
Toyota Embraces Fuel-Cell Cars for Post-Gasoline Future - gopi
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-12-17/toyota-embraces-fuel-cell-cars-for-post-gasoline-future#r=rss
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henrikschroder
Good that there's serious money being sunk into alternatives to electric cars,
more is always good.

But I'm seriously tired of the fact that all articles about fuel-cells
enthusiastically exclaims that "it's only byproduct is water!!!!", as if
hydrogen was some sort of magic alternative to hydrocarbons. It's not, it's an
energy _transmission_ medium, not an energy source.

For fuel-cell cars to work, you would need to have energy some place that
consumes water and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen, releasing the oxygen
into the air, and the hydrogen into containers that can then go into some sort
of infrastructure such that individual cars can be filled up with it as
necessary.

And if you think about the amount of gasoline infrastructure that exists, we'd
have to pretty much duplicate that, or convert that, into hydrogen shipping
infrastructure, which is a pretty tall order.

But for electricity, we already have the infrastructure. If you have a house,
you have a place for filling up your electric car, and you have a method for
paying for the energy that your car consumes, and there is a way to move the
energy from wherever it is produced to your house.

So the story for electric car adoption is "You don't have to take trips to the
gas station anymore!", but the story for fuel cell car adoption is "You have
to take trips to a new type of gas stations that don't exist yet!". That's
quite a hurdle...

~~~
sliverstorm
We appear to already have the infrastructure for electric cars, and at low
adoption rates that's true. But according to the utilities, that
infrastructure is in no way ready for sweeping adoption of electric vehicles,
so then too we would need to overhaul our existing infrastructure.

~~~
revelation
We could take the gasoline, burn it to generate electricity and use that to
charge electric vehicles. If you consider the massive efficiency advantage,
we'd probably still come ahead over using internal combustion engines.

This is in other words a complete non-issue. But I'd love to hear plans on
safeguarding inevitable hydrogen leaks in residential areas. Should we tell
people to get rid of their garages?

~~~
sliverstorm
I think you are confused. Gasoline drive is perhaps 30% efficient. Electric
drive is perhaps 80%. Charging batteries I don't remember, but let's call it
80%.

So what you've proposed is:

    
    
        Burn gasoline (30%) * Charge batteries (80%) * Drive e-car (80%) = 19% efficient
    

It works better if you have a very high efficiency gasoline-powered generator
(a 60% efficient generator gets you 38% efficient) but that can't really be
done at the homeowner scale.

~~~
revelation
I guess you are underestimating just how terrible internal combustion engines
are and overestimating charging + driving losses.

Consider that hybrids or HEVs can improve substantially on the efficiency of
just a pure ICE. I guess the problem with using an ICE for driving directly is
that you are often forced to run it at RPMs and states where it is nowhere
near that hypothetical 30% efficiency, simply to get the acceleration the user
demands.

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MrGuyUser
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but it's very rare on
earth so it has to be manufactured. So the oil companies totally would love
you to switch from the oil they will sooner or later not be able to fracking
get anymore to hydrogen which they can raise prices on until the day when
nuclear fusion becomes something they could sell again as long as it remains
expensive enough to be sellable.

Hydrogen is dumb, at 300 miles / 450kms a fuel cell I notice there is no
mention of the price which is laughably much more than gasoline is today. Then
they say that mileage is further than "most" electric cars. True except for
the Tesla which actually 85kwh edition has at least 450kms of range. And also
Hydrogen cannot be regenerated from breaking which makes it less efficient
than full electric. In the future it maybe possible to charge your car with
solar or wind or fart energy, but not if your Petrol Company lobbied
alternative fuel car runs on a Hydrogen Fuel Cell and has the acceleration of
a brick on wheels at 0-100kms in 9.6 seconds. A hummer does that in around
10.5 seconds.

~~~
teraflop
The article does mention price: "While EVs take hours to recharge, the fueling
cost is a fraction of the roughly $45 a hydrogen fill-up will cost."

That's more expensive than gasoline, but as of a few months ago the price
difference would have only been about 30% compared to my relatively fuel-
efficient Honda Fit. The gap is larger now thanks to the recently plummeting
gas prices in the US, of course.

> And also Hydrogen cannot be regenerated from breaking which makes it less
> efficient than full electric.

As the article doesn't mention but Wikipedia does, the Mirai also has a
battery and supports regenerative braking. It's basically a hybrid car that
uses a fuel cell instead of a gasoline engine.

~~~
MrGuyUser
Ok I was wrong about the regenerative breaking. It makes sense since it would
be easy to implement. Most of the drive system of a Hydrogen Car will be
electric already. It will use batteries as well. The world will once again be
at the whim of the hydrogen producers which would likely be Shell, BP or
Exxon. Electric cars are only going to get better and generating your own
power is only going to get easier. Oil companies don't like the loss of
control. Hybrid's pull some tricks to save fuel, but I might argue they have
much more points of failure and are harder to fix when they do fail. I predict
that on Dec 15th they will sell one or two of these cars to Toyota Executives
whom receive a bonus just a little more than what the car would cost if they
did.

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jobu
There have been two major hurdles for the development of hydrogen fuel-cell
cars:

1) storing the hydrogen - hydrogen is extremely corrosive, and not very energy
dense compared to gasoline

2) variable energy output - fuel cells are good at producing a steady,
constant amount of power, but the power requirements of a car can be quite
variable (especially for city driving)

Anyone have details on how Toyota overcame these?

~~~
_rpd
For (1), the Mirai will use two 70 MPa (10,000 psi) carbon fiber tanks lined
with a polyamide resin to give a range of approx. 300 miles ...

[http://blog.toyota.co.uk/how-does-toyotas-fuel-cell-
vehicle-...](http://blog.toyota.co.uk/how-does-toyotas-fuel-cell-vehicle-work)

[http://www.plasticstoday.com/articles/toyotas-fuel-cell-
car-...](http://www.plasticstoday.com/articles/toyotas-fuel-cell-car-employs-
carbon-fiber-extensively-thermoplastic-composite-20141127a)

A Toyota exec recently fired bullets at the tanks to allay fears that they
would turn fuel cell vehicles into Hindenburgs waiting to happen ...

[http://www.autoblog.com/2014/01/16/toyota-fires-bullets-
hydr...](http://www.autoblog.com/2014/01/16/toyota-fires-bullets-hydrogen-
fuel-tanks-shoots-ev-supporter/)

~~~
digikata
Firing bullets at it when the tank is new is just a publicity stunt. Those
tanks need to be holding hydrogen for at least five years, all while being
cycled from full to empty, then lets see how well they hold up.

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tsotha
Batteries are far closer to being practical than fuel cells. Particularly
hydrogen fuel cells which would require new infrastructure.

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protomyth
"the only byproduct is water, which exits through the tailpipe"

How much water are we talking about and what effect is this going to have on a
highway in the north in winter?

~~~
nrb
It's in the same ballpark as the amount of water vapor that comes out of the
tailpipe of an internal combustion engine.

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mrfusion
So why can't we just run fuel cells in reverse to refill the h2? That way you
could just treat it like a more efficient battery.

~~~
dragonwriter
You can design fuel cells that will let you do this, but they are, IIRC, both
more expensive and bulkier, so not ideal for most vehicle applications.

