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Toyota Announces Plans For Fuel Cell Car By 2015
puddingebola writes "Toyota has announced plans for a fuel cell powered car at the Tokyo Motor show. From the article, 'Satoshi Ogiso, the Toyota Motor Corp. executive in charge of fuel cells, said Wednesday the vehicle is not just for leasing to officials and celebrities but will be an everyday car for ordinary consumers, widely available at dealers. "Development is going very smoothly," he told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Tokyo Motor Show. The car will go on sale in Japan in 2015 and within a year later in Europe and U.S."'"
I remember at least 2 years ago, Toyota had this plan. Hydrogen isn't as bad as people make it out to be. You just need special materials to work with. If you go steel, it just gets owned. So special materials are expensive in the short run until they're manufactured. Hydrogen itself is just made with electricity and water. It isn't much different than electric cars in that regard. The main difference is electric cars need expensive batteries. Hydrogen cars only need a pressurized tank. I think in the long run hydrogen cars can win out. Do go investing in hydrogen refilling stations just yet though like that electric car got ahead of the curve.
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Fuel Source?
Wake me up when this has a chance of actually being a viable product. I doubt they can create the thing for a reasonable (non-heavily-subsidized) cost. Given that we are STILL waiting for laptop fuel cells which have been perpetually "around the corner" since literally the Dawn of Slashdot, I'm not holding my breath.
And once you have the car, you need the Hydrogen. There are currently zero economic ways of creating the stuff. You can either crack it off of Hydrocarbons (and if you are going to do that, why not just burn the damn things in a conventional car?) Or you can electrolyze it. Which is tremendously energy-inefficient. And then you have to compress it for storage/transport/delivery, wasting even more energy.
Hydrogen cars make sense if we have bountiful free electricity. Until that happens, electric cars make more sense, and neither will seriously challenge the dominance of the ICE.
Don't you just hate it when the summary is so useless that you actually have to RTFA (or, more realistically, skim through it)? Fuel cells can mean natural gas, gasoline, diesel etc, all of these significantly less interesting since they have been powering cars for 100+ years and done so by converting chemical energy directly to mechanical energy, without going through the electricity step. But hydrogen is interesting. And finally some competition for Tesla - let's see, what happens to a hydrogen fuel cell when you hit debris on the road!
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AFAIK, it takes *lots* of energy to make the hydrogen. Anybody have the latest scoop on the costs for this? What would the "hydrogen stations" be charging for it? What would the $/mile comparison be between a hydrogen car and a gas one?
Toyota plans on selling the first hydrogen powered fuel cell car in Japan in 2015, and in the US and Europe in 2016. Which won't sell very well if the first hydrogen filling stations are planned for 2020. Does anyone have any real plans for those?
I'm sure the welder supply shops will love the business, but they aren't usually open on weekends.
In the TFA it say hydrogen costs $3 for the same equivalent range as a gallon of gas (which is about $3/gallon where I live).
Except that it requires hydrogen --- which is complicated to store --- and requires an infrastructure we don't have in place. And the hydrogen probably takes up more space than a gallon of gas (a guess --- does someone know?).
Questions:
1. What are we destroying to make the hydrogen? Hydrogen doesn't occur naturally --- it would need to be stripped off a molecule. What is the byproduct of this process?
2. Why is investing in a new infrastructure -- hydrogen distribution --- a good thing?
3. The byproduct is "water". Which sounds harmless enough -- but if you go back 50 years ago the idea of carbon dioxide as a byproduct sounded harmless. Does this process change the net amount of water in the ecosystem in a way that would have impact in 50 years?
I ask these because I don't know, and every time I've read about fuel cells in the last 10 years I just never understood what the attraction is supposed to be.
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Amory Lovins sees fuel cell vehicles as being competitive well before 2050, so this is an interesting development. http://www.rmi.org/RFGraph-cost_reduction_potential_of_powertrains
When precious metals are replaced? Really? And just how long do they think fuel cells have been around and very expensive too? FYI, fuel cells have been around for many decades and have been in use for about the same period. Mostly by the space, aerospace and defense industries. TFA seems to throw out the concept of a quick reduction in price when it's an old/mature industry and technology already.
It made me wonder if another Bush wasn't in office somewhere pushing this hydrogen stuff again as a distraction to the growing BEV market. Like George and Dick did back when HEVs(hybrids) were hitting the market.
LoB
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1) It doesn't matter if it has the "range of a regular gasoline car". Because you would have to drive like 500 miles to find a hydrogen refilling station!
2) Hydrogen is expensive... at least as much as gasoline in most of the US.
Another year, another disappointing Toyota...
the green(ish) vehicle we want is the SARD Supra HV-R
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARD
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Toyota_Supra_HV-R_02.jpg
so why won't they build a few?!?!?!
Not happening anytime soon but when we have fusion power stations then what will be the best distributed fuel source? Would hydrogen not be a good choice then?
The hydrogen combustion car is dead, dead. It combines the chicken-and-egg problems of hydrogen fuel distribution with all the inefficiency of blowing stuff up to make heat and a little forward motion. At least fuel cells are efficient.
The BMW 7 series and Mazda rotary hydrogen ICE demo cars came out years ago. Nothing serious since. Periodically some lame manufacturer without access to fuel cells or batteries converts an engine to burn hydrogen, but it's a stunt that goes nowhere.
=S
All the comments about H2 efficiency and explosive risk completely miss the point. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been feasible for years, there have been a few Honda Clarity and Mercedes B-Class FCVs driving round Southern California (which has the ONLY public refueling stations in the entire USA) for several years.
The problem is demand. If you care about the environment you plug in for your regular commute. You can can already buy a plug-in hybrid for half the price and lower running costs than these 2015 cars. As Volt owners gleefully report, most drivers travel for hundreds of miles recharging at home, but for long trips the car has the quick refueling of gasoline that's available everywhere.
There's a market of people who don't want any tailpipe emissions and can't plug in and regularly drive long distances and live near the handful of H2 stations and are willing to spend a lot of money on a new technology, but it's vanishingly small!
Eventually fossil fuels could be so expensive or restricted that H2 will be the range-extender we use for our plug-in vehicles, if ethanol from biomass doesn't work out. But that's a long way away. Meanwhile Toyota and Hyundai are very cagey about whether you can plug in their HFCVs; it seems the answer is No. Their cars have a battery and motor so plugging in is the cheapest way to drive the first few miles, and I think soon consumers will reject a motor-driven car that you can't plug in. The comparative reviews of the first HFCVs against 2015's plug-in hybrid cars will be brutal, and there will be dozens of "gotcha" pieces, wherein the brave reporter drives out of Southern California and gets stranded.
=S
If we look to the car of the future, it's surely going to be battery. And I don't just mean 10 years from now. I'm thinking 100 years, even 1000, heck even 10,000 years from now.
We're seeing around 8% improvements in battery capacity year upon year. Everything is going solid-state for reasons down to reliability, size, capacity, latency, noise, efficiency, (and eventually) cost to produce. You just can't beat raw instantaneous electricity as a power source.
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You can't predict what's going to happen 10 years from now any more than you can predict a 10,000 year future. Weather reporters can't even get tomorrows weather accurate, so what makes you so sure?. Our battery future is now, in 10 years we may have some advancements that rival battery power. The resources of Earth are not infinite, whatever the future holds it has to be renewable or bust.
I meant even in principle, battery is better than any other power source. It has to be. The only statistic it currently falls short on is capacity, but imagine a battery that stores 10x as much energy as today's batteries. That's almost inevitable, and by itself makes it much better than any other option. Now imagine 100x more capacity. You get the idea...
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By far the cheapest sources of H2 today are fossil fuels. Big gas/oil don't mind fuel cells because it still means sales of their product. But mostly they don't mind because it's a distraction from real alternative fuels. The real threats are renewables, and little of the energy from them will go into producing H2 in the foreseeable future, because those processes are currently so inefficient. Energy from renewables will be stored as biodiesel, butanol, or other liquid fuel for which there's an existing distribution system and existing vehicles that can use them or distributed as electricity. Battery electric vehicles are somewhat of a threat because the efficiency, even after converting the fossil fuel energy into electricity, distributing it, storing it in batteries, and converting it back into motion is much more efficient than refining it, distributing it, and burning it in a mobile ICE. Fuel cell cars with onboard reformers might be a real alternative, as there's already a distribution system for natural gas, and storing CNG isn't so bad. Storing LNG is even better, but a system for distributing and dispensing it en masse doesn't exist, whereas LNG only needs a dispensing system.
So... don't be distracted. Room temperature liquid fuels and electric battery storage are in the near future, but not much hydrogen.
Except for fuel cells. In practice batteries currently beat fuel cells, but nobody knows for how long.
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