Toyota reaffirms 2015 release of new hydrogen vehicle
Toyota Highlander FCV - Click above for high-res image gallery
In 2007, Toyota drove one of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles from Alaska to Vancouver, British Columbia. Earlier that same year, a Toyota FCHV drove from Tokyo to Osaka on one tank. The company is certainly in favor of at least researching the technology, and it has repeatedly said that it will start series production of a fuel cell vehicle in the middle of the next decade. At one point, Toyota hinted that 2014 might mark the big year, but that's looking unlikely now.
During a recent shareholders' meeting in Japan, Toyota VP Masatami Takimoto said that Toyota now plans to start production of this new car in 2015. That's still quite soon, as no one expects the hydrogen infrastructure problem to be solved by then. Thanks to Greg B. for the tip!
Gallery: LA 2007: Toyota Highlander Fuel Cell
[Source: AFP]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tankd0g 5:34PM (6/23/2009)
Cue the ABG H-haters who will no doubt point out a tanker truck was needed to get that Highlander to Alaska. As if gasoline was available on every corner prior to the model T being mass produced.
Reply
Brian 7:35PM (6/23/2009)
Most people did not rely on the Model T for everyday transportation when it was first invented. They used horses for quite a while until the car spread enough to be viable and cheap enough... I doubt people are going to buy a car that is seriously hampered by refueling issues now... There also wasn't an alternative to the Model T that did everything it could do, pretty much, but had the infrastructure that the Model T lacked. I wouldn't buy a hydrogen car until there were a few hydrogen stations nearby AND their reliability had been proven. (And performance... It would have to match or beat my current car for me to be interested right now...)
tankd0g 8:19PM (6/23/2009)
Rethink what you just said Brian, in the context of a world where the gas stations can't get any more gas delivered, at any price.
blah 5:56PM (6/23/2009)
Considering that Honda, is one of Toyota's largest competitors, it took them long enough to even make it to this point. FCX Clarity's are already on the road in California, with a home charging station far along in development. Toyota has quite a bit of catch-up to play.
Reply
jpm100 6:14PM (6/23/2009)
They lease a small test fleet and pretend its production so they get called "on the road". And Toyota will do the same thing and get kudos for being in production too.
Must be nice.
tankd0g 8:20PM (6/23/2009)
You can bet the Volt will soon follow this forumla.
jeff 6:20PM (6/23/2009)
lol at the Greg B. tip.
I'll just pick one of the many anti-H2 vehicle arguments out of my hat....
Greg B. argues that eventually we'll be able to produce H2 using renewable energy. Lets look at which is the best use of this energy, a FCV or a BEV.
FCV: electricity generated, transformed to H2 through electrolysis, transported to end user, converted back to electricity in fuel cell, electricity sent to electric drive motor.
-Electrolysis: ~60% efficient.
-H2 distribution: i'll be nice and assume the same 83% efficiency used by the DoE applied to gasoline distribution. That ignores the fact that H2 contains less energy per volume than gasoline at reasonable temperatures and pressures. Or you can have a high pressure or cryogenic tanker, which would increase energy content of H2 per volume, but would increase energy consumed while moving it around. So lets just stick with 83% as a best case scenario.
-H2 fuel cell electricity generation: varies a lot, but 80% is a very generous number
Overall efficiency from electricity source to electricity going into the drive motor: 60%*83%*80%= 40%
BEV: electricity generated, sent over existing infrastructure to end user, charges batteries converting to chemical energy in battery, battery produces electricity that's used by the drive motor.
Electricity transmission over grid: the DoE uses 92.4%
Charging then Discharging li-ion batteries: 80% on the low side
Overall efficiency from electricity source to electricity going into the drive motor:
92.4%*80%= 74%
In other words, FCVs need almost twice as much energy as BEVs.
Once we finally get a significant portion of our utilities producing electricity cleanly, after we've spent billions establishing an H2 generation and distribution infrastructure, we'll be using almost twice as much energy to get around with FCVs as we would be if we had skipped building the H2 infrastructure and pushed for EVs instead.
Also with EVs, we already have an infrastructure to charge them, and this infrastructure can be upgraded gradually as EVs are adopted over the coming years, no chickens or eggs. The money it would take to upgrade the grid for full EV charging duty would be a fraction of that required to support H2 vehicles.
Reply
tankd0g 8:35PM (6/23/2009)
Ah yes, let's leave out all the relevant facts shall we?
The efficiency of extracting hydrogen is a non-issue. If you are using renewable energy which you CAN NOT store any other way, then it's essentially free. 90%, 60% or 20% efficiency, it's still captured energy you couldn't capture before. There are no batteries at power stations, when the wind blows on a wind turbine or the sun beats down on solar panels and no one is there to use it, it is wasted. We could be filling empty natural gas wells right now with sequestered hydrogen from otherwise wasted elecricity.
The electrical grid is currently near capacity, 1/3 ownership of EVs would more than double the load on the grid. Who is going to pay for that? My utility is already asking for 20% increases every year just because of the price of coal. What do you think building all new power plants and stepping up every neighborhood's capacity 3 fold is going to cost? Do you think it wise to have the fuel for your car and the very electricity you require to live a western lifestyle be controlled by one company? Anyone remember Enron? What they did to California will be considered the good old days. There is no competition amount power utilities. Oil companies dream of ever having that kind of monopoly.
People talk about charging their cars off peak. Charging an EV would use 50-60kwh a day. That is as much as a small household uses now. Tell me, when is off peak time going to be if everyone is charging their cars?
And then there's range. Anyone going to sort that out for EVs? I've been hearing all my life about these advances in battery technology, where are they? It still takes 4 hours to "rapid" charge up a car that goes half as far as 5 minutes of filling up my gas tank gets me.
keep the change 8:42PM (6/23/2009)
I'd like to see a battery that can push a transport truck 500 miles that doesn't weigh as much as the truck. Or a train, or a ship. I'd like to see a lithium battery push an airliner at 600 mph. I'd like to see a battery push a plane that doesn't use propellers. Batteries are for laptops.
Herkimer 9:04PM (6/23/2009)
@tankd0g
Hydrogen, as a fuel, only makes economic and ecologic sense for communities that have a local, renewable source of fresh water. No water, no hydrogen. For countless southern and mid-western population centers, hydrogen is either inefficient or plan-old impossible. (Why would I pay a surcharge to transport H2 to me, when I could put some solar arrays on the roof and charge my car
As more and more communities are facing water shortages, hydrogen becomes much less attractive as a solution. (I see it, oddly, as analogous to using corn to produce ethanol.) --Can you image the H2 needs of places like Phoenix or Las Vegas? They can't even water their lawns, during certain times of the year.
I think H2 will make economic sense in coastal areas...but probably not for the rest of us.
jeff 9:12PM (6/23/2009)
@tankdog
You're arguments go one way for hydrogen and then the other for BEVs. If you're worried about the extra power plants required to charge EVs, then why aren't you worried about twice as many extra power plants to generate the H2? I just finished explaining that in terms of overall energy use, FCVs use twice as much power because of the energy conversion losses going to and from H2.
Generating H2 as a storage buffer for excess power is an advantage, but according to you, there obviously is no excess power! I know i know, we're talking about variable sources like wind, and that is an issue, and there's no reason we couldn't use H2 generation as one means of storing that energy. I think fuel cells are definitely useful for stationary applications. But we can also use hydro reservoirs for load balancing, and V2G systems could also help, although i admit a lot of work would have to go into that. Either way, you say the overall efficiency of the H2 fuel cycle is irrelevant because it's free energy, H2 is the only means of capturing this energy, but that's ridiculous. Wind farms are grid connected, only a small portion of a wind turbine's generation during high wind periods with low electricity demand would require some form of buffer storage. The vast majority of energy generated could easily be sent straight to the end user with much more efficient fuel cycle path than through convoluted H2 cycles.
Your 50-60 kWh per day number is utter BS and so is your "double the load on the grid". How many people do you know who drive 250 miles on a daily basis. Lets talk about a more realistic number like 40 miles a day, which requires on the order of 8kWh of electricity (see the chevy Volt, EV1, even the damn G-Wiz), about a fifth of a typical household daily consumption. The reality is that the addition of an EV is not all that much of an additional load. If everyone in your neighbourhood got an EV and on average they drove 40 miles a day, your neighbourhood's consumption would go up by about 20%. At even the most optimistic rates of adoption of EVs, it'll take decades before the overall electricity consumption goes up by 25%. Giving more than enough time for the grid to keep up. And like i said, every additional power plant required for charging an EV would mean two additional power plants to power FCVs - VERY SIMPLE MATH.
@ keepthechange: Just because a battery powered airliner isn't practical doesn't mean that a battery powered commuter car isn't. Internal combustion is here to stay for a very long time in the applications you mentioned. As we can plainly see from some examples that are already on sale, batteries can do plenty in the field of passenger cars.
JDM Life 8:22PM (6/23/2009)
Sweet.
Wonder how it will look. Toyota is on point.
Reply
Pokey 1:17AM (6/24/2009)
It will look like everything else Toyota makes. Which is not a particularly bad thing, if you happen to be legally blind, or devoid of any kind of enthusiam for the automobile.
Glenn 2:45AM (6/24/2009)
Propaganda from Toyota .. the real news is they still have large trucks in their pipeline.
Hydrogen will never work, given the nature of the hydrogen atom.
We have lots of it, but it also is the atom with the stongest bond to break .. it takes more energy to break that bond then you get back in return.
Best place to get hydrogent .. fossil fuels.
Reply