Toyota's made a hydrogen fuelled remote control Mirai

You’re looking at a hydrogen powered RC car negotiating a model village. And therefore your day should be immediately better. And your feelings towards scary fuel sources of the future just a little softer and more welcoming.

Fresh off the back of squeezing 845 miles from a fully fuelled BIG Mirai, Toyota has now set about dropping our jaws with a little Mirai.

While no range figure for the shrunken remote-control Mirai is quoted, we’re promised that swapping electric for hydrogen has doubled the distance an RC car will usually go.

It’s a tie up between Toyota, Tamiya and Bramble Energy, the latter’s scalable hydrogen tech easily converted into dinky 1/10 scale form.

“Our fuel cell technology is made from the printed circuit board industry which can be turned into any size or shape, so the core fuel cell component was actually not that big a challenge,” says Tom Mason, co-founder of Bramble. “The biggest hurdle was to make all the system components required to run the fuel cell small and compact enough to fit onto the Tamiya TT02 chassis and inside the Mirai RC car shell.”

The Tamiya chassis is four-wheel drive and the same as you’ll typically find in the shops plonked beneath more familiar bodyshells. Toyota had the Mirai mould specially made, one tenth the size of the regular car but wearing the same signature hue of Scarlet Flare Red.

Worried there are no tiny hydrogen fuel stations to fill up your depleted RC car at*? Here it’s just a simple case of slotting out the two empty fuel canisters and popping in two full ones.

Like the idea, but you’d much rather have a gnarly off-roader or traditional racecar atop the chassis rather than an eco-warrior saloon?

“While we are a long way off being able to offer a hydrogen powered RC car for purchase, this challenge has proved that a scaled down and adaptable version of H2 can be a superb energy platform for our cars,” says Alistair Brebner from Tamiya UK.

*Not to mention there not being enough full-size ones…