A hydrogen engine is so much worse for efficiency than a hydrogen fuel cell, and even that is not good compared to batteries. I’d estimate the round trip efficiency of a hydrogen engine to be about 10-15%. So for the same energy that could be used to drive a battery EV 100km, this car from Toyota could drive 12km.
Additionally, hydrogen is not very energy dense per volume. A compressed hydrogen tank that replaces the boot/trunk of the car would have enough hydrogen for about 100km of range.
Please let me know if I’m wrong about any of these numbers. For Toyota’s sake, I really hope I’m wrong.
Your numbers are way off. No manufacture would even think about touching hydrogen ICE motors if they only got 10-15% efficiency.
no manufacturer except one that’s still desperately trying to push for a hydrogen economy because they invested too much into hydrogen production
Is that what they’re doing by releasing one vehicle in a couple of US states and now another in a different country? I think your take is pretty extreme.
For decades, they had been one of the only companies to electrify their vehicles with numerous hybrid options. There doesn’t have to be only one single alternative to ICE engines. We can build and develop multiple things in unison.
Uhh, no… hydrogen is the only way forward, unless battery tech magically becomes so much better overnight. We haven’t developed a new battery tech over the current stuff since the 70s.
Here’s big names who are working on hydrogen cars:
BMW Hyundai Honda Toyota Jaguar
How you going to tell me hydrogen which is the most abundant thing in the universe, is not worth it?
You’re the guy hedging his bets on horses and farriers.
EV works for cities but that’s about it.
https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/
according to this website, hydrogen ICEs are very inefficient. same with fuel cell vehicles. the main losses come from converting the hydrogen into and out of electricity. but if said electicity is generated in abundance with renewable energy at a cheap price, this could really be something.
edit: you can’t really burn electricity, so as a car enthusiast i really hope hydrogen ICEs become a thing.
BEVs are a lot of fun to drive. Car people are nostalgic for burning fuels and roaring engines, but future generations will be far less so. We just need far lighter batteries.
Lighter batteries, lower costs, quicker charging and way longer range under load. Hydrogen is the way forward. I don’t understand why there is so much push back from the EV crowd. EVs are great for city driving, but are terrible for long range and heavy load equipment.
I was specifically talking about cars that are fun to drive. The one thing I dislike about my BEV is that it’s so heavy.
Personally I don’t think hydrogen is the way for most personal vehicle applications. Batteries are improving a lot and becoming quite a bit cheaper too. Also many large car makers have gone the EV route and they are king makers. But who cares, the better technology will probably win out.
The issue with this metric is they’re talking about energy used to get the power. It completely ignores the fact that hydrogen can already be pulled from the atmosphere using solar plants. There are a few companies out there now that are developing stations that are basically automated.
The ICE motors Toyota and Hyundai have shown, have very little loss of HP/Tq numbers from their gas counter parts. Unless the battery industry comes up with a super light, quick charging (5 mins) and long lasting battery, EV will be resigned to the city at best and no heavy workloads for it either.
Efficiency still matters significantly with hydrogen solar panels, because solar panels aren’t free.
Suppose solar to wheel is 60% efficient in a battery electric vehicle, but 30% efficient in a hydrogen vehicle. You need half as many solar panels to power the battery electric vehicle, and spend at most half as much to charge it. That matters.
It really doesn’t when the hydrogen you’re burning isn’t creating pollution like the mining and destruction of the earth that lithium batteries create.
Well. Basically no one except for dumbass boomer executives forcing the company in a direction. Like Toyota.
I thought they were using ammonia powered vehicles and calling them hydrogen just because ammonia contains hydrogen. Wasn’t there a bunch of hype a few months ago about Toyota inventing an ammonia internal combustion engine that was so efficient it would “make electric cars obsolete”? The article just mentioned liquid hydrogen though. So I don’t know what to believe anymore.
I think the biggest thing that people forgot in the efficiency debate is cost. What will hydrogen actually cost to go 100km compared to electricity
The current cost to drive a car with green hydrogen from electrolysis (not blue or grey hydrogen from methane reforming) is roughly equivalent to $50/L (AUD) for petrol, or $120/Gal (USD) for gas. This is one of the reasons most hydrogen today is made from fossil fuels.
and you have to use it up within a week or two, or your fuel disappears
And yet here we are breaking new ground with brand new (within the year) solid hydrogen projects.
The alternative is the slow charging and short life high cost lithium battery. We need better and efficiency matters not when it’s being pulled from the air in huge stand alone stations now being built.
The alternative is the slow charging and short life high cost lithium battery.
I’ve seen nothing suggesting a short life. Solid state batteries also should result in short charging times
Why hydrogen? Why not electric at this point?
Because Toyota invested a lot into hydrogen instead of EV, and they need to recuperate at least some of it.
Honestly I’m glad that somebody is exploring other environmentally friendly alternatives too, nothing wrong with having options.
Kind of? Hydrogen can be environmentally friendly, but EVs have big advantages:
- Creating and burning hydrogen is way less efficient than EVs (almost an order of magnitude)
- Hydrogen is much cheaper to create in environmentally unfriendly ways (using natural gas etc.)
- Unless we have massive overproduction of power, the additional energy can be better used to de-carbonify other processes with larger impact
That’s why generating hydrogen during off-peak hours from a nuclear power plant will be very beneficial. It may be less efficient but way better for the environment then lithium
You still have all the transport and storage costs associated with hydrogen. I’d need to see a study that actually determines the environmental impact of lithium to believe you.
They’ve invested heavily into a partnership with Panasonic to build solid state batteries too . They hand just spread their risk
While most car companies initially believed liion batteries isnt ready for the market, and wanted to wait for a more safe and dense battery tech to hit market (solid state battery), toyota invested in hydrogen. Then Tesla took the bullet and sort of went against thr grain and created the liion based evs, and the rest of the companies are scrambling to catch up due to the demand for them.
Any push for hydrogen is because toyota invested into it and doesnt want for it to go to waste.
It’s not just Toyota that invested in the tech, a bunch of other big names did as well. Hydrogen makes sense for everyone who doesn’t live in cities.
How do you figure? Everyone who doesn’t live in big cities has the ability to charge an EV overnight, or in half an hour when road tripping. Absolutely none of them live within hundreds of miles of hydrogen refueling station.
Unless you have a quick charge at your house, or live in an area with one, you’re not getting 30min quick charge at all. I’m 50 miles from the capital city in my state and we don’t have any quick charge stations here. Anywhere. You really seem to be underestimating the size of the USA.
Because some companies just can’t get rid of the idea of ICEs. And they don’t like that their expertise in making high-quality ICEs doesn’t give them much benefit in making electric cars. So they prefer hydrogen to win over electric otherwise they’ll have a very hard time competing against newcomers.
In my opinion, it’s dinosaurs clinging to their old ways while the asteroid looms large in the sky.
If there is an asteroid in the sky then everyone dies. Not just the “dinosaurs”. This is not a good analogy
Us mammals did pretty well all things considered.
there are seroius longevity concerns with Lithium batteries. if you just fill the car up with combustible gas, there’s no battery that is expensive to replace every 10-20 years. australia could very well be one of the best countries tp deploy this technology.
The Hydrogen tank for the Toyota Mirai literally has a replacement date of 10 years. And that’s not a maybe, it has to be replaced for safety reasons.
Modern Batteries last 10 years easy. Even the abused leaf ones with no thermal management last fine. It will not be any issue
Could be, but I bet that hydrogen tanks is much cheaper, easier to produce and recycle. Also doesn’t require rare earth materials.
They’re not comparable at all, I just said it as a reaction. The battery is more comparable to how often an engine completely dies. It doesn’t, really. Especially the newer ones with proper thermal management.
The tank is cheaper, sure. But the hydrogen itself and infrastructure isn’t, and hydrogen isn’t even really green 95% of the time. But that’s a whole different topic.
How is solar hydrogen collection stations that pull hydrogen out of the atmosphere not green?
It’s wasting solar that could be used for better things.
Like powering EVs?
I imagine the next Mad Max movie with hydrogen cars. Invisible fires and awesome explosions sounds like a match made in heaven…
Heh. A match.
These concers exist for Hydrogen too. While the Hydrogen tanks can last a longe time, the catalyst in the Fuel cell degrades, like the electrodes of batteries do. That means that the fuel cell needs to be replaced as well after some time. In addtition to that, fuel cell vehicles need batteries as well, since the fuel cell is slow to respond to load changes. These smaller batteries are stressed heavily in stop and go traffic and will need to be replaced a lot more often than Ev batteries.
I think they are talking about using hydrogen as the fuel for an internal combustion engine, not fuel cells
This isn’t a fuel cell. It’s an ICE motor.
This is why Toyota and other manufacturers are still working on hydrogen. The ICE motor to run these is pretty much the same as current petroleum based ICE motors. Until batteries can charge in 5mins and travel more than 100 miles under load, then hydrogen is the way.
I know about 7y ago everyone was salivating at the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles.
I’ll be very interested to see how well it works in practice…
with refill stations every 50-100Km, this could work extremely well. the current mirai has 700Km of range. you could even power standard combustion engines with very little modification. mike copeland built 2 muscle cars that run perfectly on hydrogen.
The us has 57 hydrogen fueling stations. By contrast, there are 59,340 public electric charging stations in the us.
If there were stations you could drive a hydrogen car. But there just aren’t. And there doesn’t seem to be anyone planning to build tens of thousands of these stations any time soon.
Maybe they won’t start with the US then. There are countries with highest population density and smaller surface closer to home for Toyota.
Do you mean countries like Indonesia?
How about Japan? 😊
I dunno, man. Indonesia is pretty close to Toyota’s HQ.
i heard toyota might have plans for that. at least they understand that someone needs to build them.
If they had plans to invest in hydrogen infrastructure on the scale needed to make hydrogen cars viable, they would have made an announcement about it. There are over 100,00 gas stations in the US. To make hydrogen vehicles viable toyota would need to be investing in hydrogen infrastructure at that scale. And they would be building these stations alone. No other company is investing in hydrogen infrastructure. Shell is pulling out of the hydrogen fuel station market entirely, and even so there are only stations in two states specifically because of government incentives.
Hydrogen cars are going nowhere. Toyota’s continued fluff about the Mirai is PR to distract from the fact that Toyota is doing everything they can to avoid making zero emission cars.
What’s to stop them just having a bowser for it in a traditional station like they already do with LPG powered cars today?
deleted by creator
Yep, I have no clue why so many seem to hate hydrogen ICE motors. They’re the future, not batteries that take hours to charge, and have terrible distance under load and need to be replaced every 5ish years. They’re fine for the city, but any other distance/hauling they’re terrible
Most new EVs have almost as much range as a typical gasoline equivalent, and some can get hundreds of miles of range out of 20 minutes on a DC fast changer. Plus the batteries get an estimated 15-20 years of service, or somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 miles. That’s around as many miles as a gasoline engine will get before the problems begin piling up.
The issue in my eyes, and my number one complaint with this massive E.V. push (for many years now) is the insane environmental impact of lithium mining and the very short termed planning of just going hard on batteries (without spending more time and money on better battery tech [Toyota actually has that new solid state battery I’m very hopeful for, and we’ve been working on polymer batteries for decades]) we will waste a very precious earth material we WILL NEED in the future, and you never ever hear any of the politicians or CEOs talk about how dirty lithium mining and processing is because almost all of it happens outside the countries leading this push (thus, not their problem).
Not saying we shouldn’t be moving away from ICE, it’s that I feel our current approach is incredibly short sighted, and will have far reaching impacts into future generations and I feel as though we may even cause more damage than help in our current approach
we need to move away from fossil fuels, thats the important part. if we can produce the fuel without using up any (immediately) finite resource, that’d be awesome. i’m okay with electric cars existing, but we’re still in the “figuring it out” stage of CO2-neutral vehicles.
Is there any proof of this? Most are rated for x miles but in reality get half of that, and fast charging right now unless you’re in the city is non existent for the majority of the USA.
Hydrogen fuel cells or engines are a useless joke. Toyota REALLY needs to be thinking more about power generation with Hydrogen and then electric cars so that their vehicle production can be universal across the world. Electricity is the most versatile form of energy and can be produced using lots of natural resources. I get it…Japan has limited natural resources and the seawater around them is abundant (thus hydrogen), but the hydrogen vehicle makes zero sense literally anywhere else in the world and you’re a GLOBAL COMPANY Toyota.
Also with all of the saltwater around them you’d think they’d be working on sodium-ion battery technology and how to utilize the salt they extract during the hydrogen production to be used in batteries, but no…keep making ICE engines for some stupid reason. FFS Toyota.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are EVs, have electric motors, and qualify when you talk about “power generation with Hydrogen” and “versatility of electricity”. The hydrogen in the tanks is fed into an anode and oxygen into a cathode to power a circuit and drive an electric motor. It’s an EV, but the ‘battery’ is hydrogen. FCEVs could be the key to shoring up a lot of conventional EV shortcomings; lithium-ion waste, electricity grid load, and lifespan, for instance. Combine that with the ICE vehicle in question in the article; Hydrogen ICE engines could provide routes for retrofitting existing combustion vehicles, adding additional demand to improve supply infrastructure and improve green hydrogen supply. These are well-warranted experiments for Toyota to be undertaking on the global stage; as crucial as any EV battery investigation!
And don’t forget it’s way faster to refill a hydrogen tank than an battery. Also, cars are such a big industry it’s actually easier to not have a middleman (hydrogen ->
electric grid-> EVs) because all the infrastructure would have to be built without any real need for it.Is faster, but with modern EVs it’s really not a problem.
Depart home with 100%, drive for 4 hours, stop to grab an meal and use the facilities and the car is finished before you. Modern EVs take 15 minutes to go 20-80% charged.
Hydrogen is 3x less energy efficient than a battery electric vehicle. It certainly has use cases, but it came 20 years too late for light vehicles.
And don’t forget it’s way faster to refill a hydrogen tank than an battery.
For now, this should change with solid state batteries
I agree with everything you said except the retrofitting… I don’t think retrofitting an ICE is going to be remotely possible for any price anyone would be willing to pay. Sure they both have a “gas tank” of sorts, but as you mentioned, a hydrogen vehicle is ultimately an electric vehicle… And electric motors and their supporting components are quite different than ICEs.
Except the cost to refill with Hydrogen is significantly higher than petroleum in many parts of the world, which makes it non-viable as a fuel. A Lithium/Sodium battery can be charged by whatever fuel source you want and can be done at home. Hydrogen can only be “charged” at a hydrogen fueling station, which has to exist. All but one Hydrogen fuel station in America is in California and there aren’t even a lot of those.
Hydrogen fueled vehicles are a cool technology, but they aren’t practical and thus will never sell anywhere outside of Japan. My point was that Toyota could make a car that works everywhere and just swap engines in a Plug-in Hybrid for the fuel source or, for fully electric vehicles, change the power generation source. If they make the power from Hydrogen and harvest the salt for sodium batteries, they can make two parts of the water they’re harvesting from the ocean into useful stuff.
Well they have announced that they have a solid state battery that should be ready for mass production in 2028. They haven’t put all their eggs in 1 basket
They’ve been making claims about their solid state battery for years. It’s always a few years away.
When was the first article about productivity? Actually curious
Here is an article from July 2017. 6+ years ago they were “right around the corner”. I know they’ve talked about it before that, but that’s just one example of Toyota being “no seriously we’re almost there” on this supposed tech that I could find while on mobile.
The problem isn’t the battery tech. They’ve made the battery. They just can’t figure out how the hell to mass manufacture it for a reasonable cost to compete with Lithium Ion.
I hope they succeed and take over the world of EVs by storm, but there are only so many times they can claim to be “right around the corner” before you start to wonder if they’ll ever actually get it.
When is it due according to what Toyota says in the article?
deleted by creator
a hydrogen engine is a useless joke.
Hell yeah let’s see them in America too
“environmentally friendly car”
Removing tailpipe exhaust doesn’t automatically make cars environmentally-friendly.
Wat? You sure understand what hydrogen is?
A fuel that is notoriously hard to contain and usually produced using fossil fuels, using inefficient production methods that waste electricity.
Anyway, the commenter you’re replying to is more referring to the pollution from tires and the noise.
And the death. Don’t forget the animal and human cost of everyone having a car.
What costs do you mean?
The animals and people killed by vehicles. The environmental impact those animal deaths can have.
usually produced using fossil fuels, using inefficient production methods that waste electricity
Well, it’s either one or the another. While the energy loss is relatively high when using electricity, it’s not a problem when you have an oversupply of renewable energy, actually it’s even beneficial as it provides a storage for otherwise lost energy.
But regardless of the production, it generates no pollution when consumed by a vehicle. You know, like clean air in cities.And of course, hydrogen won’t solve tire pollution nor associated noise (albeit I guess it should be more silent that fossil fuel one) but it’s still environmental friendly compared to what we have now.
Sprawl itself is also pretty terrible for the environment.
And it’s hard to build sprawling towns that don’t rely on cars, and hard to build dense towns where everyone drives everywhere.
