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
Well. Basically no one except for dumbass boomer executives forcing the company in a direction. Like Toyota.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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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.
a hydrogen engine is a useless joke.
“environmentally friendly car”
Removing tailpipe exhaust doesn’t automatically make cars environmentally-friendly.
Wat? You sure understand what hydrogen is?
The fuckcars community has their nose so far up their ass, they think any kind of personal transportation is the devils spawn and no amount of improvents will fix that. In their eyes, everyone should be forced to live in dense urban environments and ride some kind of shared public transportation everywhere.
There are good talking points in their propaganda, for sure, but just like everything today, the echo chamber is so strong, they are now extremists on the matter.
yeah even as someone that really likes PT I think the fuckcars community is a pretty bad community that just simps for the new shiny thing rather than talking about things that actually improves PT.
Still, suburbia should stop being subsidised and more transit oriented systems should be built.
The extremes always look silly. Take for example the little dick energy of a big lifted pickup with tiny wheels blowing coal.
Where the fuckcars folks are correct is that many many car drivers claim they NEED some monstrously fast, big, powerful, etc vehicle and to drive too fast, take up lots of room, crush people, look “cool” etc to go a few miles to buy some milk.
Any rural town with a speed limit near a school knows that when people get into their cars a lot of excuses for why they need a car become armor for why they need to be allowed to drive like dicks.
I don’t think we’d see fuckcars have nearly the staying power if those people were driving sensible vehicles at sensible speeds and didn’t claim priority over every piece of road.
Totally agree with this although it’s a uniquely an american problem. In my neck of the woods, cars are more sensible and I would still say there’s a lot more room for improvement, both in what people are alowed to take on the roads and public transportation options.
But the circlejerk that is fuckcars makes even the people driving the Renault Twizy seem like monsters.
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.
