Toyota reveals Lunar Cruiser

You’ve heard of the Toyota LandCruiser, well now meet its extra-terrestrial sibling – the six-wheel drive Lunar Cruiser.

That’s the name Toyota has now given the hydrogen fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV) being developed for a NASA-led moon mission in 2029 called Project Artemis.

Clearly, Toyota is hoping the Lunar Cruiser will display the same off-road abilities as the LandCruiser, just in a very different environment.

“The name … was decided upon based on the quality, durability, and reliability expected of the pressurized lunar rover, and the concept that Toyota has long held to for the Land Cruiser, which was for people to ‘come back alive’, especially true for the lunar rover as it will be traversing the harsh environment of the moon's surface,” a Toyota press release noted.

Not content with producing flying cars, the most recent development of which was presented just days ago, Toyota is working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (as opposed to Toyota rival Mitsubishi Motors) on the Lunar Cruiser program, which was established in 2019.

A final decision on whether the Lunar Cruiser will be part of the mission rather than other potential rover concepts is due by the end of 2020.

If it does get the green light, the Lunar Cruiser is set to be the most costly Toyota ever built.

It will be about six metres long, 3.8 metres high and weigh in at about 3.5 tonnes. It will feature six 40kW in-wheel electric motors, have a top speed of 30km/h and a range of approximately 1000km. Solar panels will provide supplemental energy for onboard use.

It is designed to carry two astronauts in its pressurised cabin – which means they don’t have to wear their space suits – and four in an emergency. There’s even a sleeping space and a toilet.

Those astronauts won’t have to take turns at the wheel because the Lunar Cruiser will be equipped with an autonomous driving system that allows it to be driven remotely from mission control.

Mounted behind the cabin will be a fuel-cell stack and hydrogen and oxygen tanks – remember there’s no oxygen on the moon so it has to be brought from earth as well as the hydrogen.

Toyota has long been a hydrogen fuel-cell fan and argues it’s the right powertrain for the Lunar Cruiser because it so much smaller and lighter than an equivalent battery-electric set-up.

Of course, Toyota won’t be the first vehicle manufacturer on the moon, as General Motors built the buggies that Apollo astronauts piloted.

And Audi will build two lunar rovers for a German company’s attempted moon landing in 2021. It will be one of more than a dozen different lunar missions planned over the next few years by nations including China, India, Russia, Japan and South Korea, plus Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the world’s top private space company.

If all goes the way Toyota plans, it will have a full-size prototype to evaluate by 2022 and an engineering model manufactured in 2024. Test flights would begin in 2027 and two production examples of the Lunar Cruiser would be launched for the moon in 2029.

Toyota has to deal with some new challenges to get the Lunar Cruiser operational, including extreme radiation and heat, fast-flying debris and the moon’s dusty, rocky and at times extremely steep surface. On the flipside, low gravity means it’s a lot easier to move 3.5 tonnes than on earth.

The Lunar Cruiser’s mission will be to roam the polar regions in search of large deposits of water, in either liquid or solid form. The plan envisages leaving the vehicle on the moon for five years. Each year it will search a different location for about six weeks.

The hope is it will eventually find enough water to produce hydrogen through electrolysis, rather than depending on supply drops.