this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are EVs, have electric motors, and qualify when you talk about "power generation with Hydrogen" and "versatility of electricity". The hydrogen in the tanks is fed into an anode and oxygen into a cathode to power a circuit and drive an electric motor. It's an EV, but the 'battery' is hydrogen. FCEVs could be the key to shoring up a lot of conventional EV shortcomings; lithium-ion waste, electricity grid load, and lifespan, for instance. Combine that with the ICE vehicle in question in the article; Hydrogen ICE engines could provide routes for retrofitting existing combustion vehicles, adding additional demand to improve supply infrastructure and improve green hydrogen supply. These are well-warranted experiments for Toyota to be undertaking on the global stage; as crucial as any EV battery investigation!
And don't forget it's way faster to refill a hydrogen tank than an battery. Also, cars are such a big industry it's actually easier to not have a middleman (hydrogen -> ~~electric grid~~ -> EVs) because all the infrastructure would have to be built without any real need for it.
For now, this should change with solid state batteries
Is faster, but with modern EVs it’s really not a problem.
Depart home with 100%, drive for 4 hours, stop to grab an meal and use the facilities and the car is finished before you. Modern EVs take 15 minutes to go 20-80% charged.
Hydrogen is 3x less energy efficient than a battery electric vehicle. It certainly has use cases, but it came 20 years too late for light vehicles.
I agree with everything you said except the retrofitting... I don't think retrofitting an ICE is going to be remotely possible for any price anyone would be willing to pay. Sure they both have a "gas tank" of sorts, but as you mentioned, a hydrogen vehicle is ultimately an electric vehicle... And electric motors and their supporting components are quite different than ICEs.
Except the cost to refill with Hydrogen is significantly higher than petroleum in many parts of the world, which makes it non-viable as a fuel. A Lithium/Sodium battery can be charged by whatever fuel source you want and can be done at home. Hydrogen can only be "charged" at a hydrogen fueling station, which has to exist. All but one Hydrogen fuel station in America is in California and there aren't even a lot of those.
Hydrogen fueled vehicles are a cool technology, but they aren't practical and thus will never sell anywhere outside of Japan. My point was that Toyota could make a car that works everywhere and just swap engines in a Plug-in Hybrid for the fuel source or, for fully electric vehicles, change the power generation source. If they make the power from Hydrogen and harvest the salt for sodium batteries, they can make two parts of the water they're harvesting from the ocean into useful stuff.