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 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.
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
Is that what they’re doing by releasing one vehicle in a couple of US states and now another in a different country? I think your take is pretty extreme.
For decades, they had been one of the only companies to electrify their vehicles with numerous hybrid options. There doesn’t have to be only one single alternative to ICE engines. We can build and develop multiple things in unison.
Uhh, no… hydrogen is the only way forward, unless battery tech magically becomes so much better overnight. We haven’t developed a new battery tech over the current stuff since the 70s.
Here’s big names who are working on hydrogen cars:
BMW Hyundai Honda Toyota Jaguar
How you going to tell me hydrogen which is the most abundant thing in the universe, is not worth it?
You’re the guy hedging his bets on horses and farriers.
EV works for cities but that’s about it.
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.
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
That’s why generating hydrogen during off-peak hours from a nuclear power plant will be very beneficial. It may be less efficient but way better for the environment then lithium
You still have all the transport and storage costs associated with hydrogen. I’d need to see a study that actually determines the environmental impact of lithium to believe you.
They’ve invested heavily into a partnership with Panasonic to build solid state batteries too . They hand just spread their risk
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.
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.
How do you figure? Everyone who doesn’t live in big cities has the ability to charge an EV overnight, or in half an hour when road tripping. Absolutely none of them live within hundreds of miles of hydrogen refueling station.
Unless you have a quick charge at your house, or live in an area with one, you’re not getting 30min quick charge at all. I’m 50 miles from the capital city in my state and we don’t have any quick charge stations here. Anywhere. You really seem to be underestimating the size of the USA.
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.
If there is an asteroid in the sky then everyone dies. Not just the “dinosaurs”. This is not a good analogy
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
