Clickbait title but essentially true: Toyota is planning long-range battery-powered electric cars for 2020 as its hydrogen fuel cells cars are failing | Electrek
i doubt toyota ever really expected to sell many. at least in the near future. they've probably sucked up as much tax funds as possible and will keep moving forward at a much slower rate.
There plan was to lease or sell 3000 in the US through next year. They have a good shot of doing that. What seems more and more unlikely is that they will be able to ramp the sales up as they claimed. Smaller, cheaper Toyota Mirai fuel-cell car coming in 2019, company says Toyota Prius Chief Engineer Hopes To Charge Up Plug-In Version Sales I think 200K primes a year may be tough, but it will be much easier than 30,000 fcv per year. Will Japan still be willing to give a $25K subsidy to fuel cell vehicles in 2021, when a capable prius prime is so miserly with fuel? Will california still have hydrogen dreams in 2020? Half a million plug-in vehicles were sold world wide in the first 9 months of this year. Maybe in a decade toyota or someone else will get the costs of fuel cells and storage down. Simply the cost of hydrogen fuel is uncompetitive with a car like the prime's efficient use of much cheaper electricity and gasoline. I know today toyota and the state of california pay for the fuel but ... 2017 Toyota Prius Prime Plug-In Hybrid | Let's imagine the new possible. 133 mpge + 54 mpg Compare Fuel Cell Vehicles 66 mpkg When you think about it it takes a lot more than a gge of electricity to make a kg of hydrogen. If stations were cheap then maybe it would be nice to switch from gasoline to natural gas but again it takes a lot more than a gge of naural gas to make a kg of hydrogen too.
Spin of electric-only killing off fuel-cell is indeed clickbait. They are not mutually exclusive. As much as some people will try to convince you co-existing isn't possible, the expectation of a one-size-fits-all solution simply isn't realistic. Think about how much of the electrical system they actually share.
The fuel cell and the drive train isn't the issue. The issue is with the chosen fuel and who will pay for building the required infrastructure from the ground up. Fuel cells don't need pure hydrogen to run, and some are working with other fuels for their fuel cells.
It is nice to see some signs that Toyota is warming to the idea of EVs. Toyota is certainly big enough to do both. I see zero reason to conclude Toyota is abandoning hydrogen just because they are warming to the idea of electrics.
Sure but easiest fuel for a fuel cell today if you include car and infrastructure is probably methanol. Unfortunately methanol will lose some energy in the reformer on-board, so if fuel cell efficiency is same as mirai, and engine the same as the prime, then a prius prime running methanol will be more efficient then a mirai running methanol. That means you need to bring fuel cell costs down bellow the prius prime's drive-train.
That would make so much sense! I mean with the requirement of a battery pack anyways, make it larger, give it a plug and you are set (if you really want the inconvenience). I was surprised Toyota didn't go this route. However, if fuel cells survive, I suspect they will.
We'll know more if the cheaper model is still slated for 2019 release. If not and Tesla is still afloat, stick a fork in it. The fuel itself is a costly joke.
Here's one fantastic way: Powerwall | The Tesla Home Battery Toyota might have moved beyond a prospective measly <200-mile range if they hadn't been so hellbent on milking public funds through CARB to push H2.
So, one thing to think about is the domestic market. In Japan, the energy plan is essentially, turn Australian coal into hydrogen through gasification. Coal gasification is about 63.7% efficient at hydrogen production if you don't worry about carbon sequestration, 59% if you do. Conversely, it looks like coal-to-methanol-to-gasoline conversion appears to be 41-55% for the first stage, and 54% for the second stage, for a best-case of about 30%. And, the Mirai beats the Prius on pump-to-wheels efficiency. So, I think that's why Toyota went with hydrogen fuel cell for Japan, when internal combustion of gasoline makes more sense here. Thing is, BEVs are so much better than hydrogen on efficiency, hydrogen infrastructure is horrifically expensive (to the point that rolling out BEV infrastructure, including DCFC, looks cheap), and renewable electricity generation is coming down in price very, very quickly, which would be more attractive than imported coal, I'd think.
Depends. Solar arrays have begun to spring up for some utilities ( CA): Major Projects List Meanwhile, the majority of H2 is not produced in a renewable fashion, as the aforementioned example in Australia so painfully exhibits. You already know these things, but continue to tilt at windmills.
Hawaii already has some battery banks for central solar. There is also pumped water and compressed air options. Electrolysis of water for a fuel cell may even become economical for storing renewable electric. Heavy fuel tanks and distribution aren't issues for stationary fuel cells. We could burn that hydrogen in a turbine, or make renewable methane for that from the excess renewable electric. Which means we can make methanol and diesel with it. Even ethanol is possible.
I don't see 10,000 psi hydrogen, and massive spending for fueling stations as a solution to get green energy to transportation. The easiest way for renewables to reun transporation is excess wind at night charging plug-in batteries in cars in a smart grid. This is already experimented on. Let's decouple the worst choice - hundreds of billions of 10,000 psi hydrogen to fuel cars with the excess renewable power the US does not produce. We can look to germany where hydrogen generated is added to natural gas lines, or converted to methanol and upgraded to diesel. But really the US has very little excess renewable, and none where the proposed hydrogen cars are expected to run (california, NY). Absolutely, but first you need excess renewable, and in germany they don't expect much for the next 30 years. Texas is probably the closest in the US, but again texas is deregulated, so converting to hydrogen and then converting back to electricity is more expensive than just burning natural gas again and wasting the excess wind.
I think we should not forget the trading partners. Japan gets coal from friendly Australia and the US. They get oil from unfriendly countries. Domestically for japan they probably would for foreign policy shift from oil to coal and wind and solar (and maybe fracked natural gas). Its a toughy, but part of abe's backing of hydrogen is the promise toyota and honda gave him of exporting fuel cell cars to .... the US. I don't think that will happen, so even a shift to phevs makes for sense than fcevs on the energy scale in japan, if fcev R&D can not provide japanese employment for export to the US. The lobbying in the US is all about the US importing cars from japan, and I don't think its working. This changed when GM dropped out of the lobbying, and is mainly just sharing tech with honda.
