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Toyota Opens Patents On Hydrogen Fuel Cell Technology
An anonymous reader writes that Toyota will share almost 6,000 hydrogen fuel cell patents. "Hoping to speed development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, Toyota said Monday that it would offer thousands of patents on related technologies to rival automakers, for free. The announcement, made at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, echoes a similar move by electric car maker Tesla in 2014, when Chief Executive Elon Musk made Tesla patents available to all, hoping to spur innovation in the electric vehicle world (and, perhaps, to draw publicity.) Toyota has similar goals for the fuel-cell car market. 'At Toyota, we believe that when good ideas are shared, great things can happen,' Bob Carter, senior vice president at Toyota, said before the announcement. 'The first generation hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, launched between 2015 and 2020, will be critical, requiring a concerted effort and unconventional collaboration.'"
So I take it they're not going to open their patents on gas pedal design?
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Let the competition flail around with dead-end hydrogen technology while Toyota works on a secret battery electric car?
Mostly random stuff.
This is great. Hydrogen is clearly superior to pure electric in usage, but is tricky to work with currently and patents probably were an encumbering factor for other users...
I predict within five years we'll see a hydrogen Tesla car. Tesla already knows how to build great electric cars, imagine when they are un-emcumbered by tons of batteries...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
... you first need to patent it, then you release it for free to all.
Why do we still have patents at all, again?
echoes a similar move by electric car maker Tesla in 2014, when Chief Executive Elon Musk made Tesla patents available to all, hoping to spur innovation in the electric vehicle world (and, perhaps, to draw publicity.) Toyota has similar goals for the fuel-cell car market. 'At Toyota, we believe that when good ideas are shared, great things can happen,'
While I think its good of them to do this I am not so sure Toyota or Tesla really have many options. They want to sell a product, cars, that depend on certain infrastructure namely filling/charging stations. Unless they want to be forever in the business of operating those themselves they have to make it attractive for others to do so.
First they can't really expect people to pay to a risk investing in supporting their product, so extracting fees from would be station operators would only make it less like anyone will step forward. Which in turn makes it less likely they can sell cars to the public.
At the same time they really need their competitors to embrace 'their' technology as a kind of standard, for pretty much the same reasons. If they want the infrastructure to spring up there needs to be a critical mass of vehicles out there to make money supporting. If they want to sell vehicles beyond the boutique space Tesla currently operates in they need the infrastructure built out.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Well I'll be dipped in $hit! Never thought I'd see the day where a patent would be relaxed to advance ingenuity.
You simply need too large a battery pack to give cars a decent range, and the larger the battery pack the longer a charge takes...
Hydrogen has some issues around production and storage, but those are being worked around - when they ware worked around filling is as quick as gasoline cars now, and you can retro-fit existing gas stations with hydrogen tanks. A hydrogen station can process the same number of cars per hour in the same space as the existing gas station, a fact that will never be true of electric charging stations.
If you want the vast majority of cars on the road to be electric, the only possible way that happens is with hydrogen tech.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nope. Until there is a eco-friendly, sustainable way to generate hydrogen
The move to electric cars is inevitable.
The use of batteries in all those cars is impossible at large scale for all sorts of reasons.
Therefore there will be developed practical means of hydrogen generation - though why you insist on "eco-friendly" is a mystery, it just needs to work.
As for it being "sustainable", that's kind of obviously true if you think about where hydrogen generally comes from... :-)
What is also a larger mystery, is why a company with the resources of Toyota clearly knows hydrogen can and will work, yet you doubt that it can. Do you really think Toyota would have such a big push for this if it were not workable?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As a post above points out, the hydrogen supply isn't up to it.
The main supply of hydrogen today is ... yes, you guessed it, fossil fuels. Electrolytic production of hydrogren doesn't even come close. And it's ridiculously inefficient compared to battery electric vehicles.
The only useful thing that hydrogen has going for it is a fast fill time. On every other metric, it sucks balls - range, complexity, safety, price of storage equipment, price of equipment to convert it into useful work, energy efficiency.
This is a play by the fossil fuel industry aimed at either preserving some market for them or delaying the adoption of electric vehicles, they don't care which.
Come on Elon, please quit fooling around with stupid things like hyper loop or manned mission to moon or orbital space colonies. Give us a 40 K sedan with 150 mile range.
Convince railroads to haul 18wheelers and cars on flatbed cars. 200 miles at a stretch. Build roll-on roll-off terminals at the highway intersections. We will happily sit in our cars while being hauled at 80 to 100 mph. It is not perfect, but it is better than the alternative, which is to stay cooped up exactly like that in a car, but one would be driving at less than 80 mph. Money saved on toll, gas and wear and tear will pay for the train fare. The damned trains are getting 450 ton-mile per gallon of diesel. Almost all of us are within 150 miles of a major highway intersection. We could even charge our electric cars while being hauled. Solve range anxiety using railroads.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Tesla wants others to use their tech so charging stations get built everyplace and make their cars more useful. Toyota wants everyone to use their tech so hydrogen filling stations are built everyplace and make their cars more useful. In some Frankenstein experiment someone will get around to buidling a Tesla-Ota with batteries AND a fuel cell.
I'm not so sure about that. Tesla just announced and upgrade to the Tesla Roadster that gives it a range of 400 miles.
The range is fine - because it has a massive battery pack, that even at a Supercharger station takes 15 min per year.
If a tipping point were reached and most people were driving electric cars, you'd be waiting about a day or so for a spot to open at a Supercharger station.
With the dead weight of the battery gone you have all the advantages of an electric car (because it's till electric), now with far lighter body weight meaning better acceleration, or better range...
In the end what probably makes the most sense is a REAL hybrid, that is to say a combo of hydrogen/electric. The electric could charge for a 50 mile range, the hydrogen could kick in for extended trips.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The fine print on this announcement is that the patents are not really free. You have to apply and be accepted to the program (serious contenders need not apply?) and the royalty-free license period only goes to 2020. This is just enough time to develop and start producing something and then you can get hit with big royalty payments.
This is sucker bait.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Because we can't extend the capacity of charger stations beyond what we have now ?
Filling up a car now takes about a minute. A Supercharger station filling up in about 15 (or longer) means you have to have 15 times the number of "pumps", more if the charging time really takes longer OR if more cars have less range.
Do you really think cities can hold 15 times the number of gas stations we have currently?
There is some reduction from people who can charge at home, but not really much because of the number of people in apartments or just traveling long distances.
What none of you seem to be thinking of is what happens when ALL CARS AND TRUCKS are electric, which I consider inevitable. You all seem to be planning for a world where only the rich drive electric cars which makes for a huge reduction in the requirements around power distribution.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Toyota was making a lot of amazing battery innovations before they apparently hit their head on something and forgot what a crappy idea Hydrogen is.
Or perhaps a giant corporation with lots of money and a huge R&D department might be a bit more aware of what the future roadmap for hydrogen production looks like than you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Patents work on a new market technology. Where the new idea can change the industry and the inventor should be able to get a strong first to market advantage. However for automotive there is a huge infrastructure and everyone is afraid to being first to market. There isn't a first movers advantage towards non-gasoline cars, it is actually a disadvantage because there isn't a proper infrastructure to support it. So in this case opening the patents makes sense, to allow all your other competitors to share in rebuilding the infrastructure, and being able to get into the market on a level playing field, vs. at a First Movers disadvantage.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I believe you are looking for something called "parking" which happens usually for an excess of 15 minutes. Yes, obviously, charging stations would need to be installed, but that is pretty trivial.
Fully agree that the North American power grid (really, world wide) is nowhere near ready for that much extra demand, and will probably be the biggest obstacle in going full electric. But hey, by the time it's ready, we're bound to have wireless charging concrete/asphalt.
The difference is that Microsoft just made some software and hoped it would take.
Toyota on the other hand makes real physical objects that rely on vast infrastructure to operate. You can bet that Toyota is nor pushing for Hydrogen without having a damn good idea of it being feasible.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How so? In a hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen is not used to power the vehicle directly through internal combustion. It is converted first to electricity
Exactly, hydrogen is all of the benefits of electric cars, without the huge weight of the battery pack, without the long recharge time when you need to refuel on the go, without having to recycle batteries and produce them in huge quantities either.
Due to conservation of energy, hydrogen fuel cells will never be more efficient than "pure electric".
So current cars are about efficiency? Of course not, they are about convenience. That is all you generally need to know to understand the future of, well, anything.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
when HP realized their webOS was going nowhere, they open sourced it to save a little face and gain a little goodwill, and then abandoned it.
It probably occurred to Toyota recently that hydrogen is not a good idea because:
1. hydrogen molecules are tiny and thus tend to leak out of everything
2. storing hydrogen is costly because of its low density (lowest in the universe) and the insanely cold temperatures required to liquify it
3. the chicken-and-egg problem of getting gas stations to carry it
According to the DC-X team (via Jerry Pournelle's blog) hydrogen is a very frustrating fuel to work with for reasons 1 and 2. Initially they were attracted to it for performance reasons (cryogenic fuel is the most powerful chemical rocket fuel in the universe) but after working with it for awhile came to the conclusion that kerosene/LOX was a far better choice from the standpoint of operational efficiency and cost. Lesson which SpaceX is using now to great effect.
I believe you are looking for something called "parking" which happens usually for an excess of 15 minutes.
While the vehicle is unattended. Charging while parking would need some means to secure the charging transaction to make sure someone else doesn't unplug the charger while the vehicle is unattended during the charging session that you paid for. A gasoline fill-up is short enough that one is not terribly inconvenienced to remain standing outside the vehicle during the entire fill-up.
I believe it's inferior because you have to build a new gas delivery infrastructure
But not one that is dissimilar to what already exists and works.
There's a loss of energy making H2 that's non-trivial.
I was not aware that gasoline refinement was free.
Then there's the conversion of H2 to electricity in the vehicle.
In many versions of hydrogen storage you essentially get batteries that consume hydrogen.
The delivery of electricity comes with efficiencies in the 90-percent range.
But not the distribution of electricity before it goes into the vehicle.
Really though, the deal-killer is that the infrastructure for electricity is in place, and you can pick up an old fashioned phone book and find dozens of electricians capable of installing more amps in your garage. H2? Good luck.
As more realistic readers have noted elsewhere, every car being electric means essentially ALL parking spots have to have electric charging stations added. That means essentially tearing up and rebuilding every sidewalk, everywhere, and every parking garage, everywhere.
Which is more likely - that happens, or gas stations are slowly over time converted to support hydrogen?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If a tipping point were reached and most people were driving electric cars, you'd be waiting about a day or so for a spot to open at a Supercharger station.
Only if you make the rather dim assumption that Supercharger stations cannot be enlarged or more of them added. Furthermore electric cars can be and would be charged at home so the need for refueling stations as we currently use them would be significantly reduced.
In the end what probably makes the most sense is a REAL hybrid, that is to say a combo of hydrogen/electric. The electric could charge for a 50 mile range, the hydrogen could kick in for extended trips.
Umm, where are you going to get the hydrogen? Gasoline/electric hybrids make sense because we have existing infrastructure built to support them. We have essentially zero hydrogen fuel infrastructure and no reasonable prospect of that changing anytime soon. Not that it couldn't be built but the advantages of hydrogen do not appear to justify the expense even if the technology works well. Maybe for some fleet vehicles but we certainly aren't going to move to hydrogen cars in the next 10 years. I see no reasonable scenario where hydrogen cards make any real dent in the market in the next 20 years baring some miracle technology breakthrough.
Yes, obviously, charging stations would need to be installed, but that is pretty trivial.
Then why are parking meters either solar or mechanically powered?
Claiming charging station installation is "trivial", ignores the reality of how everything is built. Look inside a parking garage sometime and think of how "trivial" it would be to route power to every spot, when all that exists currently (ha!) is wiring built to support a handful of lights.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Toyota knows there will be one winner. Electric of H2 power? It won't be both.
What you are crazily ignoring is that H2 *is* electricity!!
Electric cars are the winner, absolutely. It's just so obvious it's absurd.
But to claim there will only exist H2 or battery powered cars is to go just as far into the realm of absurdity.
The question then is what mix will there be of H2 use vs. battery, and that leads you to think about what it means if the majority of hundreds of millions of cars need power somehow...
Just follow that road and at the end are the answers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do you really think cities can hold 15 times the number of gas stations we have currently?
Why would they need to? I think you are presuming electric fueling infrastructure will strongly resemble gasoline fueling infrastructure. It will not. Electric charging stations can be put in every parking lot, home, business etc. Heck my little downtown has a half dozen electric car charging stations right now in our shopping district. One of my customers has battery charging stations in front of their office. We have gas stations because they are handling a toxic, flammable and bulky chemical which is impractical and dangerous for most people to get at home in large quantities. We would need LESS fueling stations than we currently have if anything. You really only would need a fueling station for longer trips and it's not exactly tough to find a large patch of surplus farmland next to a highway.
There is some reduction from people who can charge at home, but not really much because of the number of people in apartments or just traveling long distances.
People in apartments have parking places for their cars too. No reason we couldn't wire many of those for charging purposes. Wouldn't happen overnight but we aren't going to switch to electric cars overnight either.
What none of you seem to be thinking of is what happens when ALL CARS AND TRUCKS are electric, which I consider inevitable.
I don't consider it inevitable at all unless there are some pretty significant breakthroughs in battery tech to allow faster charging and lower cost. Electric cars are a promising niche right now. I think you'll see a LOT of hybrids before you see any sort of wholesale change to pure electrics. In some locations (remote and cold especially) I don't see internal combustion going away anytime soon.
Or perhaps a giant corporation with lots of money and a huge R&D department might be a bit more aware of what the future roadmap for hydrogen production looks like than you?
Perhaps but if so they are being rather coy about how hydrogen somehow makes more sense than electric+battery. I'm an engineer who works in automotive and it's not like I wouldn't understand a good argument why hydrogen would make sense. I don't have anything against hydrogen as a fuel source. In theory it has a lot of potential advantages. But the reality is that those potential advantages face some very serious real world obstacles. I have yet to see anyone point out a roadmap for hydrogen powered vehicles that I think has even a remote chance of actually occurring. The biggest obstacle (though hardly the only one) is the lack of fueling infrastructure. Solve that without introducing a pollution problem in the process and I'll listen.
The average household would use 50% more power if all their vehicles were electric.Though if solar power keeps taking off, it's possible that charging during the day(like at work)
Because what cities are no for is so many open areas where sunlight falls down upon everything. Um, no????? No to mention it would give you something like 10 minutes of power for a solar cell mounted on a car!?!
I cannot believe the massive ignorance of reality that goes on around thinking of mass numbers of EV chargers.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you'll see a LOT of hybrids before you see any sort of wholesale change to pure electrics. In some locations (remote and cold especially) I don't see internal combustion going away anytime soon.
Perhaps. Up here in Alaska I actually proposed installing a small hydrocarbon burner to provide the heat necessary as opposed to burning it in an engine. Even up here 'most' of the heat goes out the tailpipe and such. A gallon or two of 'something' burned intentionally for heat would still be a lot less energy wasted. Plus, faster heat!
I don't read AC A human right
"Do you really think cities can hold 15 times the number of gas stations we have currently?"
I don't know about 15 times, but around here we're probably down to about 1/3 of what we had a decade ago, so if we went 3-4x we'd probably be about on par.
More likely though, gas "stations" will become passe, and charge-spots will become like parking meters (hell, probably *part* of parking meters). Stop your car on the curb, grab a bite or do some shopping, and let the vehicle charge while you're away. Same while you're at work. If workplaces set up charging for employee vehicles, then line-ups at the "pump" could be less than they are now.
Your local grocery store? Yeah, they'll have charging ports everywhere. They'll probably give you a discount if you buy groceries there while charging, too. Coffee-shop, same.
The hydrogen will be provided by sea water hydrolysis powered by off shore wind farms with off peak surplus power.
So to make invention still go you first need to patent it, then you release it for free to all. Why do we still have patents at all, again?
Because that's the current law and getting it changed is an exercise in futility.
So, just like copyright and the GPL, they have to patent it first to keep OTHER people from patenting it and locking them out of their own invention. Once that's done they can go ahead and give it away if they want (or cross-license with people with other patents on useful stuff).
Sure it would be nice if patents went away on a lot of stuff - or even everything. It would be nice if other countries wouldn't try to conquer us if we disarmed, too. But as long as patents are there, inventors are forced to stay armed.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Electric vehicles that create their own electricity as they move. A magneto produces power when a turning part (wheels, axels, etc.)
by way of belts or otherwise make the magneto turn to excite permanent magnets (e.g. wheels or fifth wheel turning magneto shaft). Current returns to central motor after moving through an inverter to battery and motor controllers and then goes on to Central DC Motor. Battery starts car as usual. Battery is replenished by Direct Current coming from the Magneto via Inverter. Extra DC current flows through motor controller to Central DC Motor which moves car. OR a Magneto-Motor Overunity would accomplish the same thing by having multiple permanent magnets, each bank of them with number of poles to correspond to cycles of motor, mounted on central rotating shaft. These magnets then excite stationary coils which send their AC current back to Central Motor via Inverter and battery and motor controllers. You have a car that runs itself forever.
Every single fuel cell car is still an underpowered, unsexy car.
In the meantime Tesla is showing its cars can rival half a millon buck cars at less than 1/3 the price.
What Toyota will never conceed is that its fuel cell cars where never truly intended to replace gasoline cars. They are compliance cars, made strictly to comply with emissions regulations to offset the lowest mpg cars on Toyota's product line.
In the meantime Tesla is producing cars people actually want to buy, because its a high end car with all of its sex appeal !
You're woefully short-sighted, my friend! You assume batteries are improving in mere increments, or perhaps are even out of tricks to try to better their game-- but not so. As I said earlier, several of the upcoming chemistries, such as (several competing versions of) nanotitanate, and nanopore ceramics, and silicon nanowire can be recharged either fully in a matter of 5 minutes or so, or to 80% in a similarly short time, at which point they must be charged more slowly if you want to top them off, but a full pack is rarely needed regardless. Even today's Leaf can be recharged quickly enough to make them quite attractive to buyers, given the enormous savings in travel expenses, lack of need for tune-ups and service, and lack of the dreaded Smog Test. There are a number of primary battery chemistries, once tweaked to their maximum potential, whose energy density can be increased by an order of magnitude by coating the electrodes with silicon nanotubes (or other materials that increase electrode surface area). That means that for a car such as the Model S that can already top 400 miles range per charge with less aggressive driving, it could easily make it nonstop from Los Angeles to Atlanta... and, rather than increasing an EV's range to ridiculous extremes, the battery pack could instead be reduced in size, making EVs lighter, less expensive, more nimble and with even greater vehicle cargo capacity than they already have. (There's a REASON the Model S got the best rating in the history of Consumer Reports, as well as Motor Trend's Car of the Year Award! You would have to be delusional to ignore that, and continue to believe without basis that fuel cells will ever overcome EV momentum! Critics love the totally flat floors, and, huge trunks in both front and back. FCVs will not likely ever have such roomy cargo space.) And, since batteries are still far from running out of new tricks, they need not remain the vehicle of choice for the rich. Within the next few months or a year, more models and other variations of the Model S, Model 3 and others that will be available which will put Teslas within the reach of the average American. Musk laid out that plan publicly even before the first Roadster was sold... very serviceable EVs in the range of $30,000 or so in the third generation. You appear stubbornly obsessed with this idea that EVs are heavy-- that is already not true, at least that today's EVs are typically only slightly heavier than today's ICE cars, and EV car makers already are working out the production lines to deliver battery packs that will be lighter, more energetic, more robust and cheaper than what is available today. The Tesla Gigafactory will be poking a hole in the whole battery cost thing... Musk's not going to tell everyone of breakthroughs he's putting online-- but look at his past history, and you can tell he's got some surprises to reveal soon. He is a showman, and loves to spring incredible publicity blockbusters at gala events... and if you think I'm lying, notice that at no time in the last couple of years has he betrayed any stress of "Where do I go from here? Do I have any options left? Is the other shoe about to drop?" Anything but. He's been behaving like a giddy daddy the week before Christmas, just waiting to see how the kiddies respond to the toys beneath the tree. As for your misplaced, gushing enthusiasm for FCVs, there are enormous hurdles for FCs to be overcome, which appear to a lot of specialists in such chemistry, to be ominous, thorny, and expensive to resolve. Fuel cells might make some good sense for stationary installations such as homes as cogenerators of heat and electricity, but natural gas is still a finite resource, and may become even more finite if fracking proves to be causing an increase in ground water contamination, as well as the swarms of troubling earthquakes that have been occurring in the last few years. Solar power is not perfect, but in balance, is far more sensible than continuing to use up finite resources when clean, quiet renewables are avai