Toyota Mirai vs Hyundai Nexo

What's the difference?

Toyota Australia is on the record as saying it doesn't want to push one form of electrification over another, and to that end wants the market to choose whether it wants hybrids, plug-ins, full battery or hydrogen vehicles.

While hybrid options have well and truly arrived in models like the RAV4, Corolla and Camry, and we’re all still waiting for the full-electric and plug-in vehicles, Toyota has now brought in its second-generation Mirai hydrogen FCEV.

But with Toyota, and Hyundai with its Nexo, the only brands pushing hydrogen into the mainstream, is it good enough to hold its own against battery electric models like the Tesla Model 3 and Nissan Leaf?

The first time I drove the Hyundai Nexo it was in a place called Goyang in South Korea.

Goyang was a place of pure contrast. The old Korea clashed with the new as you walked through ancient seafood markets toward the towering Hyundai Motorstudio, an ultra-modernist expression of design, perched like a steel battleship above a simultaneously crumbling and rapidly modernising city. 

Part museum, part design expo, part car dealership of the future, it was as though the whole place was a metaphor for the breakneck pace at which megacorp Chaebols like Hyundai were advancing Korea at a faster rate than its populace could keep up with.

The brand’s Nexo SUV is the same in a lot of ways. It’s a mid-size SUV that might be popular right now, but it contains the technology of the future wrapped in a digestible format for the masses.

Of course, it’s the future from a certain point of view. VW would argue EVs alone are set to drive our brave zero emissions future, but Hyundai is of a different mind.

What you’re looking at here, or so Hyundai’s representatives tell us, is the ultimate replacement for diesel. Long range, high load capacity, and an ultra-fast refuelling time are part of the hydrogen fuel cell promise. One that promises to out-do many of Australia’s qualms with EVs.

A statement of the future it may be, but what’s the Hyundai Nexo actually like as a car? We went to its Australian launch to find out