Can You Drink The Water Exhaust Made By The Hydrogen-Powered Toyota Mirai?

Hydrogen in, water out. Photo: Toyota

In a magical place called California, there are these crazy cars that are powered not by gasoline or electricity, but instead they run on hydrogen. The hydrogen runs through a fuel cell that generates electricity to power the wheels and produces nothing but water vapor. So does this mean you could drink the water that the car produces?

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That’s exactly the question one influencer set out to answer this week after they got their hands on a shiny blue Toyota Mirai to drive around for a few days. To power the Mirai, you take it to one of the few remaining hydrogen filling stations across California. After this, the fuel cell in the car rips the protons and electrons in a hydrogen atom apart. The electrons pass through an external circuit to power the car, and the proton from the hydrogen atom combines with oxygen from the air to create H2O: water.

In the Mirai, this water is collected in a tank, which can then be drained out of the car via an outlet at the rear. The water is totally pure, save for any impurities that it picks up in the holding tank or pipes inside the car. So could you drink it?

Well, Instagram page The Fast Lane Car certainly thinks so. In fact, they popped a glass under the water relief valve and poured themselves a glass of fresh Mirai water to see what all the fuss was about.

And what’s the water like, I hear you cry? Well, according to the video “It doesn’t taste like anything, it’s just warm.”

Now, we wouldn’t recommend rushing out to taste the Mirai water for yourself, as you don’t really know how clean the pipes are or if they’ve picked up any dirt and detritus while the car has been driving around. But the water that the car produces from hydrogen is pure when it’s emitted from the fuel cell.

In fact, this isn’t the first time that water produced from hydrogen fuel has been consumed by humans. According to Toyota, astronauts aboard the Apollo mission would drink water from the exhaust of their fuel cells, which were used to power all kinds of electronic kit onboard.