Toyota Motor Corp said Saturday it is conducting trials of a vehicle powered by a hydrogen engine in Australia, making it the Japanese automaker's first such test of the environmentally friendly car on public roads toward its commercial use. In the trial from late October through January, a specially modified…
  • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.worldEnglish
    128·
    8 months ago

    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 them 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.

    • Crayphish@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      8 months ago

      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!

      • derpgon@programming.devEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        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.

        • Viper_NZEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          Is faster, but with modern EVs it’s really not a problem.

          Depart home with 100%, drive for 4 hours, stop to grab an meal and use the facilities and the car is finished before you. Modern EVs take 15 minutes to go 20-80% charged.

          Hydrogen is 3x less energy efficient than a battery electric vehicle. It certainly has use cases, but it came 20 years too late for light vehicles.

        • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
          2·
          8 months ago

          And don’t forget it’s way faster to refill a hydrogen tank than an battery.

          For now, this should change with solid state batteries

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
        21·
        8 months ago

        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.

      • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        11·
        8 months ago

        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.

    • Geobloke@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      8 months ago

      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

          • chronicledmonocle@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            8 months ago

            Here is an article from July 2017. 6+ years ago they were “right around the corner”. I know they’ve talked about it before that, but that’s just one example of Toyota being “no seriously we’re almost there” on this supposed tech that I could find while on mobile.

            The problem isn’t the battery tech. They’ve made the battery. They just can’t figure out how the hell to mass manufacture it for a reasonable cost to compete with Lithium Ion.

            I hope they succeed and take over the world of EVs by storm, but there are only so many times they can claim to be “right around the corner” before you start to wonder if they’ll ever actually get it.