Japan To Offer $20,000 Subsidy For Fuel-Cell Cars

An anonymous reader writes "Toyota is on track to launch the first consumer fuel-cell car in Japan next year, and the country's Prime Minister says the government wants to assist the new alternative to gas-driven vehicles. Shinzo Abe announced that Japan will offer subsidies of almost $20,000 for fuel cell cars, which will decrease the Toyota model's cost by about 28%. He said, "This is the car of a new era because it doesn't emit any carbon dioxide and it's environmentally friendly. The government needs to support this. Honda is also planning to release a fuel-cell car next year, but experts expect widespread adoption to take decades, since hydrogen fuel station infrastructure is still in its infancy."

Comments

weird choice

[Trepidity]

My impression is that, 10 or 15 years ago, electric vehicles and fuel-cell vehicles were perhaps equally good candidates for "future non-petroleum car technology", but that electric vehicles have been developing much faster, while fuel-cell vehicles have been going nowhere. Why now place a large bet on fuel cells?

Re:weird choice

[Nemyst]

I'm guessing because A) Japanese manufacturers have been focusing on fuel cells and B) electricity in Japan is quite expensive, reducing incentive to use it. Japan's power grid is also fairly strange and I'm not sure it'd be able to bear heavy electric car usage.

Re:weird choice

[Trepidity]

Ah good point on (B). Also, since the Japanese public has gotten very skeptical of nuclear power post-Fukushima, that's likely to just put more upward pressure on electricity prices.

Carbon impact is misleading

[Chalnoth]

The issue is that the dominant technology for producing hydrogen is steam reforming, which emits carbon monoxide and/or carbon dioxide as byproducts. This means that hydrogen fuel cells are most definitely not "carbon free" in any reasonable sense.

Perhaps at some point in the future it will become more common to generate hydrogen through some other means that doesn't produce CO/CO2, but we're definitely not there yet. So I'm not really sure that this technology is any better than electric vehicles. (which face a similar problem, but effective technologies to produce the electricity are already cost-competitive and on the rise as a result).

Re:Why isn't the U.S. doing things like this?

[rubycodez]

no, this is not how you do it, wasting my tax dollars on 28 percent overpriced uneconomical $70k luxury vehicle that has payback period in over a decade...

Re:Why isn't the U.S. doing things like this?

[tomhath]

The US is already doing this. There are plenty of tax credits and other subsidies for hybrid vehicles, ethanol, etc.

Re:Why isn't the U.S. doing things like this?

[ShanghaiBill]

This is how you do it!

No, this is NOT how you do it. It makes sense for the government to promote and subsidize scientific research and technological development. But it does NOT make sense for governments to subsidize manufacturing. If something cannot be sold at a fair market price, then the answer is not taxpayer funded subsidies, but more R&D to develop something that actually makes sense. These subsidies usually get twisted in corporate welfare entitlements, and then can often be used to stifle progress rather then promoting it. Examples: Ethanol subsidies, and solar subsidies that have morphed into protective tariffs that raise the cost of alternative energy in order to protect inefficient producers with political connections.

Re:Why isn't the U.S. doing things like this?

[Sqr(twg)]

I worked on fuel cell vehicles for seven years, but quit because I realized there will never be a future in it.

There are lots of reasons, but the main argument is this: It takes about four times as much electricity to power a fuel cell car as a battery-electric car. (Fuel cells convert hydrogen into electricity at about 50 % efficiency, and making hydrogen from electrolysis has about 50 % efficency, not counting losses in compressing the hydrogen and when tranferring the compressed gas to the car. Batteries can have 95 % efficiency both in charging and discharging.)

You could make hydrogen from natural gas, of course, but the "no fossil fuels" argument goes away, and efficiency is still no advantage over a combustion engine that runs on natural gas directly.

The only advantage a fuel cell vehicle has over a battery-powered one is range, but range is less of an issue whith batteries, because chargers could be everywhere, unlike hydrogen tank stations that have lots of safety issues.

Re:Absolutely - it is filthy

[cerberusti]

Even if we could produce it in a reasonable manner hydrogen is highly explosive, very easy to ignite, cryogenic when liquefied (as in 20 K cryogenic), and likes to leak out of most containers at an impressive rate (even very well sealed and cooled containers which you could not practically place in a moving vehicle).

Leaks can also cause spontaneous ignition due to the fact that unlike most gasses, hydrogen warms on expansion and requires a terrifyingly low amount of energy to ignite.

There is effectively no way to overcome the practical issues with using dihydrogen alone as a fuel source while being competitive with anything else. It must be bound to another atom, such as carbon (and if that counts as hydrogen powered we already have it with gasoline.)

In the US we will end up doing exactly what you mention: We will burn the natural gas directly for energy, because that is a sane thing to do. It is stable and easy to store compared to hydrogen, and the energy density is good enough.