Toyota, Honda, Nissan and other Japanese automakers are serious about rolling out battery electric vehicles to catch up with the world’s frontrunners like Tesla and BYD
“We love battery EVs.”
Takero Kato, the executive in charge of electric vehicles at Toyota, said that not once, but twice, to emphasize what he considers the message at this year’s Tokyo auto show.
It’s a message ringing clear at the Tokyo Mobility Show, which will run through Nov. 5 at Tokyo Big Sight hall and where battery-powered electric vehicles are the star at practically every booth.
Maybe public perception is skewing my opinion, but Toyota had a massive head start on EVs with the first Gen Prius. Then they let that platform stagnate and bemoaned the advancement of EVs once Tesla had brought them to the market all in favor of hydrogen. They put all their eggs in the hydrogen fuel cell basket hoping that storage and range would be worked out despite clear disadvantages due to physics. Now they “love battery tech”? I love their reputation when it comes to ICE and reliability, but I’m challenging them to persuade my negative opinion of their EV commitment before I buy a Toyota EV.
Toyota knew they blew it and won’t be able to catch up on their own. Because of that, they have to create a partnership with Idemitsu Kosan which already have a headstart in solid state battery technology.
I always thought of hydrogen as tech that didn’t have a leg to stand on.
The tech is just a bunch of air
While from a technical point of view it would allow for the continuation of combustion engines, and is thus an attractive alternative for car makers, it doesn’t make sense to use hydrogen on such small scales. Making hydrogen cleanly requires a lot of energy, so the idea generally is to use renewable energy to generate hydrogen from water. This works for industrial applications like steel making, but on a small scale it just doesn’t make economic sense because it needs to be cooled down so much.
The main reason why hydrogen is pushed is because it is also a byproduct of natural gas exploitation, so called blue or grey hydrogen.
Yeah, but all these traditional car makers had all this expertise designing and making ICEs so they blindly stuck to the idea of continuing to make ICEs, by just moving to hydrogen.
They hobbled themselves since making electric cars requires a very different skill set which Tesla and many Chinese car makers were able to break into without the high entry cost that making quality ICEs has. Now they’ve set themselves to play catchup at the risk of being steamrolled by newcomers.
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That’s crazy:
— US gas 140,000 EV chargers and it’s nowhere near enough, even with most charging fine at home
— US had 57 places to fuel hydrogen, all in California
— we don’t even have a cost effective way to produce green hydrogen yet, most will continue to come from fossil fuels for decades
And you think it’s cheaper and easier to build entire industries across the US and worldwide, for a fuel source still dependent on fossil fuels, at a cost probably in the trillions of dollars? And it’s desirable to save large oil companies trying to hold desperately to their existing business?
The generation of Hydrogen was never the hardest problem.
Compression, storage and transportation - those are the big problems.
How is the car driver in Kansas refilling their hydrogen powered vehicle without major efficiency losses?
The barriers haven’t changed much in decades, and cyclically someone pretends those are all minor.
The new play is: Maybe Ammonia?