Toyota Announces Plans For Fuel Cell Car By 2015 115
puddingebola writes "Toyota has announced plans for a fuel cell powered car at the Tokyo Motor show. From the article, 'Satoshi Ogiso, the Toyota Motor Corp. executive in charge of fuel cells, said Wednesday the vehicle is not just for leasing to officials and celebrities but will be an everyday car for ordinary consumers, widely available at dealers. "Development is going very smoothly," he told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Tokyo Motor Show. The car will go on sale in Japan in 2015 and within a year later in Europe and U.S."'"
*Yawn* (Score:4, Insightful)
Wake me up when this has a chance of actually being a viable product. I doubt they can create the thing for a reasonable (non-heavily-subsidized) cost. Given that we are STILL waiting for laptop fuel cells which have been perpetually "around the corner" since literally the Dawn of Slashdot, I'm not holding my breath.
And once you have the car, you need the Hydrogen. There are currently zero economic ways of creating the stuff. You can either crack it off of Hydrocarbons (and if you are going to do that, why not just burn the damn things in a conventional car?) Or you can electrolyze it. Which is tremendously energy-inefficient. And then you have to compress it for storage/transport/delivery, wasting even more energy.
Hydrogen cars make sense if we have bountiful free electricity. Until that happens, electric cars make more sense, and neither will seriously challenge the dominance of the ICE.
Re:they've had this place since what 2010? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hydrogen itself is just made with electricity and water.
Yes, except that is not really how most of it gets made.
Frankly, one of the cheapest sources for hydrogen is from natural gas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production#Steam_reforming [wikipedia.org]
Besides, where is all the electricity going to come from to do from pure water? Coal fired power plants? Yea, that sure fixes the problem!
So either you take it from natural gas, which is about 80% efficient, or you take it from water which isn't efficient at all and get the electricity from coal power plants, which isn't clean either.
I'm all for replacing oil and gas as our fuels, but unless we use nuclear energy to power the Electrolysis to pull it from water, this isn't solving anything.
BTW, less than 5% of hydrogen is actually obtained from water, 95+% is obtained from fossil fuels.
Re:they've had this place since what 2010? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ah, it's a hydrogen car! (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, why not just use a natural gas or propane fuel cell? It would save having to make hydrogen from CNG.
If the fuel cell could handle both CNG and LP gas, the technology for storing propane is fairly mature, so it would be useful, not just for keeping an electric car's batteries topped off, but for a UPS or emergency backup generator.
I read a lot of hype about hydrogen, but that is an expensive road, and I wonder if the gains from it are worth it compared to better electric grids and higher capacity batteries.
Re:they've had this place since what 2010? (Score:4, Insightful)
Electrolysis is terribly inefficent, if it was worth doing, that is how we'd get our hydrogen.
No matter how much better it might or might not be than gasoline, the fact is it costs FAR less to pull hydrogen out of natural gas than it does from water.
So using your numbers, it would be almost FREE to power our cars with hydrogen from natural gas.
Except, that it wouldn't be, there are a few laws of thermodynamics you're breaking there. We already have natural gas cars and they are good, but not nearly 10 times better than gas cars. You sure aren't going to get further improvement beyond that by using hydrogen.