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By Bloomberg

After using the red carpet to position Prius hybrid as the must-have ride for Hollywood stars, Toyota Motor Corp. is putting its Mirai fuel-cell car on the Olympic podium.

Toyota called a press conference today for President Akio Toyoda, a top official on the organizing committee for the 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo, to announce a sponsorship agreement for an international sporting event it didn’t identify. At the site of the final assembly line for Mirai last month, Toyoda said 2020 was “one delivery date we have to be aware of.”

As a weeks-long event that reached 3.6 billion viewers when last held in London in 2012, the summer Olympics would give Toyota an even bigger stage to promote its clean car of the future. Prius caught on in the U.S. market after Toyota’s coup at the 2003 Academy Awards, when the company arranged for actors including Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart to be driven to the red carpet in its now-iconic hybrid.

“If Toyota can raise sufficient awareness while offering the Mirai at a realistic price, it could recreate the success it experienced with the Prius,” Karl Brauer, an analyst at auto researcher KBB.com, said in an e-mail. “Leveraging the 2020 Olympics to tout the Mirai’s advanced and ultra-clean drivetrain will go a long way toward achieving Toyota’s awareness goal, but controlling costs for the hydrogen vehicle will be much tougher.”

While the Olympics will offer Toyota a chance to reach far more eyeballs than the 2003 Oscars, the promotional opportunity will come with a much bigger price tag. The cost of becoming a top sponsor at the Tokyo Olympics will be a minimum 15 billion yen ($123 million), Kyodo News reported in January.

Toyota has said it didn’t pay a dime for placement at the Academy Awards 12 years ago. The company pulled off its valuable moments before paparazzi by working with Global Green USA, an advocacy group for climate change awareness.

Hydrogen Bet

Japan’s capital and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe plan to spend alongside Toyota to promote the nation’s bet on hydrogen. Tokyo plans to spend 45.2 billion yen to offer fuel-cell vehicle subsidies, build 35 hydrogen fueling stations and put 6,000 cars from Toyota and Honda Motor Co. on the roads for the Games, Makoto Fujimoto, who heads the planning team at the metropolitan government’s energy department, said in January.

Abe has directed resources toward hydrogen power after Japan suffered its worst nuclear disaster since World War II in March 2011, when an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Fukushima Daiichi power plant northeast of Tokyo.

Toyota started selling the Mirai in Japan for 7.24 million yen in December. It’s taking it slow with early production of the car, which emits only water vapor and can power a home for about a week in the event of an earthquake or other emergency. The Toyota City, Japan-based company plans to build just 700 units this year, 2,000 in 2016 and 3,000 in 2017.