SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
At a car factory in this city named after Toyota, the usual robots with their swinging arms are missing. Instead, workers intently fit parts into place by hand with craftsmanship-like care.
The big moment on the assembly line comes when two bulbous yellow tanks of hydrogen are rolled over and delicately fitted into each car's underside.
While much of the world is going gung-ho for electric vehicles to help get rid of auto emissions and end reliance on fossil fuels, Japan's top automaker Toyota Motor Corp. is banking on hydrogen.
Toyota sells about 10 million vehicles a year around the world. It has sold only about 4,000 Mirai fuel cell vehicles since late 2014, roughly half of them outside Japan.
Is Toyota going to build the network of hydrogen-refueling stations to serve its hydrogen-powered cars?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday November 17 2017, @04:14PM (5 children)
Toyota's been working on this hydrogen crap for ages, and apparently their management doesn't understand the Sunk Cost Fallacy, as it seems they think they have to stick with it because they've done a lot of R&D on it already, even though hydrogen has proven to be a terrible "fuel". It has horrible energy density, requires a giant highly-pressurized tank to store enough H2 for only a fraction of the range of gasoline, and it needs an infrastructure that simply doesn't exist, and probably never will. On top of all that, the stuff just isn't very efficient: it takes a significant amount of energy to create H2 gas from other sources, since unlike gasoline and diesel, you can't just pump it out of the ground and refine it a little bit. It's a bit like antimatter used in Star Trek (even in ST, they admit that antimatter isn't naturally occurring anywhere where it can be mined, so they have to create it in other ways), except instead of having a huge energy density like antimatter (compared to fusion), it's the exact opposite, as it has much lower energy density than competing contemporaneous sources.
Battery-electric is the future, hybrids are good for the transition time, and for applications where the charge time is an issue (assuming they don't get their acts together as an industry and move to quick-swappable batteries), other fossil fuels like CNG would make more sense than hydrogen. They're already working on electric tractor-trailers; once that's realistic, the days of anything besides battery-electric vehicles will be numbered.
Finally, this isn't the only place where Toyota is exhibiting extreme stupidity. They refuse to support Android Auto and CarPlay in their infotainment systems, unlike most other makers.
http://www.automobilemag.com/news/2018-toyota-camry-use-open-source-infotainment-platform/ [automobilemag.com]
http://www.autonews.com/article/20170227/OEM06/302279971/can-toyota-stave-off-carplay-android-auto%3F [autonews.com]
https://www.cars.com/articles/which-2017-cars-have-android-auto-1420691731381/ [cars.com]
(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday November 17 2017, @06:04PM (1 child)
I'm sorry, are you arguing that batteries have better "fuel" density than hydrogen? Or that the "filling stations" are convenient, cheap, and fast? Or maybe you are arguing that battery-electric is simpler than a hydrogen power plant? Maybe you are arguing that battery-electric is efficient and loss-free from power station to battery charger? Because NONE of that is true.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday November 17 2017, @06:51PM
I'm sorry, are you arguing that batteries have better "fuel" density than hydrogen? Or that the "filling stations" are convenient, cheap, and fast? Or maybe you are arguing that battery-electric is simpler than a hydrogen power plant? Maybe you are arguing that battery-electric is efficient and loss-free from power station to battery charger? Because NONE of that is true.
Wrong.
Batteries now have pretty similar range to hydrogen-powered vehicles, and batteries are getting better as energy densities increase. Hydrogen isn't getting any better.
Batteries don't have filling stations now, but you can charge them at home. Try that with hydrogen or gasoline. Regardless, batteries are just as good as hydrogen here: hydrogen filling stations don't exist either.
Battery-electric is most certainly simpler than a hydrogen power plant. With hydrogen, you either burn it in an internal combustion engine (which means you have the same situation as today, but with a much heavier fuel tank), or you use a fuel cell to convert it to electricity, which means you now have the same drivetrain as an EV, plus a fuel cell and heavy tank. Battery EVs are simpler than either version.
Battery-electric is efficient from power station to charger, in the 80-90% range. Hydrogen is not; it has to be trucked around (it leaks too much to use in long-distance pipelines), and the production process uses a lot of energy. Electricity however can be generated by numerous methods: solar, hydro, nuclear, etc., and you aren't stuck with one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:13PM
you're complaining because toyota is helping to build an open source infotainment system? are you fucking brain damaged? it's dumb ass, little, wallowing pigs like you who keep the whole world enslaved by technology, instead of freed by it. apple or google in my car? fuck you!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 17 2017, @07:54PM
I think a better solution is ethanol or chemically produced gasoline from catbon snd hydrogen. We could build giant solar farms in deserts to provide input energy to create it anf pull the chimicals to crack into carbon and hydrogen from the air and wayer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 18 2017, @10:04AM
Compressed hydrogen has about 80 times the specific energy as lithium ion batteries which is what makes it attractive.