The RAV-4 Was An EV Experiment That Continues To Be One

This is a look back at Toyota's early electric vehicle experiments, not current news about upgrades or rebates for your home. In the 1990s, under then-president Hiroshi Okuda, Toyota built two very different test vehicles on the same RAV4 crossover platform. One was the RAV4 EV, a battery electric version sold in Japan starting in 1996 and in the US from 1997, with about 1,900 built worldwide through 2003 (roughly 1,500 of them in the US, including 320 sold in California to meet that state's zero-emission vehicle rules). It used a nickel-metal hydride battery, a 50kW electric motor, and could go over 124 miles on a charge under Japanese testing standards.

The other was a hydrogen fuel cell version, the RAV4 FCEV, unveiled in 1996 with a fuel cell stack that ran on hydrogen stored in a metal alloy rather than a compressed tank. A follow-up version tried extracting hydrogen from methanol instead, since hydrogen fueling stations barely existed at the time.

None of this involves a current program, rebate, or purchase option — it is history explaining how Toyota's early battery and hydrogen experiments fed into its later hybrid and fuel cell vehicles. There is nothing here that affects decisions about your house or its energy systems.