Toyota's Hydrogen Future Is Crumbling As Owners File Lawsuits, Call For Buybacks (insideevs.com) 159
Toyota's Mirai, a hydrogen-powered Fuel Cell EV initially heralded as the future of driving, has faced significant challenges due to inadequate hydrogen fueling infrastructure. As chronicled by InsideEVs, many owners have become disillusioned with the vehicle's high operational costs, unreliable refueling options, and significant depreciation, prompting lawsuits and calls for buybacks. Longtime Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Toyota Mirai owners are fed up and disillusioned. Hydrogen fuel pumps are hard to find and, rather than new pumps opening, they are closing down. Owners feel misled about the costs and availability of hydrogen fuel stations. Even if a Mirai owner can find a fuel station, it may not be operating. Moreover, refueling is frequently a long and problematic process, with pumps taking over an hour to fill a tank and cars getting stuck to the fuel pump for hours. It would be quicker to charge a battery EV. Naturally, resale values of these cars are plummeting. Even without those problems, once the complimentary hydrogen fuel supply that Toyota gives new owners expires or runs out, the cost of hydrogen fuel becomes quite expensive. "Not in my wildest dreams or nightmares would I expect a purchase from a giant car company like Toyota would turn out to be such a terrible experience," said owner Shawn Hall. "The entire H2 vehicle experience is an experiment that is failing. I didn't expect to buy a vehicle from Toyota and feel duped, cheated, and misled."
Another user wrote on Reddit: "We all need to realize that we bought a vehicle that had, at best, a questionable future. Unfortunately in this instance, the gamble didn't pay off, and the technology of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles does not appear to be something the vehicle industry is invested in pursuing. Very similar to HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, there was one clear winner and in our instance, the battery-powered EV won out over H2. Its sucks, but it is what it is."
Another user wrote on Reddit: "We all need to realize that we bought a vehicle that had, at best, a questionable future. Unfortunately in this instance, the gamble didn't pay off, and the technology of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles does not appear to be something the vehicle industry is invested in pursuing. Very similar to HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, there was one clear winner and in our instance, the battery-powered EV won out over H2. Its sucks, but it is what it is."
Orders of magnitude (Score:2)
Comparing the purchase of a car to the purchase of an optical disc drive suggests the guy in the last paragraph has way too much money on his hands.
Re:Orders of magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, but he's right. You buy into some new tech and there is a chance you'll have backed the wrong horse. Probably better to think of a big purchase like a car as an investment, which may go down as well as up (well cars rarely go up in value, but you know what I mean). Early adopters of EVs took a similar risk, but at least they could just charge it at home if they'd never built any public chargers.
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When I bought an EV over a decade ago, part of the deal was that Nissan were helping to build the UK's first charging network. They ensured that the infrastructure was there. I understand that Tesla later did something similar in the US.
Toyota don't seem to have done that with hydrogen filling stations. I'd say that consumers had a reasonable expectation that they would. A buyback seems reasonable, with deductions for mileage.
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Makes me think how Tesla went out and built their own charging network, along with integrating the charge locations into the navigation system.
At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery, so as battery technology gets better I’d suspect H2 would become less interesting. We should also remember H2, is likely produced either from oil & gas or from electricity, so we need to add a conversion loss to the equation.
Re: Orders of magnitude (Score:2)
"At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery"
No. It works completely different from a chemical cell, which is what people mean when they say battery.
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"At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery"
No. It works completely different from a chemical cell, which is what people mean when they say battery.
Maybe a bad choice of words, but invariably the car's propulsion is electric. Whether a traditional battery or a fuel cell, it is form of energy storage for what is otherwise an electric car.
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So my regular gasoline car is an electric because gas is a form of energy storage?
With California running into issues of too much solar power, and power plants that don't have a load during the day, H2 could be a great way to convert excess capacity to a usable form. Sure it's lossy, but it's portable versus something like a gravity pump storage system.
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So my regular gasoline car is an electric because gas is a form of energy storage?
No.
In cars like the Toyota Mirai, a hydrogen vehicle operates as an electrically propelled vehicle using a hydrogen fuel cell to convert hydrogen to electricity to provide power to the electric motors. It is possible to use hydrogen in a combustion engine to push pistons and spin a crankshaft -but that is not how it is done in these vehicles.
For reference: How Do Fuel Cell Electric Cars Work? [energy.gov]
Hydrogen vs batteries [Re:Orders of magnitude] (Score:2)
At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery, so as battery technology gets better I’d suspect H2 would become less interesting.
Well, just another type of energy storage medium, anyway.
The main point, however, is useful to note: since the 1990s, battery technology has been amazingly improved. This wasn't initially driven by electric cars, it was driven by laptops and phones demanding better and longer lasting and lighter batteries. But electric vehicles took those battery improvements and ran with it.
Hydrogen technology, on the other hand, didn't improve.
One might have argued*, back in 1990, that hydrogen was a viable alternative
Re: Hydrogen vs batteries [Re:Orders of magnitude] (Score:2)
Part of hydrogen technology has improved a lot. A partnership between GM and Honda significantly improved fuel cells, mostly in the cost department.
Storage is still terrible, though, which is why it's failing.
Maybe someday someone will solve the hydrogen storage problem in a reasonable way, and then it might take off. But if batteries continue improving as they are then it's going to be even harder for it to catch up.
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I have always felt hydrogen fuel cells were a good option for some market segments but every year I can think of less and less places they could be viable.
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1980s: Magazine articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
1990s: Magazine articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
2000s: Internet articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
2008: Tesla show BEVs can work and be fun. Toyota went "Oh, shit, we better actually make something"
2014: Toyota Mirai is launched, people ask where do I fuel them?
2017: Tesla launch the Model 3, making the case for hydrogen and the Mirai obsolete.
2023: 9,500,
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- About a thousands of level 2 chargers in long term car parks.
- Over a hundred moderately fast 50 to 100kW chargers.
- About 20 to 50 superchargers that can charge a BEV is a similar time to hydrogen fueling.
The next problem is where to put them. EV chargers take little space and people are used to idea of liv
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Toyota was relying on taxpayers to build H2 stations. In California, taxpayers did build a few but the basic problem is that H2 fuel is 5 to 10 times as expensive per mile as electric fuel. Toyota for a while did give buyers "free fuel" for a year to hide the cost of the fuel but that is over now and people are stuck with these cars where fuel is expensive and not readily available.
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Yeah, no.
Unless Toyota said they would, there is no reasonable expectation to think that they would.
These buyers took a gamble and lost. Fuck them. No buybacks or consideration of any kind.
Maybe next time they will not be so frivolous with their money.
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Actually, Toyota has announced quite a few partnerships, including with Chevron.
That was one of the biggest reasons Toyota kept (keeps) pushing hydrogen. They want to sell you the car and then make more money every time you went back to the pump.
https://pressroom.toyota.com/c... [toyota.com]
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Sure, and partnerships are what they are. They often don't work out.
Unless Toyota guaranteed something, too bad for the buyers.
Re:Orders of magnitude (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the thing with EVs. While it would suck if the manufacturer went bust (e.g. Fisker is on the brink right now), the car itself would still function for its entire lifetime. Plug it into a home or public charger and its ready to go again.
Conversely, if you bought a car that operates on MagicFuel(tm), and the only nearby MagicFuel station is going to close down, then now you own a brick on wheels. And adding insult to injury the only reason MagicFuel existed was because a cynical automaker wanted to disrupt sales of EVs and suckered people into being pawns in their game.
Re: Orders of magnitude (Score:2)
No one has to sabotage green hydrogen technology, because it has to overcome physics.
Hydrogen production research is always ongoing, because there are so many uses for hydrogen. Even if there were zero people trying to use it as a motor fuel there would still be ample reason to develop more technologies for that.
MagicFuel [Re:Orders of magnitude] (Score:3)
... if you bought a car that operates on MagicFuel(tm), and the only nearby MagicFuel station is going to close down, then now you own a brick on wheels.
Except we need MagicFuel(tm) for chemical industry anyway, in gargantuan amounts,
Hydrogen used in chemical processes is not a mobile fuel, and doesn't have any distribution system to send it to 145,000 gas stations across the US.
and the green assholes, by sabotaging green hydrogen research and infrastructure
I've never seen "green assholes" sabotaging green hydrogen research-- the opposite, in fact: all the greenies I know are hugely in favor of green hydrogen. In fact, they downplay the very real problems with hydrogen as a fuel. As for sabotaging infrastructure, what infrastructure? Infrastructure to strip hydrogen off of methane? I haven't seen any evidence that
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Maybe, but he's right. You buy into some new tech and there is a chance you'll have backed the wrong horse.
For anyone who bought a Mirai, it was obvious that they had backed the wrong horse before buying. Either the buyers did no research or they trusted Toyota's reputation far too much, or (more likely) both.
Tesla had started building the Supercharger network a couple of years before the Mirai was introduced and Toyota was clear that the Mirai was a car to be used in limited locations. You might not make it between San Francisco and Los Angeles because the Harris Ranch hydrogen station may be offline.
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Re: Orders of magnitude (Score:3)
To me it implies that, rather than the author of the statement, it is the people who bought the hydrogen cars had way too much money on their hands. It would be fairly careless of someone to buy a HD-DVD player in 2008 while knowing that Netflix wouldn't send them to your home, none of the other major manufacturers or movie studios supported it, and only 1 video rental store out of 100 currently carried them. Doing essentially the same thing with a purchase as large as a car is just irresponsibly throwing m
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Except that these car buys didn't buy the "discs" (fuel). They only bought a player (the car).
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that's basically the case for people who overspend on next-gen tech cars.
so it does track.
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Comparing the purchase of a car to the purchase of an optical disc drive suggests the guy in the last paragraph has way too much money on his hands.
Eh, let's not make it personal. It's just telling us the buyer isn't a young punk. No kidding, none of these vehicles are for the young and poor.
Being an old guy myself, I remember when it wasn't clear whether BluRay or HD-DVD (or for that matter, Beta vs. VHS) would take over the market. It stunk to be on the side which eventually lost. My wedding video is on the single Beta tape I still have in a drawer somewhere. But if you bought an EV in the last ten years, it was already abundantly clear batteries won
Re: Orders of magnitude (Score:3)
It shouldn't take an hour, but it does reasonably take at least ten minutes. Considering that you can get quite a bit of charge into an EV in not many more minutes, this is a long time.
When you add into that the multiple filling station explosions which occurred already it begins to look like a very, very bad deal.
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People are now trying to push hydrogen for trucking, but it looks as this is one of the same pitfalls. Trucks would need a LOT more hydrogen, and pumping it in any reasonable amount of time requires very high pressures and very expensive, finicky equipment.
When you start spending millions per pump it starts to take some of the polish off of the concept.
Re:Orders of magnitude (Score:4, Informative)
> How in the world can it take an hour to refill a hydrogen tank?
Hydrogen needs to be compressed before you fill a car. Stations only store a limited amount of the compressed fuel; for example enough to fill 3 cars. And then it takes an hour to compress more. So if 3 people have refilled in the last hour, you get to wait.
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Well, Toyota was one of the HD DVD companies. How did he expect this to work out? :P
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why the negative blowback slashdot?
toyota is a dying dinosaur (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, they make some horrible and deceiving clickbait ads for supposed future battery breakthroughs. During 2023 and 2024 one could see every now and then articles with huge letters about a battery breakthrough that happened, and if you clicked and read it, it said that toyota is working hard on new battery technologies which in the future roughly around 2030 may make it possible to have 1000 miles batteries. And all this, in order to deceive people into not buying now an EV, but wait for toyota's
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The one pure EV that Toyota currently makes seems like a compliance car, where the only reason it's not a terrible car is because they borrowed so much from the Prius.
Re:toyota is a dying dinosaur (Score:5, Insightful)
The one pure EV that Toyota makes was co-developed with Subaru and is in fact a terrible EV by current standards. It would have been a mediocre EV 10 years ago.
Perhaps "disappointing" is more appropriate? For a company that has decades of electric drivetrain experience is is perplexing that Toyota could produce something so subpar. They rode their battery patent exclusivity for so long they forgot how to be competitive in an evolving market.
=Smidge=
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They put the majority of their EV R&D into hybrids and plug-in hybrids (and to be fair, had lots of early success in that area), thinking hybrids would be a bridge technology until hydrogen was ready. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have a plan B.
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The thing is, plug-in hybrids are still viable now as a bridge to ubiquitous fast charging. What would be best is a plug-in with and extended battery. For many people there exists a reasonable battery capacity that would allow them to operate as an electric car for 90% of their travel. For some, that is within the typical battery capacity of a hybrid. For others, adding just a bit more would cover it.
They would do well making that plan-A.
Re: toyota is a dying dinosaur (Score:2)
The other thing is, if you know how to make a hybrid, you know how to make an EV. It's not like it's hard to scale up an electric power system. The motor driver is a small challenge, but the rest is just more and or bigger with no real complexity changes. So there is really no excuse for them not being able to make a compelling EV.
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In Toyota's case, the Hydrogen Vehicles are Hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles. It is not a combustion engine using hydrogen. It is an EV -it just uses a fuel cell instead of a battery. They could swap in batteries instead of the fuel cell and go.
They just don't want to sell Battery Electric Vehicles.
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if they don't change soon their strategy. But apparently they like more the natgas-on-lipstick aka hydrogen.
(Let's not gloss over that much of power for battery EVs comes from burning coal and natural gas. Even California, EV central, gets half its electricity from methane.)
I was thinking about this, reflecting on history. Around 2000, which was peak hydrogen hype, the dream was we'd grow switchgrass, ferment that into alcohol, and feed the alcohol into fuel cells (which could process hydrocarbons rather than pure hydrogen). None of those technologies came to fruition. Not to mention the fuel cell would produce c
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Where do you think Hydrogen comes from? It isn't water that's for sure.
There is currently 1 large scale electrolysis plants in service, Takasago Hydrogen Park. We get less then 0.1% of the world's hydrogen from electrolysis.
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Where do you think Hydrogen comes from?
Ummm, I'm agreeing with you. EVs, hybrids, hydrogen cars, and ICE cars for the most part ultimately get their energy from fossil fuels. Today. Perhaps in the future we'll be able to power for them from nuclear and renewables. It makes me wonder if we're addressing problems in the wrong order. If you want to decarbonize, focus on electricity generation first, cars second.
Oh wait, that would be a pragmatic approach. Never mind.
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Let's not gloss over the FUD that much of power for battery EVs comes from burning coal and natural gas. It doesn't. Yes the USA is lagging badly in renewables but it is getting there, mainly because renewables are now the cheapest option. So don't fell bad, you will catch up with leading countries in a few years. Where I am, New Zealand, we are 83% renewables and on target to match several other countries that are already 100%.
I have notice
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A couple years ago I was more bullish on Tesla lea
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Toyota's foot-dragging on full electrification in favor of hybrids is currently working very, very well for them.
Some people think hybrids are a "bridge" to something else, presumably full BEVs, but more likely hybrids are always going to be a thing. For some people a BEV just is not going to work or be desirable. I suspect Toyota will continue to be quite successful owning that market instead of being just another BEV company.
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Probably the most current poll, which shows that 52% of Americans currently own or are considering an EV for their next vehicle.
Interesting (to me), are the demographics aspects that basically show less interest among those older, poorer, or conservative. That's especially understandable if you're poor, since there are a dearth of affordable options in the US at this point in time.
Adoption is highest among the upper and middle income brackets, the young, and those who skew liberal and among those who're wor
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did you just say natural gas and hydrogen are the same thing?
hmmmmmm.
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MIT is building several hydrogen creation plants based on tech they developed that can efficiently product hydrogen from water
They can produce hydrogen from water and a bunch of electricity. Unfortunately for them, I can simply cut out the Hydrogen/water/ethanol/catalyst middleman and dump the electricity straight into an EV's battery without a bunch of conversion losses.
Hydrogen may have a place in industries like aviation and in industrial applications where required temperatures are impractically high for electric heating, but I don't foresee it ever being a competitive way to fuel a personal vehicle.
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I can simply cut out the Hydrogen/water/ethanol/catalyst middleman and dump the electricity straight into an EV's battery without a bunch of conversion losses.
This is a bit of a myth. You still have the large footprint of creating the batteries in the first place, so you're still dealing with a middleman.
I spent time making hydrogen chemically as a student in my off time. Hydrogen is hard to work with, store ,and make economically, it can ignite easily with a bang though. Not a viable use case for transportation its limits are well known, batteries however are making great strides. Batteries can be charged by many more efficient and safer means, Toyota should have listened to its engineers not it's PR people. Your going to have to invent some new physics to make this work.
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That footprint isn't as big as you think and getting smaller.
Regardless, one needs to keep in mind that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle needs a fuel cell with pumps and fairly expensive catalyzers, AND it needs tanks to hold the hydrogen, AND it needs an electric motor to move the car along, AND it too needs halfway decently sized EV battery, since the output of the fuel cell doesn't match up well with the needs of the vehicle when accelerating and driving along.
IOW, a HFCV is really just an EV... with it's ow
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I suspect hydrogen will never get there. If someone comes up with an efficient process to synthesize propane from a renewable source, we'll have something. Unlike hydrogen, there's a fair bit of distribution infrastructure and off the shelf hardware for it.
Predictable (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure who thought this would be a good idea.
Hydrogen, to the extent it makes sense at all seems a much better fit for trucks. Trucks have more room but weight requirements (and hydrogen is light but takes a lot of space), and have far more predictable routes like moving in between warehouses making it much easier to build a few hydrogen stations in the right places.
The problem I believe is that hydrogen is so far very expensive, and so even though that trucks make a good fit as far as infrastructure goes, the price probably discourages commercial operations.
So it sucks price-wise, and it sucks infrastructure-wise, and it's terrible if you run out of hydrogen. Very little reason to buy one of those only than risking a whole lot of money to be an early adopter.
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The price thing is interesting if the info in the article is correct. It's claiming that in the US, hydrogen is about $36/kg.... but in Europe, it's only $15/kg and just $11/kg in Japan.
So what's up with the US hydrogen? Has the price tripled only in the US in the past three years? Or did it also significantly increase in Europe and Japan during the same time and their starting price was also just that much lower?
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All commercial hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels, Everyone had the idea that hydrogen would be cheap and green, but industrial scale electrolysis is only now being realized, it accounts for about 0.1% of all hydrogen produced.
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It's actually not very light either, Apparently hydrogen needs very high pressure (much more than propane) so you need very sturdy tanks which are heavy. I understand like 20kg tank for 1 kg of H2 (https://hyfindr.com/en/hydrogen-knowledge/hydrogen-tank)
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Ideally the tank would be a sphere to minimize mass for a given volume. But that's really hard to integrate into a vehicle body. Instead, they compromise and use pretty hefty cylinders, which is still difficult to integrate. Not impossible: the Mirai has done a decent job [google.com]. But it's bigger than a gas tank and c
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Apparently hydrogen needs very high pressure (much more than propane) so you need very sturdy tanks which are heavy.
The Mirai weighs about the same as the larger Tesla Model 3. So that's another thing that early promoters of hydrogen claimed (lower weight) that turned out not to be true.
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The fuel cells themselves also wear out. Toyota cur
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Hydrogen is better suited for situations where its chemical structure can have more impact, like producing steel with a low carbon footprint.
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I think it makes the most sense in grid batteries.
When you have an excess of solar/wind, use it to split water into hydrogen and store it in tanks. When you have a shortfall, use the hydrogen to generate electricity. This way you don't need the whole hydrogen distribution infrastructure or millions of tiny tanks, just a few big ones.
Obviously it's only useful if you're generating the hydrogen from water, not from natural gas... although if you had an extended shortfall I suppose feeding hydrogen grid storag
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But why use H2 as the storage medium? It embrittles container vessels, migrates through seals, and is incredible flammable. And there's loads of other storage mediums: you could just use electricity to lift a heavy weight, for example.
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Gravity storage didn't seem like it would have anything like a reasonable-enough density... but I take your point. I guess you'd need to be using hydrogen for something else already in order to bother with it for grid storage, at which point we're back at vehicles again.
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Hydrogen is terrible for grid storage. Losses everywhere. If you need grid batteries then use batteries. CATL is now warranting its new EV battery for 1,000,000 miles or 15 years, and looking to use a similar version of this in grid storage solutions.
https://chargedevs.com/newswir... [chargedevs.com]
Although a better choice in many situations would be pumped hydro, which can be done in a lot more places than one might think.
Re:Predictable (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem I believe is that hydrogen is so far very expensive, and so even though that trucks make a good fit as far as infrastructure goes, the price probably discourages commercial operations.
Hydrogen isn't expensive. Heck we produce a shittonne of it just to get gasoline and diesel into your car, and some refining processes actually produce net hydrogen as by-product, in many cases well beyond current demand to a point where you're borderline giving it away.
No the issue for hydrogen vehicles is far more ... dangerous. People don't understand hydrogen isn't gasoline. People don't understand gasoline pool fire burns down a petrol station, while a hydrogen bullet BLEVE levels 4 city blocks. People don't understand that gasoline is actually hard to ignite (throwing your cigarette at it only really works int he movies), while hydrogen is just standing there saying "common m*****uker move your jumper causing some static build up, I ****ing dare you!"
That's one of the reasons hydrogen infrastructure is going backwards. The companies have done their risk modelling and realised what a completely horrible idea it was. I've seen modelling from one oil major saying you can't build these fuel stations within 300m of any building. Then you see on the Toyota Mirai Europe website a lovely picture of a Shell / Vattenfall branded electrolysers / fuel station right in the harbour district of Hamburg. Except look at it on street maps, and it's obvious Shell actually realised what a horrible idea it was and backed out of the project *after* construction. That should give you moments of pause.
The case for Hydrogen (Score:3)
At 1/3 yield, electrolyze for Hydrogen has parity with Diesel at about 150-200 €/MWh. This is about twice what a Europe in energy crisis pays per wattage.
Now mind you, that is not why Toyota or a lot of Japanese companies care: They care because they know they are one fun happy global ship war away from being completely barred from using Petrochemicals at any scale.
This create a interesting paradox: Technically one of the Japanese companies could foot the R&D bill to make this technology competitive on the potential edge it has, but the core interest is just to keep a patent pool and production going so Japan don't have to deal with the worst consequences of WW3.
The end result is that we each decade gets some vehicle/production based of Hydrogen, which go and die in the news cycle because its just there as auxiliary potential technology.
Well duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Toyota has only ever used hydrogen tech as spoiler and FUD to counter the uptake of battery electric vehicles. It never stood a chance of taking off for a variety of reasons and was never intended to. Same for their other efforts of late - liquid hydrogen power (not merely compressed but liquid), ammonia power, solid state batteries (which they've been claiming could come any day for the last 10 years) etc. All intended to dampen enthusiasm for BEVs and spread the illusion of viable alternatives. And yeah solid state batteries will come at some point but it will be no thanks to Toyota.
I wouldn't be surprised if in addition to the above that some parties, e.g. automakers or oil companies are responsible amplifying disinfo about EVs. There is certainly a lot of lies going around and somebody is putting them out there.
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i would mod you up, but already commented on this thread.
I saw this day coming ~2007 (Score:2)
..when we started seeing how lithium-ion powered cars were performing vs fuel cell vehicles, and doing the math on their relative efficiency.
As for Toyota, I think their fallout with A123 Systems (re: the latter's battery patent) defined not just Toyota's but the Japanese attitude in general toward BEVs. There seemed to be a reckoning over there that they just weren't going to be able to compete with the US or China on battery tech. I even think this pro-H2/anti-battery mood contributed toward the ouster
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Just noting that the current trend towards lighter vehicles based ob megacasting and structural battery packs works against this.
About the only place this could work from my perspective is in trucking, where it's a lot easier to standardize fleets.
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Toyota has only ever used hydrogen tech as spoiler and FUD to counter the uptake of battery electric vehicles. It never stood a chance of taking off for a variety of reasons and was never intended to.
Never intended to? Do you think a near-century old Japanese company intended for this to take a steaming shit on their reputation too? Not many car manufacturers enjoy dealing with class-action sized failures. To say this was intentional, is quite the stretch. Good thing for them they actually DO still care about making a reliable product outside of the FUD line.
I would assume only the largest tax breaks and green credit incentives from Government would define failure as intentionally acceptable. No me
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What I like about their FUD is that in some cases hydrogen is actually just as bad. One of Toyota's talking points is how it takes more than 10 minutes to charge an EV. Yeah well Toyota loves telling people that you can get 300km of range out of a Mirai in just 5 minutes. They don't tell you that to do so you need to use a chilled high-rate dispenser (not all are), and they don't tell you 300km means the tank is actually less than half full.
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"Toyota has only ever used hydrogen tech as spoiler and FUD to counter the uptake of battery electric vehicles."
Agree that recently they've done so. Go back a few decades, however, and I'd argue that many people did indeed think that hydrogen and hydrogen fuel cells were going to be the solution, Just ask Ballard and Plug Power.
I don't think anyone could have predicted just how quickly battery technology was going to improve, and just how quickly costs per kW/kg we going to fall.
Toyota zigged when they shou
I like the idea (Score:3)
I like the idea of hydrogen as a fuel source, but to buy a car powered by it and then filing lawsuits cause you cant find fuel is a bit ridiculous. The shit might as well be leprechaun juice, and then they want to act surprised
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A car is a tool to move people and stuff from A to B, and without fuel, it ceases to fulfill its promise, on which it was sold.
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If that argument holds, the court will decide. But as with every contract, they can be ligitated if one side feels wronged.
Re: I like the idea (Score:2)
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I do think the techie / scifi sensibility plays a lot into all this. But the cosmos doesn't owe anything to the fantasies of scifi authors (or the linguistic particulars that make one tech sound more like "the future" than another one, like batteries).
Information tech played out much differently than 20c scifi pictured it. Same for transportation (incl. space flight and cars).
Opinion (Score:3)
I'd like to get one of these to park in a barn for 40-50 years. It would make an interesting museum piece.
H2 never made sense (Score:2)
Why so slow to refuel? (Score:5, Interesting)
In some cases, drivers would pull up to a pump only to find another car frozen to the hydrogen nozzle due to the extremely low temperatures where hydrogen is stored. This turned five-minute fueling sessions into an hour or more of being stuck while waiting for a station tech to arrive and unfreeze the car.
To me, this looks like poor design of the pump and/or the car. Heat tracing, anyone?
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In case someone was wondering why it can take over an hour to refuel, it's not because of the pumps as the summary erroneously mentions. According to the article:
In some cases, drivers would pull up to a pump only to find another car frozen to the hydrogen nozzle due to the extremely low temperatures where hydrogen is stored. This turned five-minute fueling sessions into an hour or more of being stuck while waiting for a station tech to arrive and unfreeze the car.
To me, this looks like poor design of the pump and/or the car. Heat tracing, anyone?
True, though it also suggests that the technology is fairly complicated. Traditional gas stations don't have the requirement that you store the gas in ultra-low temperatures. Not only does that create more complicated storage requirements but more complicated mechanism to deal with that temperature gradient when refuelling.
Sure, it probably gets more reliable as the tech improves, but it definitely sounds like there's a safety issue that will require skilled personnel on an ongoing basis.
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Hydrogen isn't stored at low temperatures. Hydrogen is dispensed at low temperatures. There's typically a standard storage bullet > compressor > small high pressure storage (enough to fill only a couple of cars per hour, sometimes no storage at all), and ... a chiller. The hydrogen is specifically cooled prior to being pumped to the car as pumping hot hydrogen is painfully slow, will prevent your tank from being filled to rated capacity, and can potentially cause a pressure spike if mixed with cold st
Re: (Score:2)
Hydrogen isn't stored at low temperatures. Hydrogen is dispensed at low temperatures. There's typically a standard storage bullet > compressor > small high pressure storage (enough to fill only a couple of cars per hour, sometimes no storage at all), and ... a chiller. The hydrogen is specifically cooled prior to being pumped to the car as pumping hot hydrogen is painfully slow, will prevent your tank from being filled to rated capacity, and can potentially cause a pressure spike if mixed with cold storage in a tank.
Informative, though it still doesn't give me any faith that people could safely fill their own vehicles (or even rely on a high school kid to do so). You're going to need a responsible employee with some specific training.
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To me, this looks like poor design of the pump and/or the car. Heat tracing, anyone?
Quite the opposite. Hydrogen storage at stations is at a low pressure. The feed the hydrogen through a compressor directly on the way to your car. The issue here isn't cold, the issue is heat from the compression stage. The hydrogen then goes through an additional chilling phase cooling it down below zero before being dispensed into the car. The nozzles and hoses are insulated.
If the cold isn't maintained there's a few issues:
a) the filling process is slow. I mean REALLY slow. 20+minutes to fill a car.
b) yo
Hydrogen is... (Score:3)
...a great research project, but it's NOT even close to ready for widespread adoption as a motor fuel
There are a LOT of really hard technical problems remaining to be solved
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Forklifts prove otherwise, the technology for using compressed hydrogen is ready ... it's just not well suited to passenger cars.
I think liquid hydrogen range extenders make more sense for passenger cars, once trucking has moved to liquid hydrogen and created the refueling infrastructure. Drive as EV 99% of the time, use liquid hydrogen for road trips and pulling your boat and just accept any remaining hydrogen will boil off if the car sits for a couple weeks.
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Forklifts are either fully electric, or they're using propane or LNG.
Hydrogen is just very inconvenient to use as keeping it as a gas takes a lot of space, and keeping it as a liquid requires a lot of equipment to keep it cold. And either way, it leaks out so your vehicle can't sit around unused or you run out of fuel. Hydrogen cars right now can keep their hydrogen around for a w
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Compressed hydrogen forklifts are a minority but they are in production use and mainstream enough for every major brand to offer them.
The hydrogen in the BMW test car emptied from half full in 9 days (and driving lowers the temperature of the hydrogen, so it didn't boil off for 17 hours after driving). Long haul trucks have far bigger tanks and generally have predictable high duty cycle use, in which case boil off isn't a problem. Trucking is very likely to go with liquid hydrogen (cheaper than getting high
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BTW, for a range extender, you could drive down the battery down to say 25% and use only enough hydrogen to keep it cool. Then when you stop, charge the battery to keep it cool. That should get you more time with zero boil off.
Beta testing with your own money is stupid. (Score:2)
Unless you're so wealthy you can burn the money (as in make a pile then set it afire) spent on beta testing a toy, don't beta test toys.
Fools and their money are soon parted. Buying a Mirai was idiotic unless you are a collector with Jay Leno money.
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Looks like a cool car. LS Swap when?
No fucking shit (Score:2)
Who could have predicted? (Score:2)
Can still work in large vehicles (Score:2)
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Source? I've never heard of hydrogen being plumbed to a house. Where would it even be plumbed from? Cities don't have central hydrogen distribution.
Some individual owners have invested a lot of money in home electrolysis setups, but that goes back to your "if I had money to burn" proposal...
Seen here: https://www.buildwithrise.com/... [buildwithrise.com]
"Strizki estimates that the system cost him an astounding $500,000 to self-build and install, about $400,000 of which came from utility grants and technology firms. He says tha