When Elon Musk went so far as to call bullsh*t on hydrogen, he was right. Hydrogen is bullsh*t—in fact, hydrogen is everything and everywhere. It’s the most abundant element in the universe.

So we created "Fueled by Everything", a yearlong scientific quest to fuel the Toyota Mirai with anything we could find, from actual bullsh*t to water from Oil Creek in America’s very first oil town, to kids’ leftover lemonade and finally, like Doc Brown predicted over 30 years ago in Back to the Future, trash.

Each source had its own episode, aimed at a specific audience segment and hosted on the campaign hub while being promoted through pre-rolls, banner ads and media partnerships. “Fueled by Bullsh*t” kicked things off in April 2015, taking the skeptics head-on. Then came “Fueled by Oil Creek” in June 2015, showing small-town America that there are plenty of domestic resources left. National lemonade Day (August 20, 2015) brought “Fueled by Lemonade,” which found hydrogen in the most innocent place of all—kids’ leftover lemonade. And finally, we launched the last episode (and the car itself) on Back to the Future Day: October 21, 2015—the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in a trash-fueled DeLorean in the future in Back to the Future, Part II. By showing these two heroes an actual car powered by trash, we proved that the future had truly become reality.

Receiving over 10 million views and 1.9 billion earned media impressions, the campaign caused the Mirai’s pre-order goals to be surpassed by 400%. At launch, we had successfully injected hydrogen into mainstream culture by becoming the number-one trending topic on Twitter and Facebook on Back to the Future Day, even surpassing the day itself. But most importantly, we were able to turn the public’s perception of hydrogen around, from thinking of it as a chemical element to be feared to seeing it as an exciting fuel source for our future.