The key word here is obviously *could*.
Add one more to the pile of claims and beliefs floating around that have yet to transform into viable products.
I have been a Toyota fan from way back. I have owned a number of their vehicles. But in my mind, they lost a lot of technical credibility when they tried to apply political influence in a short sighted attempt to steer the marketplace toward hydrogen.
This was really just a thinly veiled effort to prolong the marketplace viability of the internal combustion engine --- to the detriment of the global environment.
Hydrogen will probably never work unless someone comes up with a stable molecule that includes hydrogen, is large enough to not move through solid objects, and still retains enough chemical energy to be useful. Ammonium is one option, but it is highly toxic. Only really practical in cargo ships.
Hydrogen also can be useful for inherently expensive things like rockets and jet planes. But never cars.
It was never going to compete with electric. EVs have been slandered for so long that people just assumed we would come up with something better. But EVs are great. Driving an ICE car after being in a Tesla feels like playing a first-person shooter over dial-up.
> It was never going to compete with electric. EVs have been slandered for so long that people just assumed we would come up with something better.
Hydrogen cars are EVs. This is a deep misunderstanding of the issue.
And if by that you mean very badly and very impractically then you are correct.
> There are no fundamental challenges.
Except, you know building them cheap at volume. Just a small thing.
> This reads like one of those anti-BEV posts from a decade ago.
Except it also reads like anti-Hydrogen EV post from a decade ago and since then BEV have made utterly insane amount of progress and hydrogen vehicles are still in the utterly sorry and embracing state they were 10 years ago.
The Toyota Mirai is a hydrogen Fuel Cell car.
BMW tried to create a hydrogen ICE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7
B58 is a truly great combustion engine, but the idea any turbocharged ICE can compete with an electric motor for input lag is ridiculous. B58's twin scroll turbos certainly reduce lag compared with more run-of-the-mill turbo engines, but even naturally aspirated race engines with light flywheels feel laggy after driving even low-end BEVs.
The domestic grid has no impact on most Toyota/Japanese cars which are exported or built elsewhere --- often using engines made in Japan.
This was about saving a large segment of the Japanese economy which is centered around the internal combustion engine and associated expertise and know how.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/15/toyotas-team-japan-aims...
The infrastructure needed to fully support hydrogen would take decades to develop. Starting with some way to efficiently manufacture hydrogen without using even more fossil fuels.
It's the stall that they wanted --- to give them more time to milk ICE and adapt.
There is no corresponding infrastructure delay for EVs which are already being adopted.
That's an utter fantasy. We are nowhere near having enough infrastructure to do this.
Thank you for your submission of proposed new revolutionary battery technology. Your new technology claims to be superior to existing lithium-ion technology and is just around the corner from taking over the world. Unfortunately your technology will likely fail, because:
[ ] it is impractical to manufacture at scale.
[ ] it will be too expensive for users.
[ ] it suffers from too few recharge cycles.
[ ] it is incapable of delivering current at sufficient levels.
[ ] it lacks thermal stability at low or high temperatures.
[ ] it lacks the energy density to make it sufficiently portable.
[ ] it has too short of a lifetime.
[ ] its charge rate is too slow.
[ ] its materials are too toxic.
[ ] it is too likely to catch fire or explode.
[ ] it is too minimal of a step forward for anybody to care.
[ ] this was already done 20 years ago and didn't work then.
[ ] by the time it ships li-ion advances will match it.
----------------------------------------------------------------
Does this one walk on water?
That's actually false. It originated from a literally made-up story by Bloomberg. In reality, NCA cells have existed since the late-2000s. Effective energy density was 250 Wh/kg. We have not significantly improved on this value since then.
[0] does not hold charge
I hope that batteries continue improving like this and other technologies. It is going to be like magic.
For that range I assume the battery holds 150 Wh/km * 1200 km = 180 kWh. Charging it in 10 minutes would require about 1.1 MW. That's a lot of Watts.
* Only available at the Niagara Hydroelectric Power Station
Extra $8K on a $50K car isn't too bad and can be hidden by cutting costs somewhere else. But on a <$20K car there's nothing left to cut, and the extra cost takes it out of the budget segment.
https://electrek.co/2020/07/30/tesla-batteries-energy-densit...
The real, slow engineering stories have the best lessons
However, there regularly are press releases promising breakthroughs, but they either never reach production, or end up being one of the small incremental improvements, not a revolution.
