A hydrogen engine is so much worse for efficiency than a hydrogen fuel cell, and even that is not good compared to batteries. I’d estimate the round trip efficiency of a hydrogen engine to be about 10-15%. So for the same energy that could be used to drive a battery EV 100km, this car from Toyota could drive 12km.
Additionally, hydrogen is not very energy dense per volume. A compressed hydrogen tank that replaces the boot/trunk of the car would have enough hydrogen for about 100km of range.
Please let me know if I’m wrong about any of these numbers. For Toyota’s sake, I really hope I’m wrong.
Your numbers are way off. No manufacture would even think about touching hydrogen ICE motors if they only got 10-15% efficiency.
https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-battery-electric-73-hydrogen-22-ice-13/
according to this website, hydrogen ICEs are very inefficient. same with fuel cell vehicles. the main losses come from converting the hydrogen into and out of electricity. but if said electicity is generated in abundance with renewable energy at a cheap price, this could really be something.
edit: you can’t really burn electricity, so as a car enthusiast i really hope hydrogen ICEs become a thing.
BEVs are a lot of fun to drive. Car people are nostalgic for burning fuels and roaring engines, but future generations will be far less so. We just need far lighter batteries.
Lighter batteries, lower costs, quicker charging and way longer range under load. Hydrogen is the way forward. I don’t understand why there is so much push back from the EV crowd. EVs are great for city driving, but are terrible for long range and heavy load equipment.
I was specifically talking about cars that are fun to drive. The one thing I dislike about my BEV is that it’s so heavy.
Personally I don’t think hydrogen is the way for most personal vehicle applications. Batteries are improving a lot and becoming quite a bit cheaper too. Also many large car makers have gone the EV route and they are king makers. But who cares, the better technology will probably win out.
The issue with this metric is they’re talking about energy used to get the power. It completely ignores the fact that hydrogen can already be pulled from the atmosphere using solar plants. There are a few companies out there now that are developing stations that are basically automated.
The ICE motors Toyota and Hyundai have shown, have very little loss of HP/Tq numbers from their gas counter parts. Unless the battery industry comes up with a super light, quick charging (5 mins) and long lasting battery, EV will be resigned to the city at best and no heavy workloads for it either.
Efficiency still matters significantly with hydrogen solar panels, because solar panels aren’t free.
Suppose solar to wheel is 60% efficient in a battery electric vehicle, but 30% efficient in a hydrogen vehicle. You need half as many solar panels to power the battery electric vehicle, and spend at most half as much to charge it. That matters.
no manufacturer except one that’s still desperately trying to push for a hydrogen economy because they invested too much into hydrogen production
Is that what they’re doing by releasing one vehicle in a couple of US states and now another in a different country? I think your take is pretty extreme.
For decades, they had been one of the only companies to electrify their vehicles with numerous hybrid options. There doesn’t have to be only one single alternative to ICE engines. We can build and develop multiple things in unison.
Uhh, no… hydrogen is the only way forward, unless battery tech magically becomes so much better overnight. We haven’t developed a new battery tech over the current stuff since the 70s.
Here’s big names who are working on hydrogen cars:
BMW Hyundai Honda Toyota Jaguar
How you going to tell me hydrogen which is the most abundant thing in the universe, is not worth it?
You’re the guy hedging his bets on horses and farriers.
EV works for cities but that’s about it.
Well. Basically no one except for dumbass boomer executives forcing the company in a direction. Like Toyota.
I thought they were using ammonia powered vehicles and calling them hydrogen just because ammonia contains hydrogen. Wasn’t there a bunch of hype a few months ago about Toyota inventing an ammonia internal combustion engine that was so efficient it would “make electric cars obsolete”? The article just mentioned liquid hydrogen though. So I don’t know what to believe anymore.
I think the biggest thing that people forgot in the efficiency debate is cost. What will hydrogen actually cost to go 100km compared to electricity
and you have to use it up within a week or two, or your fuel disappears
I know about 7y ago everyone was salivating at the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles.
I’ll be very interested to see how well it works in practice…
Hydrogen fuel cells or engines are a useless joke. Toyota REALLY needs to be thinking more about power generation with Hydrogen and then electric cars so that their vehicle production can be universal across the world. Electricity is the most versatile form of energy and can be produced using lots of natural resources. I get it…Japan has limited natural resources and the seawater around them is abundant (thus hydrogen), but the hydrogen vehicle makes zero sense literally anywhere else in the world and you’re a GLOBAL COMPANY Toyota.
Also with all of the saltwater around then you’d think they’d be working on sodium-ion battery technology and how to utilize the salt they extract during the hydrogen production to be used in batteries, but no…keep making ICE engines for some stupid reason. FFS Toyota.
Well they have announced that they have a solid state battery that should be ready for mass production in 2028. They haven’t put all their eggs in 1 basket
They’ve been making claims about their solid state battery for years. It’s always a few years away.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are EVs, have electric motors, and qualify when you talk about “power generation with Hydrogen” and “versatility of electricity”. The hydrogen in the tanks is fed into an anode and oxygen into a cathode to power a circuit and drive an electric motor. It’s an EV, but the ‘battery’ is hydrogen. FCEVs could be the key to shoring up a lot of conventional EV shortcomings; lithium-ion waste, electricity grid load, and lifespan, for instance. Combine that with the ICE vehicle in question in the article; Hydrogen ICE engines could provide routes for retrofitting existing combustion vehicles, adding additional demand to improve supply infrastructure and improve green hydrogen supply. These are well-warranted experiments for Toyota to be undertaking on the global stage; as crucial as any EV battery investigation!
And don’t forget it’s way faster to refill a hydrogen tank than an battery. Also, cars are such a big industry it’s actually easier to not have a middleman (hydrogen ->
electric grid-> EVs) because all the infrastructure would have to be built without any real need for it.I agree with everything you said except the retrofitting… I don’t think retrofitting an ICE is going to be remotely possible for any price anyone would be willing to pay. Sure they both have a “gas tank” of sorts, but as you mentioned, a hydrogen vehicle is ultimately an electric vehicle… And electric motors and their supporting components are quite different than ICEs.
Except the cost to refill with Hydrogen is significantly higher than petroleum in many parts of the world, which makes it non-viable as a fuel. A Lithium/Sodium battery can be charged by whatever fuel source you want and can be done at home. Hydrogen can only be “charged” at a hydrogen fueling station, which has to exist. All but one Hydrogen fuel station in America is in California and there aren’t even a lot of those.
Hydrogen fueled vehicles are a cool technology, but they aren’t practical and thus will never sell anywhere outside of Japan. My point was that Toyota could make a car that works everywhere and just swap engines in a Plug-in Hybrid for the fuel source or, for fully electric vehicles, change the power generation source. If they make the power from Hydrogen and harvest the salt for sodium batteries, they can make two parts of the water they’re harvesting from the ocean into useful stuff.
Hell yeah let’s see them in America too
a hydrogen engine is a useless joke.
“environmentally friendly car”
Removing tailpipe exhaust doesn’t automatically make cars environmentally-friendly.
Wat? You sure understand what hydrogen is?
The fuckcars community has their nose so far up their ass, they think any kind of personal transportation is the devils spawn and no amount of improvents will fix that. In their eyes, everyone should be forced to live in dense urban environments and ride some kind of shared public transportation everywhere.
There are good talking points in their propaganda, for sure, but just like everything today, the echo chamber is so strong, they are now extremists on the matter.
The extremes always look silly. Take for example the little dick energy of a big lifted pickup with tiny wheels blowing coal.
Where the fuckcars folks are correct is that many many car drivers claim they NEED some monstrously fast, big, powerful, etc vehicle and to drive too fast, take up lots of room, crush people, look “cool” etc to go a few miles to buy some milk.
Any rural town with a speed limit near a school knows that when people get into their cars a lot of excuses for why they need a car become armor for why they need to be allowed to drive like dicks.
I don’t think we’d see fuckcars have nearly the staying power if those people were driving sensible vehicles at sensible speeds and didn’t claim priority over every piece of road.
Totally agree with this although it’s a uniquely an american problem. In my neck of the woods, cars are more sensible and I would still say there’s a lot more room for improvement, both in what people are alowed to take on the roads and public transportation options.
But the circlejerk that is fuckcars makes even the people driving the Renault Twizy seem like monsters.
yeah even as someone that really likes PT I think the fuckcars community is a pretty bad community that just simps for the new shiny thing rather than talking about things that actually improves PT.
Still, suburbia should stop being subsidised and more transit oriented systems should be built.
You’ve basically just summed up Lemmy.
A fuel that is notoriously hard to contain and usually produced using fossil fuels, using inefficient production methods that waste electricity.
Anyway, the commenter you’re replying to is more referring to the pollution from tires and the noise.
And the death. Don’t forget the animal and human cost of everyone having a car.
What costs do you mean?
The animals and people killed by vehicles. The environmental impact those animal deaths can have.
usually produced using fossil fuels, using inefficient production methods that waste electricity
Well, it’s either one or the another. While the energy loss is relatively high when using electricity, it’s not a problem when you have an oversupply of renewable energy, actually it’s even beneficial as it provides a storage for otherwise lost energy.
But regardless of the production, it generates no pollution when consumed by a vehicle. You know, like clean air in cities.And of course, hydrogen won’t solve tire pollution nor associated noise (albeit I guess it should be more silent that fossil fuel one) but it’s still environmental friendly compared to what we have now.
Sprawl itself is also pretty terrible for the environment.
And it’s hard to build sprawling towns that don’t rely on cars, and hard to build dense towns where everyone drives everywhere.
