Toyota is one of the most trusted brands across the world. Their cars have extremely high resale value and are generally known to have long usable lifespans. Hydrogen issue aside, they are (at least currently) not 'far behind' their competitors.
The fuel cell can't produce electricity fast enough to power the engines for proper acceleration and the battery doesn't have enough buffer.
FCEVs are chemical in the same sense that BEVs are, because a “fuel cell” is, like a battery cell, an electrochemical cell.
The only real difference is that the “fuel” and “waste” are inside a battery, but come from and go to the outside in a fuel cell, which means that an FCEV can be fueled (and exhausts) like an combustion engine vehcile, despite being fully electric.
So are batteries too
They're already a decade behind where they could've been. The main problem is not that it won't take them long to start, but that it's been so damn long already and they've wasted all that time and haven't even started in earnest yet. Market share takes time to earn and they've given competitors a huge lead for no real reason at all beyond their absurd fixation on hydrogen.
The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely would face a difficult time getting financing to build an EV charger network in foreign countries.
Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over.
Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies.
VW and US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) and had government support (US car brands) to finance the US EV network. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry than the Japanese incumbents.
There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.
I charge my EV at home. I’ve charged my EV on someone elses charge (because i needed it, not because I got a better parking space) maybe twice since i moved to an EV with a 180 mile range. Heck, even with my “first gen” EV with a 63 mile range, I charged at home 95ish percent of the time, and those days are behind us now.
$2k to run a 240v external outlet, $500 for a charge station, and you’re set. Apartment dwellers still have issues, but thats simply because govmt/demand hasnt insisted yet.
This could be solved today by using Tesla's Supercharging network, or at least their NACS[0] connector in the North American market. I know that auto makers don't want to rely on each other for _reasons_ but siding with Tesla would give them an instant charging network and completely solve the problem in one go.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...
Think Titanic
I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric'
Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy
Now Japan has to import the batteries, and the fossil fuels to charge them.
It was only around 2016 or so that battery technology and renewables started to clearly win out and it was too late then to change course.
Hydrogen had no way of removing any disadvantage for them. It was just something they were ahead in and thought they could push on the world as the replacement for gasoline, and profit in the process.
A dependency on fossil fuels isn't a good thing, certainly not to the extent that we've developed, but I really don't think the answer is as clear cut as everybody treats it to be.
The grid will require significant investment no matter what at this point. Many parts are nearing the end of their useful lifespan, being built more than 50 years ago. Renewables and electrified transport definitely add to it, but people are trying to pin the entire cost on those things which is just wrong.
Not really. Batteries are energy storage, oil is energy production. Most of the energy used to charge batteries comes from burning fossil fuels.
Even if we convert the grid to 100% renewables and get rid of fossil fuels, we will still need to mine for battery materials.
Bottom line batteries/electricity generation do less ecological damage today than gas/gas tanks, and every year the gap will increase.
But we'll no longer need to extract and burn fossil fuels, which is where the vast majority of the environmental benefit comes from. You can't say "Aside from the main overwhelming benefit, it doesn't look so good"!
You're conflating different things. Battery production does not mean we will automatically get 100% clean energy. Gasoline in cars accounts for like 15% of the US's fossil fuel usage.
Again, batteries are energy storage. Not energy production.
This idea that batteries --> clean energy --> All negatives of batteries must be ignored is disingenuous and wrong.
It's not productive.
The grid can handle overnight charging just fine, there's more than enough transmission and distribution capacity.
Natural gas pipelines can not be used with hydrogen without some as of yet undiscovered coating. Plus these pipelines are single use; are you going to stop all gas usage in all houses before we let people fill up at stations or homes?
What makes you believe the current gas network can be used for Hydrogen? I don't believe this is the case, but would be interested in seeing evidence to the contrary.
My chevy bolt will charge at 8a (conservative) or 12a (“fast”) at my preference. It takes maybe 3-4 hours over night to charge from my average driving day with a decent commute.
My car consumes, while charging for a few hours overnight, about the same amps as a good clothing iron or a beefy vacuum. If i wanted, i could delay charge so three EV charged overnight, never draeing power at the same time.
My next car will buffer power so solar cells can overcharge and supply back to the house. And it will be a backup power supply for storms and grid outages so I no longer need a standby generator.
Tell me again about how the grid isnt ready for my BEVs and why we should be pumping some liquid or gas into tanks?
It is the same reason why we have miles of natural gas pipelines sending NG to local NG turbines instead of a few big NG power plants with wires sending electricity everywhere.
Hydrogen we need to make using a resource intensive process, and it leaks from every single container ever made, because it's literally the smallest molecule in the universe. Hydrogen transport incurs so big losses that it's not feasible at a large scale [0].
To move an equal amount of energy, you need 4x many ships as LNG, because you lose 23% more during transport than LNG AND you need to transport it at -253C which is a whole another issue.
Hydrogen is a good energy storage medium, but it's not practical for transportation. It's a lot easier and cheaper to move the same amount of energy using the power grid.
The future of hydrogen is renewable energy storage, on location. Not transport.
[0] https://vimeo.com/761934482 (16:50 mark)
You do not need 4x as many ships. You just need bigger tanks. Hydrogen is much lighter than LNG. Bigger tanks are not an issue. You're hearing straw-engineer arguments from those with a vested interest to BS about these issues.
Why would the World Hydrogen Congress have a "vested interest to BS"?
The speaker is comparing a LNG ship to a prototype Kawasaki LH2 ship, with actual values for both.
What he's suggesting is that we transport ammonia instead of LH2, ammonia is a lot more stable to transport and can be converted to hydrogen at the destination.
Ammonia is an option too. But this does not preclude other ideas.
We have an electrical power grid, dude. And it works just fine for home BEV charging.
> battery related metals
only one of these continuously emits greenhouse gasses through its use
hint: it's not the one that you can recycle into new batteries
Going from gas to electric is slow.
If electric -> hydrogen offers fewer of the benefits beyond removing a dependency on battery metals over much-cleaner-already EVs, that transition will take even longer, if it happens.
Short list and no nowhere near exhaustive list:
Extremely high pressures required to get sufficient energy density
Hydrogen embrittlement basically requiring expiration dates on tanks in vehicles
Inefficiency/cost of green methods for producing hydrogen
How to create cheap fueling stations like we have with gas stations
That isn't to say these problems are not solvable but we have been working on them a long time and haven't made a ton of progress. Meanwhile EVs have already been able to overcome most of the big hurdles. I think hydrogen has a possible future in aircraft because the issue of cost, maintenance, and special equipment for fueling is status quo for aircraft already.
Hydrogen has a ton of shortcomings still. Technology might improve some of those too, sure. But if 75%, say, of the most severe environmental impacts of cars are mitigated by EVs, leaving a much smaller-sized problem in their wake, the technological advancements will have to be proportionally even stronger and easier to overcome to make the market move on again. (Or if EVs never replace >80% of new gas vehicles or so... but if inertia against change is that strong, that's not a benefit for hydrogen advocates.)
The biggest advantage of hydrogen is that they also solve the most severe environmental consequences of conventional cars, just without creating new ones of their own. It is similar to how LED lightbulbs replaced CFLs, even though CFLs were seen as necessary to replace incandescent bulbs.
80's electric RC cars were slow and the battery ran out in 5 minutes. People who wanted power used ICE RC cars.
Then we got li-ion and LiFePo4 batteries and brushless engines. Now the cars are so fast that regular people need to use limiters when driving. You can get a electric RC car up to 80km/h with off the shelf parts easily.
Sure and all coal plants will be replaced by fusion, but a utility executive single-mindedly pursuing fusion is not a good corporate leader.
And if you replace "fusion" with "fission" it is a very sensible argument.
Maybe globally because India/China, but the US has shed Gigawatts of coal capacity over the last two decades.
> It's most likely replacement is... natural gas.
Yeah.
> And if you replace "fusion" with "fission" it is a very sensible argument.
Like it or not, we are losing our ability to build fission plants (Google Vogtle if you’re not familiar) and the only way an Electricity CEO in 2023 should be single-mindedly thinking about fission is if they have some inside information that the government is going to subsidized the heck out of it.
Otherwise, they'll just be the CEO with unconstrained capex and higher prices (and an angry utilities commission that has a singular mission to cut the rate base to reduce said prices as much as possible)
Coal is nowhere near dead. Europe is increasing production right now. People have greatly exaggerated the death of fossil fuels. We are decades away from moving away from fossil fuels.
A lot of the opposition to nuclear fission is just bad environmentalism. Take that away and we'd be building hundreds of reactors right now. We can easily reduce construction cost if it wasn't for excessive regulation designed to make it expensive.
Yeah.
>Coal is nowhere near dead. Europe is increasing production right now. People have greatly exaggerated the death of fossil fuels. We are decades away from moving away from fossil fuels.
Again, Yeah.
>A lot of the opposition to nuclear fission is just bad environmentalism.
This is categorically wrong. A lot of the opposition to fission is that it is not cost competitive with natural gas. Again, please google Vogtle. It took $30bn and 15 years to add two gigawatts of generation capacity to our grid.
Meanwhile, Indeck Niles in Michigan took $1bn and 2 years to add one gigawatt.
>We can easily reduce construction cost if it wasn't for excessive regulation designed to make it expensive.
I'm going to need a citation on all of this. What regulation exactly caused Vogtle to cost $30bn? Was it the regulations that the site should be built to spec and not leak[0]?
>In August, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission found two sets of electrical cables meant to provide redundancy in Unit 3 weren’t properly separated. Earlier, Georgia Power had to repair a leak in Unit 3′s spent fuel pool
[0]https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/news/2021/11/04/georg...
The type of problems that are reported at nuclear power plants are basically ignored at other plants. Most power plants don't have any real redundancy, nevermind the insane levels of redundancy requires at nuclear power plants. The plant would have easily ran with those issues, but we just refuse to take even the smallest risk.
Yes. Forced outages are typically complete rather thanpartial, heavily correlated and last months, so storage or backup needs to be many weeks to make it reliable at even the 95% level. Much of the generation happens at night when industries have to assign expensive graveyard shifts to utilize it effectively. It's also so expensive that increasing coverage for a set power target by overprovision is prohibitive.
> It is also the result of decades of low investment into nuclear until expertise has retired and now we struggle to find the right people to build new reactors
This must have been why reactors completed in 1979 were on average so much more expensive than the ones finished before. And why prices have gone up almost every time the same design is built again.
> The plant would have easily ran with those issues, but we just refuse to take even the smallest risk.
I love this line where you crow about how safe it is out of one side of your mouth, then whine about how if it didn't have to be safe, it'd be cheap. Let's replace the 'excessive' regulatory requirements with removing the liability cap and see who lines up to provide insurance on an entire city.
Also the residents around kadapa or husab would love it if they could have some of this safety you're talking about.
Again, we are constantly adding more and more requirements to nuclear reactors. Everything must have quadruple redundancy these days.
You forget that nuclear is the safest or form of energy that we have. The number of deaths from nuclear energy is remarkably small. Sure, we can still insist on insane levels of safety, but we should not then turn around and demonize the end result. If we insist on these regulations, then we should also insist that people be aware of what is driving these costs, and make it a positive thing.
When they were new and before the regulations they were on less than half the time. Another lie
> You forget that nuclear is the safest or form of energy that we have. The number of deaths from nuclear energy is remarkably small. Sure, we can still insist on insane levels of safety, but we should not then turn around and demonize the end result. If we insist on these regulations, then we should also insist that people be aware of what is driving these costs, and make it a positive thing.
There it is. Right on cue, after already being calledout for it.
You're demanding free insurance. The insurer gets to set the policy on likelihood to destroy a city. Stop crying or findyour own insurance.
Also this is a myth. Solar is now the safest by a factor of two. Then wind. You continue to lie about everything.
If you include all the deaths from mining waste dumping and lung cancer of uranium miners, eye witness reports of chernobyl liquidators rather than official ussr reports, and the hundreds of unremediated sites that are less than 1% of their final age, then hydro beats it too.
The fact you can charge you EV at home (from your own solar panels if you have then) is a massive added bonus that's going to be hard to convince people away from once its established.
Thinking about what comes after battery cars (assuming there's a Lithium shortage) - I'd be very surprised if Hydrogen can scale up; I think it's much more likely we move to other battery tech, or perhaps novel liquid fuels. Hydrogen was always a greenwashing ruse by petrolchem companies.
They don't actually want a hydrogen vehicle, they just don't want an EV and use "hydrogen is coming Soon(tm)" as justification for it.
But it's not worth it, since you are just carrying a big tank of water for no reason. It is a smarter solution that a battery which does carry everything at all times.
Most of what you say is not that different than what people said about batteries. Let's not forget that li-ion batteries are really hard to make and have their own major challenges, and for a long while seemed like a terrible idea. The story is basically repeating with anti-hydrogen arguments.
This includes the dumbest of them all: that it is just a conspiracy by oil companies. Last I checked, there is no carbon in hydrogen, and "novel liquid fuels" will imply adding carbon to it. So either it is not a conspiracy by the oil companies, or the oil companies were right all along.
Hydrogen is not burned in a fuel cell. It works the same way as lithium does in an li-ion battery. However, you can use hydrogen in a combustion engine, also as a compound for energy storage. Also, "fuel storage and refueling" is a huge advantage because you don't need to worry about slow recharging. This is often seen as an advantage.
You might rather refer to a color-coded periodic table which shows which elements are gases and which are solids at room temperature. That's a much more relevant concern than whatever you're trying to say.
You mean like sodium ion batteries that are coming into mass production this year at 150 wh/kg? (aka the 200-300 mile car) That don't even require lithium?
You mean like Lithium Sulfur batteries that are poised in five years to double or triple battery density?
Or you mean like the Sodium Sulfur batteries that will probably come a year or two after that which similarly double/triple NMC capacity but only require sodium and sulfur?
Your take is ten years old. High density LFP and good-enough density sodium ion is going to deliver a comprehensively cheaper car drivetrain than ICEs can deliver, and each year will only be worse and worse news for ICEs. I would predict by 2030 there will be 600 mile range EVs (real world, not WLTP) whose drivetrain component cost is 1/2 of an ICE.
We'll have to see what comes out of Toyota. They have the DNA of execution, efficiency, and engineering. It's hard to see if it is "too late", because EV transition is such a massive investment in vertically integrated manufacturing at this point, while carmakers outside of Tesla are so OEM focused. We'll see.
I had kind of assumed that Toyota would be asleep at the switch and a joke for another 2-3 years, this is a surprising development. The fact they were pushing hydrogen still last year in public and poo-pooing EVs, and given the ossification and malaise of large Japanese corporations, I assumed it would be status quo until substantial market share was lost.
Is this activist investors again, like BMW, VW, etc? Is that even a thing in Japanese megacorps?
All the hydrogen generation/splitting facilities (it all comes from methane, right oil company astroturfer?)
I forget, did you guys fix the various fundamental laws of thermodynamics so that you can get hydrogen from water at high efficiency? You know, water, that ultra-stable molecule? Or should we just ship the electricity over the existing grid rather than take 30-50% losses putting it into hydrogen, physically ship it with some new fangled hydrogen tank truck, and then get the energy out?
So how much energy do you use to GET to that 1000 wh/kg? Oh right, you'll really just get it from methane or tar sands or fracking or whatever. Right oil company executive.
All the hydrogen transport infrastructure. Does hydrogen like being in tanks? I forget. Does it basically leak from everything? Hydrogen is really stable, right?
All the hydrogen refuelling stations. Wait, is hydrogen a liquid? Oh, it's a gas? man, those'll be annoying to engineer. Right, bet that's a solved problem for Joe Q public.
All the fuel cells that last longer than 100,000 miles. I forget, did you fix that little platinum problem? Right, solved problem.
Here's the real kicker: what price are you targeting with hydrogen cars and infrastructure? It'll take, what, 10 years to get close to what the electrical grid and current recharging stations offer? I mean, we have EVs like NOW. Lots of them. Hyuuuuge factories. Does the "hydrogen economy" exist yet? Right, only if you use methane? Gotcha oil company dude.
I forget, can I slap some solar panels on my roof (especially those perovskite multijuntion ones that I hope come out in a few years) and directly use that to generate hydrogen for my hydrogen car? Oh, is that a bad idea? I should just use an EV?
Don't get me wrong, hydrogen has potential to be useful. Medium/long range aviation, really long haul shipping, really long haul trucking. You know, edge cases. You know, unless synth fuels become a thing.
So just to reiterate:
1) you have no factories for a mass production car
2) you have no green production of hydrogen
3) you have no transportation infrastructure
4) you have no pumps/refueling
5) it'll take, what 10-20 years to get to where EVs are right now?
While EVs:
1) have factories / in production
2) can use any generation source, just hook it to the grid.
3) transportation? You mean the grid? Or generation at home?
4) recharging stations, while yeah, not what gas stations are, they exist and are actively being built out
5) and just to reiterate, there's been production EVs for... 15 years now?
Your little hydrogen bus system in Japan? I almost guarantee that gets chucked once cheap EV buses hit the mainstream (they don't need to go far, they do lots of stop-go so regen, it would be really nice to charge them off the grid, they will be cheap/in mass production). I mean, if you're a city, would you like supported / non-bespoke cheaper-than-ICE buses with low maintenance cost, cheap repair, or some screwy hydrogen thing?
Yeah.
Fuel cell age is measured in hours, not miles. Every second your car is powered, the fuel cell is expiring.
We are also not discussing the viability of EVs and hydrogen cars right now, but what will happen in the future. After all, the start of this conversation is about Toyota somehow missing the boat on EVs. But people are forgetting that EVs are not the final step in the evolution of cars.
In reality, people are just repeating similar claims against hydrogen vehicles as people in the past have against EVs. The problem is that EVs have their own fundamental weaknesses that will probably never be solved. Those weaknesses will eventually require an alternative, of which the most likely is hydrogen. In that case then, Toyota is not missing out on anything.
The Toyota Mirai, which is the crown jewel hydrogen vehicle at the moment, has only 5000 hour life span on its fuel cell. You'd think they'd install one of those tens of thousands of hours one in it if they could?
You are aware that nearly all commercial hydrogen comes from fossil fuel extraction, yes?
It's obviously just history repeating itself. People complain about current emissions while ignoring future emissions. In hydrogen's case, it is the same as electricity. It is as green as the source energy, which in the long run will be green.
VRE has produced more world wide than Nuclear for several years now, and is increasing at roughly 1/4th of the cumulative size of the entire nuclear fleet every year.
And that is with a dramatic reduction in nuclear power in recent years.
Edit: LOL even your own source has the correct answer further down the page (which is still 2 years of massive expansion under current production) https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
Here's you're 'recent' 'dramatic reduction'
https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/WorldStatistics/WorldTrendinElect...
2021 Nuclear production was the historic max.
Why does the industry and pro nuclear crowd lie constantly about even the most trivial and inconsequential things?
Also, Eastern nuclear power growth has displace Western nuclear shutdowns. So the total amount is in fact a plateau. I did not know that until now.
Ultimately, the main issue is still the problem of intermittency. Until it is solved, VRE is actually much less useful than it seems on a chart. Even in a scenario where it exceeds 100% of demand, there will still be huge shortages on certain days. Ironically, the best way of solving this is via hydrogen production, but VRE advocates despise that idea.
Last I checked it was almost a month into 2023, not part way through 2021 when the production had been higher for a whole year already.
> Also, Eastern nuclear power growth has displace Western nuclear shutdowns. So the total amount is in fact a plateau. I did not know that until now.
So you made up whatever you decided sounded good about today's producton?
> Ultimately, the main issue is still the problem of intermittency. Until it is solved, VRE is actually much less useful than it seems on a chart. Even in a scenario where it exceeds 100% of demand, there will still be huge shortages on certain days. Ironically, the best way of solving this is via hydrogen production, but VRE advocates despise that idea.
So you made up the stuff about the scope of production, doubled down on it when called out, and now you're making up stuff about intermittency. And finally you're trying to conflate rejection of hydrogen where it is appropriate with calling out your blatant fossil gas propaganda and shilling for hydrogen cars.
I am not a walking encyclopedia. But you are a troll for acting like this.
The point was that VRE is still a tiny part of the overall grid. It will stay like that for a long time to come. And the original point that hydrogen is some kind is scam for not being green enough right now is pure hypocrisy, because the grid is in a similar situation.
And you immediately ignored the relevant points before launching into ad hominem and spouting off a conspiracy theory. Ironically, proving my point about how VRE fans do not want hydrogen production even though it solves the biggest weakness of VRE. Proving that VRE fans are just trolls these days and have nothing of relevance to say.
> The point was that VRE is still a tiny part of the overall grid. It will stay like that for a long time to come.
13% and growing exponentially by 5% of the total yoy isn't tiny. And intermittency doesn't even impose a need for dispatch, interchange, or storage until it hits at least 75%.
> And the original point that hydrogen is some kind is scam for not being green enough right now is pure hypocrisy, because the grid is in a similar situation.
Burning hydrogen for transport or heating is a much worse plan than using electricity directly. On top of heat pumps existing, seasonal sensible heat storage has a higher volumetric energy density than hydrogen, electric elements are much more efficient than electrolysis + transport, and fuel cells + electrolizers are worse than batteries by pretty much every metric.
> And you immediately ignored the relevant points before launching into ad hominem and spouting off a conspiracy theory. Ironically, proving my point about how VRE fans do not want hydrogen production even though it solves the biggest weakness of VRE. Proving that VRE fans are just trolls these days and have nothing of relevance to say.
Again, you're trying to conflate rejection of shoe-horning grey hydrogen into nonsensicle places whilst pretending it's green with rejection of hydrogen.
This conversation is going to end here. You are simply not worth debating against. You're just a huge troll and are wasting everyone's time by acting like this.
Similarly stating an outright falsehood with the source in front of you isn't a mistake, it's a lie. One that is part of the current fossil fuel and nuclear misinformation campaign.
You having a tantrum and cry bullying when your lies are pointed out doesn't make me a troll. Quite the opposite.
Five years later there should have been huge numbers of hybrids, and the first plug-in hybrids. Ten years later their entire lineup should have been plugin hybrid capable.
When Tesla released the Model S, they should have been heads down with a competitor. The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me. The fact that Toyota is among the last to do it is breathtakingly dumb.
When Tesla released the Model S, Toyota should have had, at a minimum, an effective 40 mile range PHEV with all electric mode, and by 2020, should have had options for 50/100 mile hybrids, which make PHEV hybids effectively full EVs for 95% of consumer driving.
The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of.
Toyota is full of good engineers still, and are effectively the largest car company in terms of volume production (I know VW may technically be larger, but they seem more balkanized in brands and acquisitions).
Toyota likely could close by simply partner-acquiring one of the bigger Chinese EV makers and battery companies (although there is that wee little China-Japan historical hatred).
The hydrogen was generated from nuclear power. They have a lot more of these sources than they do for a lithium ion supply chain.
I think every company did back on the envelope calculation and in about 10seconds realised they won’t ever have the battery supply to satisfy even 10% of their sales for decades. Only Tesla managed to convince Panasonic to build new factories.
The Japanese electric grid is so shitty you won't even believe it. They have single phase 100V power. Half the country is 50Hz and the other half 60Hz.
Their grid just plain can't handle electric cars at scale without a full and complete overhaul.