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.
Well. Basically no one except for dumbass boomer executives forcing the company in a direction. Like Toyota.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
