stationary power recently, with the EODev GEH2 generator, which uses hydrogen to generate electricity. The logic behind this whole ecosystem isn’t just in passenger cars, it’s much broader. So passenger vehicles, heavy vehicles, industrial vehicles, like forklifts and stationary power. The concept is the same. So the recipe that is inside the Mirai, the fuel cell, the hydrogen storage tanks, and the battery. That recipe is the exact same thing that’s inside the bus, but just on a different scale.
On display at the Bus Expo, you’ve got this large container here to explain hydrogen. Is it new?
This is the mobile hydrogen centre. At Altona in Melbourne, we’ve got a project that we opened last year which is the Toyota Hydrogen Centre. And we have an education centre there. We have a hydrogen generation plant, we store hydrogen, we can dispense hydrogen refuelling.
And what we found is there’s a lot of interest whenever we get people to the site in what Toyota is doing hydrogen. Why is hydrogen a talking point? Not just in the automotive area, but broadly in the energy space, particularly with governments and with industry. And we get a lot of really good feedback when people come to that centre. But we can’t take that centre with us. So we put this, this mobile hydrogen hydrogen centre together. And this allows us to use very similar content, but in a condensed version to do the same messaging.
So this is the first time it has been seen publicly. It’s getting some really good, really good feedback. And it allows us to standardise the message that we can do it Altona but also remotely. We can take this unit to other expos. We can take it into other Toyota sites. It’s a 20 foot container. So we can basically just pack it up, pick it up on a truck and then just send it.
So it’s the first day of the Bus Expo, it’s only been a couple of hours what have you seen? What sort of questions, or what sort of feedback have you received?
It’s been good. It’s my first Bus Expo. We’ve had a number of people come through and people have gone through the bus. They’ve given us some open and honest feedback on it, which is great. One of the reasons that we have this here is to understand what the market requirements are, how it’s going to perform on the road, what the bus operators and the bus users actually think and give us feedback on that as well.
So is a plan then to take the bus out on the road and put it in on routes, or is it a demonstration vehicle?
It’s a bit of both. So the demonstration side, we want to use this in as many information sharing forums as possible. And that includes conferences and public events. We are going to get the bus registered. We’ve got some really strong support from the federal government when we brought it in, and also from the local VicRoads office in Melbourne to help us, and make sure that we cover all the requirements which we’ve done. And now we’re going through that final process of getting the registration finalised. And then our plan next year is to establish some trials in Melbourne. To start in the west of Melbourne where the refueler is. And we’ll be able to get some really good feedback from the bus operators on how it performs, what it was like in service, how does it drive. All extremely valuable feedback.
Well, it sounds like an exciting finding opportunity. Looking at your job title, Manager Energy solutions, are you working on other things?
So we’re looking at passenger vehicles and we’re looking at stationary repair opportunities. We did a couple of events with the EODev unit, which I mentioned earlier. For us at Toyota, it’s about understanding what this energy transition looks like. And what the shift into low and zero emissions technologies look like in the transport sector, but also in other areas where hydrogen and fuel cells can make a difference. Which is why you’ll see some of the Toyota branding used on products that aren’t generally associated with us. So we do have buses overseas that are trying to brand it, but this is probably one of the first times in Australia where there’s been a Toyota branded, large bus, so a 10.7 metre bus. And we’re working very closely with the Toyota group of companies including Hino, to understand what that opportunity looks like because they’re the experts in bus. We’ve got this bus in our company, but we’re looking at it from a One Toyota perspective.
Thanks Matt, is there anything else you’d like to add or cover?
I think the reason that this bus is here, and it’s a fuel cell bus, because our goal is emissions reduction not favouring one particular technology over another. It’s essentially looking at how can we, as a company, provide the options for the market to decide how they’re going to reduce their own emissions. How they take responsibility for their own emissions. So behind you here, we’ve got an electrified vehicles. So Toyota talks a lot about electrified vehicles, about this portfolio approach to reducing emissions, whether it includes hybrids, plug-in hybrids, battery, electrical fuel cell electric vehicles, all of those vehicles, either reduce emissions or eliminate emissions from the tailpipe.
So we’re looking at it extremely broadly, which is why it’s not only passenger vehicles that we adopt this particular portfolio approach with, but also in heavy vehicles. We’re all going to be affected by, and we will have a responsibility to reduce our carbon emissions. We need to look at this carbon neutrality program, or the carbon neutrality requirement, I should say, not just within Toyota, but across the whole Toyota group. And that’s where we’ll have this is broad approach to emissions reduction that anyone can participate in.
