Toyota FCHV

The Toyota FCHV, short for Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle, was a hydrogen fuel cell development programme of the Toyota Motor Corporation whose vehicles were leased to a limited number of drivers in the United States and Japan from 2002. Together with the Honda FCX, which began leasing on 2 December 2002, it became one of the world's first government-certified commercial hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The programme ran through six generations of test vehicles: the FCHV-1 of 1996 built on a Toyota RAV4, the FCHV-2 of 1997 with a reformer to extract hydrogen from methanol, the FCHV-3, 4 and 5 of 2001 built on the Toyota Highlander, and the later FCHV-adv. The powertrain pairs a 90 kW fuel cell fed from onboard compressed hydrogen tanks with a nickel-metal hydride battery that can also charge by regenerative braking. In 2007 an FCHV was driven 560 km from Osaka to Tokyo on a single tank of hydrogen, and in 2009 Toyota USA announced an estimated range of 690 km for the FCHV-adv.