Toyota Motor Corp said Saturday it is conducting trials of a vehicle powered by a hydrogen engine in Australia, making it the Japanese automaker's first such test of the environmentally friendly car on public roads toward its commercial use. In the trial from late October through January, a specially modified…
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:
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.
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.
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.