FROM the size of the mob outside the Rookie Racing pit garage at the Chang International Circuit in Buriram, Thailand, you would have thought that Taylor Swift had just stepped out in driver overalls.

Instead, the crowds at the Idemitsu 1500 race, a 25-hour slog that flagged off on Saturday (Dec 17), had thronged to see Morizo, a gregarious, bespectacled 66-year-old with a toothy grin.

He might not have much of a reputation as a singer-songwriter, but Morizo is a mega star in the world of cars. Away from the track he is Akio Toyoda, the president and chief executive of Toyota Motor Corporation.

Toyoda was in Thailand last week to mark his company’s 60th year there and celebrate the unique ties between company and kingdom. The region’s automotive powerhouse is set to produce around 1.8 million vehicles this year, roughly a third of them Toyotas.

After rolling on stage in a tricked-out Hilux pickup borrowed from a local, Toyoda recounted how one Japanese executive installed to run Toyota Motor Thailand shaved his head and became a monk to show solidarity with locals. “I’m not sure if I would have been brave enough to do the same,” he said.

While Toyoda celebrated the past, Morizo had his eye on the future. For the Buriram race, he took the wheel of a Toyota Corolla modified to run on hydrogen, a fuel Toyoda considers crucial in the war against carbon emissions.

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Privately owned by Toyoda himself, Rookie Racing’s stated mission is to improve cars by racing them. It’s an idea put forward by Kiichiro Toyoda, Morizo’s grandfather and the man who steered the company from fabric looms to cars.

Despite the “rookie” tag, Morizo has been racing at a high level for nearly two decades, believing that it gives him the skills to assess his company’s cars properly and help sharpen them.

“I used to have the chance to sit beside Mr Morizo when he trained heavily as a driver. It was quite a life-threatening effort,” jokes Koji Sato, Toyota’s chief branding officer and the global head of Lexus and Gazoo Racing, the car giant’s luxury division and official racing arm, respectively.

“But Mr Morizo has put in all his effort, and it has really improved the driving flavour of Toyota’s cars overall.”

The family-oriented outfit (Akio’s son Daisuke, also a Toyota executive, is one of the drivers) lets the Toyota boss blow off steam as Morizo, but it also speeds up technical development.

Over just four races, Toyota fine-tuned its hydrogen engine’s combustion system to squeeze out 24 per cent more power and 33 per cent more torque, Sato said. The team also cut refuelling times by two-thirds.

But Rookie Racing has become part of a charm offensive, too. One goal of racing the hydrogen Corolla outside of Japan for the first time was to ignite discussion about the fuel’s potential to decarbonise transportation.

Hydrogen generates electricity when combined with oxygen in fuel cells, but it can also be combusted to drive pistons. Both methods release pure water as the only emission, but the latter means car companies can keep cranking out the revving, howling engines that supply the emotion in today’s cars. Sato said the sound of the V10 engine that Lexus built in 2010 for its Ferrari-beating LF-A still gives him goosebumps.

Fuel cell cars may not be as musical, but they can refuel as quickly as today’s cars. Toyota said its Mirai, a luxury fuel cell vehicle built on Lexus underpinnings, can travel more than 800 kilometres after taking on hydrogen for fewer than four minutes.

Other car companies see potential in the fuel. In October, Hyundai Group announced a plan to invest US$6.7 billion in fuel cell technology. BMW began building a fuel cell powered version of its X5 sport utility vehicle this month to demo the technology.

Frank Weber, the BMW board member in charge of development, said the German carmaker sees a mix of battery electric vehicles and fuel cell cars as a “sensible” long-term approach to cleaning up emissions.

“Hydrogen is a versatile energy source that has a key role to play as we progress towards climate neutrality,” he said.

The problem with hydrogen is that even though it’s abundant and burns cleanly, manufacturing it is energy intensive. Unless the power used to extract hydrogen is sustainable in the first place, the gas does little to cut carbon emissions.

The infrastructure to utilise it is undeveloped too – using it to replace today’s fuels also means replacing today’s fuelling stations. But it is easy to store and transport, which makes it a way to capture and export renewable energy.

Those benefits were brought up by Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong at the Singapore International Energy Week in October, where he said that if low-carbon hydrogen technology improved enough, the fuel could supply up to half of Singapore’s power needs by 2050, the same year Toyota has pledged to reach carbon neutrality.

For all its promise, even Toyota does not see hydrogen as the solution to decarbonisation.

It said there is no silver bullet against carbon emissions, even if many believe electric cars are the answer.

Chief executive Toyoda acknowledged in Thailand that he often gets flak for not committing Toyota to a future built around them, but said he prefers to pursue “every” solution instead of any one, and that it is not realistic to think that electric cars will become mainstream soon enough for a problem that needs to be tackled now.

Toyota executives tout what the company calls a “multiple pathway” approach to carbon neutrality, with hybrids, plug-in hybrids, electric and hydrogen cars all playing a part. They cite studies that suggest putting more hybrids on the road now would do more immediate good than waiting for electric cars to replace combustion cars.

Japan’s Ministry of the Environment said hybrids and mini vehicles are the main reason the country’s car emissions have fallen steeply since 2013. Between 2001 and 2019, carbon output from cars there dropped 23 per cent, according to the International Energy Agency.

“I believe that even in Singapore, even if hydrogen works in the future, I still see that the multiple pathway strategy still works for us, because there are segments of customers that do require the other technologies,” Hao Quoc Tien, the chief executive of Toyota’s Asea operations, told The Business Times (BT).

Meanwhile, Sato said Toyota is still working on commercialising hydrogen cars. “We have climbed about 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the mountain,” he told BT. “There is still room for improvement in terms of performance.”

He said Toyota has mainly focused on developing the technology, but will start work next year on how to apply it to mass-produced cars.

Out on the track, a torrid race for his boss provided a reminder that running piston engines on hydrogen power can still be problematic. After a strong start, Morizo’s Corolla hit technical trouble and pitted for repairs. It eventually ran for eight of the race’s 25 hours, and finished in a lowly 59th place.

The team would undoubtedly have preferred a win, but Morizo once pointed out that the point of racing is to torture a car. “Break it, know its limits, make it stronger and make it stronger again after a new issue arises,” he said, philosophically.

Now back in the office to deal with an industry rushing to clean up its act, his alter ego knows there is a bigger race being run.