2021 Toyota Mirai
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Here’s our third 2021 Toyota Mirai update in a nutshell: The car is great but the fueling is painful, and this month was more painful than most. Allow us to regale you with the story of what happened with our long-term hydrogen-fueled EV during a week we’re calling the Hydrogen Fuelpocalypse. Spoiler alert: We did not punch the yutz in the gray Mirai, but damn, did we come close.
As usual, when our Mirai’s range-remaining display showed 100 miles, we started to think about fueling up. Checking the Toyota app, we saw that most of the hydrogen stations in and around the Mirai’s home turf of the San Fernando Valley were either broken or out of fuel. No big deal; such glitches usually resolve themselves within a couple of days, hence our 100-mile threshold.
This time, though, things weren’t getting better. True Zero Mission Hills, a beautiful four-pump station that always seems to be broken, stayed offline. The somewhat reliable Studio City station kept going down. Hollywood fell, then Fairfax. Horrified, we realized what was happening: Working stations were being inundated by cars and either running out of fuel or dropping from the strain.