Toyota Mirai - Hydrogen powered car

[DuMa]

I've seen this thing on the road. It has no exhaust pipes. It's ugly. It only emits water drops from the back so if you're driving behind this thing, stay away because it will splash dirty water on your mint car bro. oh and its FUGLY

[strat61caster]

Originally Posted by DAEMANO

Previous reports/estimates on Hydrogen powered cars assumed full hydrogen power. Toyota's approach is to use Hydrogen as an alternative to gasoline in Electric Hybrid vehicles (an evolution of their current hybrid technology in the Prius). The idea is that Hydrogen "burns" cooler than gas allievating the need for their current cooling systems while still extending the range of pure electric vehicles (the pure EV's achilles heel).

Toyota calculates that battery technology will not attain the level of storage and efficiency needed to achieve >300 mile range between recharge while being able to be recharged quickly enough to fully meet the needs of those traveling outside of their city. Also, batteries are heavy.

With a hydrogen + electric hybrids, their new powertrains are smaller than even their current gas+electrics, the range is equal to a standard gas vehicle, the eMPG hovers in the 70s, and it takes about 5 minutes to refill the hydrogen tank.

Toyota's investment includes R&D for hydrogen station infrastructure improvements on a per region basis (in the U.S. starting with the Southern California to Norther California corridor, also in Norway and Sweden) working with the State of California and UCI's AP&E program. Currently there are 9 Hydrogen stations in CA, 19 being built and $30M set aside for Y2018 for additional stations. The State of California has set aside $200M to reach 100 stations by 2024.

Musk has a vested interest in selling as many batteries as possible. He's definitely not the man, he is just a man. Tesla itself isn't so much a business to sell cars, rather a way to get people using electric vehicles and eventually buying Musk's batteries. He doesn't want to be Henry Ford, but instead John D. Rockefeller. I see Toyota, Mercedes, Boeing, Tata, Honda, and GM as being greater corporate authorities on the matter.

Say what you want about Musk, I'm not a big fan myself, but the fact is that his grasp of Hydrogen as fuel is rooted in sound physics. What he says in that video in regards to what it takes to make hydrogen a fuel source is fact. Every time energy transfers medium there is a loss, from chemical to thermal to kinematic (current fossil fuels) or kinematic to electrical to chemical to electrical to kinematic again (water power to a battery powered electric), hydrogen, at our current levels of technology, is an extremely lossy way of providing energy to the consumer and it poses problems that we do not currently have economic solutions to.

That bit about Toyota believing that battery tech won't be able to beat hydrogen is interesting, that's really the only thing in this entire thread that made me take note. Toyota isn't dumb, neither is Musk, and objectively it'd be foolish to bet against either.

But my problem is that 4th paragraph, all that money to develop plants and infrastructure to produce and transport hydrogen, let alone actually storing it effectively on a production vehicle, requires leaps and bounds in material science and affordable hydrogen production. You talk about heavy batteries meanwhile the hydrogen tanks in the Mirai weigh 200 lbs! And it's made of a carbon fiber reinforced nylon, this thing ain't cheap. Yeah, it's easy to then point to the Model S' 1,200 lb battery, but we're talking about the race to replace fossil fuels, not which one is better today. The fact is most of the world population has access to electricity, the infrastructure is there today operating electric vehicles and can be incrementally upgraded if the technology demands it, meanwhile the US department of energy currently lists 23 hydrogen stations.

I tried to find how many stations were in Japan but got lazy, this article says that it costs >$3 million to build one hydrogen station in Japan, even if we assume optimistically that we can do it in the US for $1 mil a piece, we need to replace >150,000 gas stations, a $1.5 billion dollar investment that doesn't even cover the cost of generating hydrogen on the scale necessary for it to be the primary fuel choice.

http://phys.org/news/2015-11-japan-l...ty-vision.html

Hydrogen needs a shit ton of work to be viable (primarily in cost effective generation and supply infrastructure as well as tanks on the cars), electric is viable today and is just one breakthrough away from overtaking fossil fuels; the better battery.

My opinion? Bio-diesel. We don't need a solution for the first world countries, we need one that will minimize the ecological impact of the 3 billion people in the third world who are quickly gaining access to technology. Unless you ban burning organic fuels, for the foreseeable future they beat the shit out of anything else we've come up with. A 1L plastic bottle filled with petrol will allow a man to travel 60+ km on his scooter, they sell them on the side of the road in many poorer countries. That's what you have to beat to truly change the world, the fact that you can slog a gallon of liquid that can transport you to a job two cities away as cheaply and easily as you and I refill our drinks at the soda fountain or grab a jug of milk. Compared to a 1,200 lb battery charging for an hour or a 200 lb hydrogen tank pressurized to 10,000 psi, there's a long way to go before burning organic fuels is eclipsed by anything.