2016 Toyota Mirai Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Sedan

Yes, it’s ugly—spectacularly ugly. There is no single angle from which it looks anything but ugly. But there’s also no single angle from which the 2016 Toyota Mirai looks like anything else.

That is literally by design, as outlined in our earlier in-depth coverage of the car. It can be argued that hybrids are a thing because Toyota made them a thing—not a trim level or engine variant of an existing vehicle, but their very own phenomenon in the form of the Prius. To advertise the fact that the Prius was not like anything else, Toyota made it look unlike anything else. Time will tell if Toyota can do the same trick with the ghastly Mirai, but the automaker is banking big on the car and even bigger on hydrogen technology and infrastructure.

Although there are no MPGe numbers available yet, the Mirai promises to be relatively fuel efficient, offering more range than the recently released Hyundai Tucson fuel cell (up to 300 miles versus 265 for the Tucson) despite having lower tank capacity (11 pounds of hydrogen versus 12.4 for the Tucson). Furthermore, while filling the Tucson’s tanks takes about ten minutes, Toyota claims that process will take only five minutes with the Mirai, a time comparable to how long it takes to fill up a gas-fueled car’s tank.

The time required to hunt down a hydrogen filling station is a different story, even in alt-fuel-friendly California, the only state where the Mirai will initially be offered. At this point, one can count the number of hydrogen filling stations in California on two hands, and sales will be limited to customers who live near those stations. But new state funding is expected to bring 17 more hydrogen stations on line by the end of 2015 and another 28 by the end of 2016.

Toyota has even pledged to help maintain 19 of them and is inviting other OEMs to follow its lead. Toyota claims that the number of stations is less important than their locations; citing a study by the University of California, Irvine, Toyota says that most customers will want to be within a six-minute drive of a refueling station, and it would take only 68 refueling stations strategically located in the Bay area and the Los Angeles/San Diego corridor to adequately serve a population of 10,000 fuel-cell vehicles. Another dozen stations, partially supported by Toyota along with energy supplier Air Liquide, are on the way in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island to support Mirai sales there starting in 2016.