Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
IDK why hydrogen just hasn’t captured any mind share. Seems like a great technology.
Someone will be along in a moment to tell me all about embrittlement and blue hydrogen, yet conglomerates are pouring many billions into water cracking infrastructure right now.
Huge energy losses in the conversion of electricity to hydrogen. Also for passenger cars there are no clear benefits. 350kW chargers provide hundreds of kilometers of range in under 20 minutes.
In some places (like Western Australia), solar electricity is very cheap, making the inefficiencies of conversion economically viable.
The benefit is storage and transport of energy.
Edge case, but a good one. So different energy carriers per geographical region.
We’re rolling out production capability so that we can export green hydrogen to South East Asia. Not so regional.
I’ve always considered hydrogen cool but ive also assumed it needs huge infrastructure changes so it can be supplied to the general population. Some EVs you can plug in an outlet and putting up charging station is super easy.
I want to get off gas yesterday and EV is simply the quickest way imo.
Sure ok, but we’re building infrastructure right now.
Hydrogen is great on paper until you start looking into the details.
hydrogen cars have to store the fuel in 70000 PSI tanks. theres only 2 stations in my major city area that sell it, and they are often unavailable due to maintenance or supply issues. if the car needs service the only place that will touch it is an hour drive away.
It’s almost as though you need infrastructure.
Put a 10,000 psi tank of hydrogen in your car, or a tank of heavy, reactive metal hydride. Also, while hydrogen isn’t a greenhouse gas, releasing unburned hydrogen into the atmosphere causes more GHG to be formed. Humans are terrible at keeping unburned gasses from leaking.
It’s great science but it’s hard technology.
It almost requires extremely high pressure or cryogenic storage and it diffuses through everything.
Hydrogen cars have limited performance, are overly complex and there’s no infrastructure. For an average consumer they make zero sense
This is a pretty vanilla statement. You could say this about literally any new tech.
Why ask the question if you already know the answer?
The reason it hasn’t taken off is because it’s a fundamentally very difficult technology to safely build. Embrittlement is a fact of physics, and it’s extremely difficult to design around, especially at scale.
And the fact that there is almost zero global capacity to manufacture green hydrogen means that there is little point in subsidising it from an environmentalist point of view.
Hydrogen will have its uses, maybe in niches like aviation fuel where requirements are very specific and it’s possible to exercise much tighter control of the infrastructure chain. But it’s just not a competitive technology for replacing petrol and diesel in general purpose road vehicles.
Because these problems are not prohibitive. Any tech has challenges.
A brief perusal of anything about embrittlement suggests that it’s very manageable. There are hydrogen powered vehicles driving around right now. How is it that their tanks to not crumble or shatter?
Imagine saying “There’s not a lot of computers around, therefore this internet isn’t going to be viable”. In Western Australia there are three large scale hydrogen production facilities under construction. The one nearest me will cover 15,000 km^2 and produce 3.5 million tonnes of hydrogen per annum. Do you really want to bet against mining consortiums contributing many billions of dollars to hydrogen production?
The short answer is that they do. They have a relatively short lifespan (around 10 years) with regular inspections.
Replacing car tanks is not really the tricky bit though- it’s everything else. Pipelines, filling station infrastructure, transport trucks, and so on. All of which ends up having a similarly short lifespan. The ongoing cost (both in cash terms and in terms of environmental impact) of continually replacing huge amounts of the associated infrastructure at a much higher rate than you need to for petrol is a factor in why the technology isn’t competitive.
Green hydrogen makes up a tiny fraction of the global hydrogen supply because so-called blue hydrogen (produced from fossil fuels) is so abundant. Green hydrogen amounts to only 1% of global production, and blue hydrogen isn’t going away. Individual electrolysis plants might manage to turn a profit, but for the foreseeable future anyone filling up their car with hydrogen will almost certainly be filling up with fossil fuels, not renewable fuels.
Maybe at some point in the distant future when all the natural gas wells have been capped then the arithmetic will be different. But as of 2024, subsiding hydrogen vehicles is not a viable way of decarbonising.
That’s just BS. The longevity of everything is comparable to that of natural gas related equipment. It will be much cheaper than massively expanding the grid and build batteries for everything. Not to mention that you can reuse much of the natural gas infrastructure.
Green hydrogen is growing exponentially in the same way wind and solar grew. The upside of something that isn’t dependent on finite fossil fuels. It will eventually be available in vast quantities and at a very low price.
We can go back and forth about which ought to be a better technology, but one is practical now while the other isn’t. One has much smaller infrastructure requirements than the other. One let’s us refuel at home while the other doesn’t
I personally will be happy to see almost the entires gasoline industry disappear. Imagine making such an impact on ground and air pollution, when the goal is simply to reduce carbon emissions. Imagine how much it simplifies all of our lives to just plug in every night
EVs only have smaller infrastructure requirements if you ignore power production.
One may be practical now but, according to this article, we’re approaching the limits of practical applications.
Article is paywalled so I only see the beginning.
– if these limits are from the ceo of Toyota, they’re not worth the bits they’re printed with. Toyota has a huge investment in Hydrogen they don’t want to lose
— everything else indicates Batteries about the current level can cover all personal vehicles and many commercial ones. Clearly there are limits for things like shipping, aircraft, construction vehicles, but one of the things those have in common is they go back to a large depot. You don’t need to replace the tens of thousands of gas stations and their distributors but might have to replace infrastructure at hundreds of central depots
— power generation is sufficient for now but clearly needs to grow with adoption. Other countries with much higher BEV adoption rates have demonstrated this really isn’t a problem. Compare that to hydrogen infrastructure which is almost non-existent and you’d have to build out quite a bit before vehicles become practical
— charger infrastructure is adequate at the moment but clearly needs to grow with adoption. Compare to hydrogen infrastructure which is almost non-existent
Sorry boss, multinational conglomerates are investing many billions into water cracking infrastructure to produce hydrogen. It’s just arrogant to think your facebook research is more authoritative.
Critics of hydrogen cars are repeating the same criticisms of EVs just before they took off. Same can be said of wind power or solar power. In reality, it’s just the same anti-green and anti-progress BS you hear about any new green technology. It’s all the same story.
Take it easy, it’s a bit more complex than that. Slow as it might be, everyone understands you can charge an EV even with just a regular 15A 120V plug. Stuck at your father in laws out in the country? They’ve still got a plug.
Generally, people are uncomfortable with high pressure explosive gases. I think overall, hydrogen gas a better shot in industrial/heavy trucking markets than consumer transport.
No it isn’t. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s much harder to wire up millions of charging stations with the necessary amount of power, than to deal with high pressure gas. We’ve just normalized the danger of high-voltage electricity. In reality, this is just as safe if not more so, and a lot easier to pull off.
Erm, no buddy. Everyone’s entitled to their incorrect opinion, and this one’s a doozy.
How much big of a tank of H2 do you need to effectively equal the energy capacity of a lithium ion pack? If the tank needs to be reasonably sized, how high is the pressure? How do you ensure hydrogen embrittlement isn’t a problem on both the tanks and the transport pipes/storage tanks? How does pressure correlate with exfiltration?
Flying wires is a walk in the park, especially competitively.
A 700 bar tank will store more than energy than a similarly sized li-ion battery.
As an energy storage system for cars, the problem is already solved. People are just repeating the same anti-progress rhetoric that was used against battery cars.
700 bar?? 10000 pounds/in^2??
No, you’ve unfortunately lost your grip.
We’ve been doing it for over a decade now. It is shown to be safe.
No thanks. I’d much prefer electrified mass transit. I’m saying this as a former manufacturing engineer, there’s quite a bit that can go wrong with cyclically pressurized vessels in subtle ways that are difficult to non-destructively evaluate.
This is not the path forward for anyone but heavy industry.
You can plug an EV into an outlet in your garage. No way could hydrogen be easier than that.
You have to have a garage to begin with. People have created a distorted grasp of what infrastructure even is.
Two thirds of Americans have a garage. Roughly zero can refuel hydrogen cells at home.
2/3 is still not 100%. And you can refuel at home if you really wanted. In fact, you can even refuel a gasoline car at home. But in reality this was never a major selling point. It’s just the crutch BEV fans are relying on. The refueling infrastructure is the only thing that really matters.
Most EV users charge at home, this is absolutely a major selling point, and they would all lose this ability if they switched to hydrogen. Which is why they aren’t switching to hydrogen.
“Hydrogen will never work, there are no hydrogen gas stations in my city”
Lordy.
LOL
Meanwhile EVs have taken up a significant share of the market while hydrogen is still niche.
BEVs were a niche for about 100 years.
BEVs were around early on, but petrol vehicles overtook them. Battery technology is finally practical for automobiles and it’s mainly a matter of increasing energy density/range. Hydrogen, on the other hand, has a lot more obstacles to clear if it wants to get anywhere near the adoption level of even current BEVs.
Also, last I checked, hydrogen vehicles end up using a battery anyway which is charged by the hydrogen, then the battery is what powers the motor. You might as well just use a petrol plug-in hybrid, especially since more energy-dense batteries will mean more and more trips can be covered by the battery alone. In fact, that’s my situation right now. I have a plug-in hybrid petrol vehicle and it covers the vast majority of my trips on battery alone.
The only reason why we see BEVs today is the obsession to be green. If that wasn’t there, BEVs would still be dead. It has not come close to solving the fundamental limitations of batteries. One of which is that you need a huge charge infrastructure, something that will be more expensive than its backers think.
Hydrogen cars do not necessary need a battery, and only use it for regen power. This is the equivalent of a hybrid car. A hydrogen car is also 100% zero emissions unlike a petrol car. The main point is that a hydrogen car fully replicates the experience of an ICE car. For millions of people, that is an absolute necessity.
BEVs have their advantages beyond being green. I wake up with a full “tank” every morning, I can use the heater or air conditioner without emitting carbon monoxide so I can do this in my enclosed garage, the electricity is cheaper than gasoline (plus I can get free charging at work), and if you have a BEV then the vehicle is a lot simpler to implement which means more companies can make vehicles since the barrier to entry is lower and thus increased competition should drive down prices (look out for China, provided governments don’t make tariffs too high).
Not everyone can recharge at home. Hydrogen have all of the same advantages except recharging at home (and even this is a “kinda”, because home refueling is possible, and plug-in cars exist).
The problem is that we are hitting the limits of the BEV, and no amount of handwaving is going to make the problems go away. This mirrors the push for ethanol powered cars, and sudden realization that we cannot grow enough corn to make it happen. And fantasies about how China or whatever solving the problems is just a repeat of cellulosic ethanol, which was suppose to magically solve the problems of ethanol production.
Storage and transportation of hydrogen continue to be the limiting factor for hydrogen and those hurdles don’t seem like they can be cleared easily. Only Toyota has really given it much of a try and the hydrogen stations are available in very limited areas. Plus with how complicated the stations are and the problems they can encounter, I’ve heard they go out of order pretty frequently. Plus the number of vehicles that can fuel at the same time is limited. Given how the hydrogen has to be pressurized or liquefied or whatever, I’m struggling to understand how a home setup would work.
The cool thing about batteries is that there are all sorts of materials to choose from. For example, sodium-ion batteries are hitting the scene now. There are trade-offs, but options are there. Yes, not everyone can recharge at home, but it’s a lot easier to set up a charging station than a hydrogen fuel station (or a gas station, for that matter). I think the best option at this point is a plug-in hybrid petrol vehicle, though the downside is the complexity of the drivetrain.
There’s not really a ready supply of green hydrogen though?
That’s only one of many problems. Storage and transportation are other major problems.
Difficulties with storage and transportation are manageable. The only reason there’s no supply is because there’s no consumption.