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Toyota Scion IQ Electric Car To Launch In 2012
Mightee writes "Toyota officially announced at an annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas that the all-electric Scion iQ will be launched next year in the United States. According to Toyota, Scion iQ can only go 50 miles on a single charge. Because of this, it will be facing tough competition from 73-mile Nissan Leaf and 85-mile Mitsubishi i."
Once, under very specific circumstances, in 1996 (not '97):
...which is all to say, you can't compare a completely uncommercializable prototype with a real-world production vehicle.
http://www.foveal.com/ATdS_Report_1996.txt
They only made something like four of them, and never came close to managing even half that range in real world usage:
http://evworld.com/article.cfm?storyid=1737
And it not only looked hideous, it had hopelessly poor acceleration too (0-60 in 17 seconds), which together would've likely stopped most people even considering buying one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solectria_Sunrise
Yes, gasoline is a flammable liquid with a high-ish vapour pressure at room temperature and pressure...
Hydrogen is a gas at room temperature and pressure, and an extremely low density one at that (in fact, you'll struggle to find a less dense gas - it's the lightest element, but exists as a molecule, still helium is more dense, the next closest).
What the GP was mentioning was the assertion that pumping liquid hydrogen at a filling station would be "safe and easy" (in comparison to gasoline). Liquid hydrogen is a cryogen - that boils at -252C (-450F), so not only is it a) very energy intensive to liquify (either by pressurising and chilling, or just chilling), it will furiously boil when pumped up out of the dewars you keep it in.
The only real way to "safely" store it (without having to consider cryogenic issues like venting, ice build up on the outside of valves and pipework, extensive lagging and bulky dewars etc, is to store it as a compressed gas.
The problem with that takes us back to density: it has a very low energy density, so you need very high pressures to store lots of it (ie, enough to give you similar range to gasoline).
You certainly won't be pumping it as a cryogenic liquid out of a fuel pump into your car in the same way you currently pump gasoline, and to think that liquid gasoline and liquid hydrogen are broadly similar in safety (in terms of the precautions and risks involved in storage, usage and handling) as you suggest with your flippant and uninformed statement that starts with a sarcastic "wow" is just laughable.
The major research right now is "how do we increase the energy density?" - we had effective hydrogen fuel cells back in the 60s - we sent them to the moon on Apollo, but they had to be fuelled with LOx and LH2, which was hazardous, but handy since they were using millions of gallons of the stuff anyway to power the rocket engines themselves, bleeding off a little to run the fuel cells was just a bonus. We simply can't do that in a consumer vehicle, so we need a way to carry enough hydrogen to make fuel cells really worth it, hence research into new polymers that can "absorb" it like a sponge, or new materials that enable us to make higher pressure storage tanks etc.
No it wouldn't. Energy density by volume of liquid hydrogen is 1/3 that of gasoline. So unless you're willing to carry around 3 times teh amount of fuel, I don't think you're getting the same range. And even then, do you really think it is reasonable for every car to carry 40 gallons of liquid hydrogen around with them? I don't.
Why compress it. it's lighter than air. You could have floating cars. The question is does "BMW Hindenberg" or "Toyota Hindenberg" have a better ring to it?
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer