Why hydrogen? Why not electric at this point?
Toyota trials hydrogen-powered vehicle on public roads in Australia
Submitted 11 months ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 11 months ago
FooBarrington@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Because Toyota invested a lot into hydrogen instead of EV, and they need to recuperate at least some of it.
Geobloke@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They’ve invested heavily into a partnership with Panasonic to build solid state batteries too . They hand just spread their risk
KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
jose1324@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
frathiemann@feddit.de 11 months ago
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.
EarMaster@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I imagine the next Mad Max movie with hydrogen cars. Invisible fires and awesome explosions sounds like a match made in heaven…
Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
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.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
ours@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Destraight@lemm.ee 11 months ago
If there is an asteroid in the sky then everyone dies. Not just the “dinosaurs”. This is not a good analogy
rolling_resistance@lemmy.world 11 months ago
“environmentally friendly car”
Removing tailpipe exhaust doesn’t automatically make cars environmentally-friendly.
mihies@kbin.social 11 months ago
Wat? You sure understand what hydrogen is?
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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.
Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
hoshikarakitaridia@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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…
KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Hildegarde@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Also with all of the saltwater around then 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.
Crayphish@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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!
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 11 months ago
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.
derpgon@programming.dev 11 months ago
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.
Geobloke@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
chronicledmonocle@lemmy.world 11 months ago
They’ve been making claims about their solid state battery for years. It’s always a few years away.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
a hydrogen engine is a useless joke.
Destraight@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Hell yeah let’s see them in America too
18107@aussie.zone 11 months ago
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.
SupraMario@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Your numbers are way off. No manufacture would even think about touching hydrogen ICE motors if they only got 10-15% efficiency.
weew@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
no manufacturer except one that’s still desperately trying to push for a hydrogen economy
KpntAutismus@lemmy.world 11 months ago
insideevs.com/…/efficiency-compared-battery-elect…
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.
jose1324@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Well. Basically no one except for dumbass boomer executives forcing the company in a direction. Like Toyota.
PeterPoopshit@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I thought they were using ammonia powered vehicles and calling them hydrogen just because ammonia contains hydrogen.
Geobloke@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
18107@aussie.zone 11 months ago
The current cost to drive a car with green hydrogen (from electrolysis, not 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.
wooki@lemmynsfw.com 11 months ago
And yet here we are breaking new ground with brand new (within the year) solid hydrogen.
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.
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 11 months ago
I’ve seen nothing suggesting a short life. Solid state batteries also should result in short charging times
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
and you have to use it up within a week or two, or your fuel disappears