Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption::The potential to significantly reduce pollution could be huge.
Toyota boasts new battery technology with 745-mile range and 10-minute charging time — here’s how it may impact mass EV adoption::The potential to significantly reduce pollution could be huge.
More likely that they’re trying to hedge their bet on their hydrogen fuel cell technology that they’ve heavily invested in. It’s actually fairly impressive.
It’s cool tech but it’s expensive. Per mile, it can’t compete on price with gas let alone battery EVs.
Hydrogen isn’t working out for them so now they’re just delaying as much as possible.
Hydrogen cars cannot be better than battery electric cars, because the laws of physics doesn’t allow them to be.
A HFCEV is just a BEV with extra steps and efficiency losses. Reverse hydrolysis is used to generate electricity (with losses) that in turn charges a small battery that drives the car.
Smaller batteries can’t provide the same amount of power as larger batteries (that’s why the fastest EVs always have large batteries and why performance drops as the battery gets close to empty).
Already it’s a loss for HFCEVs, but the bad news doesn’t end there - that ultra-pressurised hydrogen doesn’t just magically appear in your tank. So we need to look into that. In fact, let’s look at the whole process.
I’m going to be very generous here and assume that all hydrogen is produced with green energy - this obviously isn’t the case. Hydrogen production is far more carbon-intensive than almost all national electricity grids are.
BEV:
Electricity is generated, and sent over power lines until it makes its way to a charger. This charger directly charges the battery of the car (whole process, typically over 90% efficient). The battery drives the electric motor. The car moves (electric motors, 90-97% efficient).
HFCEV:
First water must be collected and purified. I don’t know how energy intensive that is, but it could be a lot. Then it needs to undergo hydrolysis, which is extremely energy intensive. The hydrogen needs to be pumped out and compressed, which requires yet more energy. From there, the hydrogen needs to be loaded onto transport, be it shipping tankers, trucks, trains. It needs to be physically transported, which is more energy. Then if it was on a tanker or train it needs to be put into smaller distribution vehicles. Then transported to a fueling station. The pumps and station needs a lot of energy to run. People fill their cars up. The car runs an (again quite energy intensive) reverse hydrolysis, which charges the battery and powers the electric motor.
There’s a lot more “work” being done than sending electrons down wires.
And this is before we even get into things like infrastructure or safety. A typical hydrogen fueling station costs over $5m to build, in part due to the safety regs of pressurised hydrogen being a very explosive substance (and fueling stations have blow up before, despite them virtually not existing).
Chargers range from $600 to $10k each. Say a location has 20 of them. That’s still pennies compared to a hydrogen fueling station. Petrol stations cannot be used for hydrogen. They look the same but they are not the same, even ignoring all the additional safety requirements.
Electricity on the other hand has infrastructure everywhere, even wired directly to our homes. Electricians exist everywhere, it’s a widely understood technology and pretty much any electrician is capable of installing at least a home charger.
Sorry for the rant, but no, HFCEVs will not take off. They’re vastly more complex. More expensive. Less safe. Less performant. Nowhere near as energy efficient. There’s not really any angle you can look at where they make sense even if we assume battery tech completely stagnates.
So TLDR “Toyota, Stop trying to make hydrogen happen! It’s not going to happen”
Hydrogen is not going to happen. It’s wildly impractical and there is no infrastructure for it. EV is the way of the future, but Toyota’s strategy is to bring customers along with hybrids first. Most of their lineup has a hybrid powertrain, and in most cases it is the same 2.5L HEV engine, just retuned for more HP on larger vehicles. The Camry up to the Grand Highlander and their Lexus counterparts use it. Meanwhile, if they are successful with solid state battery technology, it’ll make the rest of the market obsolete. Their strategy is to make incremental steps toward EV vs trying to force the market into an EV.
The problem is it hasn’t been their strategy.
They had a fantastic start with the Prius technology, and have been improving over time. The current models are better than ever, and solid state batteries a great evolution at low cost. They had all the pieces, even if moving slower than we need.
However, all their talk was about hydrogen as the future, and pushing hydrogen technology, and that’s just not going to happen for personal vehicles. I know part of it was government support, part sunk cost fallacy, but they were heading down the wrong path, were the last manufacturer to realize that, and got defensive about it. BEV technology reached a critical point where the rest of the industry made a choice, but Toyota was stubborn about saying they were all wrong
I wonder if hydrogen is a better solution for commercial vehicles or semis that need to haul. I’m not aware of how they would perform, but EVs are not very practical for medium and heavy duty use
Yeah, we’re going to need hydrogen in places where batteries won’t scale. I don’t think we know where that is, but I have a hard time picturing batteries for construction or farming equipment … ever.
Several companies have BEV semis under test so we should soon have better real world data on where batteries currently work for trucks, and batteries get better every year
And how do you produce hydrogen? Either with methane (producing tons of co2) or by wasting tons of electricity with hydrolysis. BEV is the superior technology in all aspects but one: recharge time.
Hydrogen cannot compete with BEVs for passenger cars. This will never ever change, because the problem isn’t even current technology, the problem is physics.
Even putting that aside for a moment, there’s a reason why VW and Mercedes cancelled hydrogen R&D the second batteries became dense enough for usable car range.
There’s a reason BMW, once extremely anti-EV and pro-hydrogen has now switched. There’s a reason why Toyota’s new CEO is distancing the company from the absolute failures their hydrogen projects have been and have said they’re getting into EVs.
BMW and Toyota were the two big pro-hydrogen carmakers, and they’re abandoning it.
I don’t want my reply to be a massive wall of text, so my issues with the physics of hydrogen cars will be in another comment.