Saw this news on Tokyo Auto Show with 
Looks like a Lexus ES with expecting 400+ miles of range
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIScE5AAIJk
Currently leasing a 19 Mirai with one pay $10999. Fully satisfied, beside the shortage of fuel cell. (which is okay⊠got free rental car for 2 months). Will definitely get this when come up
Thoughts?
I think this looks a lot better than the Lexus ES. I love the direction Toyota is going, they are making it hard to justify paying a premium for the Lexus brand.
With how amazingly ugly the current Mirai is and that someone thought that design was good enough to be approved, I canât believe that they would make a v2 that actually looked somewhat appealing. Itâll get ruined somewhere between concept and production.
Did Toyota not get the memo that all fuel cell vehicles need to look like a steaming pile of dogsh*t?
Seriously this thing is REALLY nice looking. That Toyota grille still irks me and I suspect Iâll never get used to it, but the shape of the car and proportions are really good.
They must have lost their original copy, being the original author and all. Maybe Honda will catch on.
Hard to get any uglier than this pair.
Donât your green credentials get yanked if you canât overtly virtue signal??
The clarity is ugly, but man, I canât for the life of me figure out how the first gen mirai got put together. What designer sketched that out and went âoh yah, thatâs the ticket!â
More importantly, how bad were the designs that didnât make it?
+1. Depending on how much this will cost, it mightâve made a fitting replacement for the GS.
Iâm sort of shocked that Toyota finally made a car that wasnât fugly. Has a bit of a JDM flair to it, although Iâm not sure why (def something about the greenhouse).
If this will lease at a decent price, Iâm def interested (although not for another several yrs, unfortunately).
I saw this on twitter yesterday, and agree gen 2 looks hawt, but what I said about gen 1 is that it looks like Toyota put a gen2 prius and a bunch of ugly kitchen appliances together, kept mating them until they got it just ugly enoughâ.
The current Clarity looks like Honda mated the original Insight to an Accord sport until they got momâs rear wheel covers and dadâs elongated Michael Phelps body.
Funny but I donât get the sense that people want an entirely different design language (maybe styling) from the same manufacturer just because itâs green(er) - otherwise it could just come in 5 shades of green that are only available in that line.
When Toyota still had Scion (bless their hearts) they professed Prius would be a sub-brand for all their hybrids. Survey says: 
Honda had a CNG Civic at the same time as the Clarity FCX (HFC only/lease only predecessor) and Insight. Never branded or styled the same (CNG Civic was just a retrofit). The Honda hybrids have seemed to do well when they had trunk money, less-so because they were seen as green.
GM used the then-unreleased Voltec platform to secure bailout money, claiming it would make its way into every GM vehicle. Gen1 made it Cadillac (shortlived) when Gen3 was already out. The Volt sold well but I suspect it was as much the fact that GM brought an Opel-quality (nice in/out and well-built) to the US as much as virtue signaling.
Most brands tried Hybrid retrofits to varying success. The more successful selling EVs were all fresh designs (Leaf, Tesla, Bolt) and the retrofits (Focus EV, Fiat 500e, eGolf) not so much. Range and charging bring two big issues. The i3 and i8 have been an interesting look at this: two BMW designed from scratch that donât look like BMWs. Some people love them, some waited for insane lease deals to give them a try.
Even living on the west coast, Iâve seen/heard very few people in the past 5+ years bragging about their whip because it runs on hydrogen or sunlight or gets 5,000 miles to the gallon of dead dinosaur. At one time the gen2 Prius was all about the virtue signaling, now I only see Prius Primes driven in the slow lane by normals or bringing my DoorDash.
I canât wait to check out the Mirai and others at the LA Autoshow next month, have my ticket and hotel reservation already.
