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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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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?
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.
You’ve basically just summed up Lemmy.
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.
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.
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.
