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Comment by hansjorg | Hacker News Reader

Toyota, which is the largest car manufacturer by volume, have stated repeatedly that they are betting on hydrogen fuel cells rather than batteries.

Given their track record with hybrids, one would think that they know their battery technology.

None of the anti-hydrogen fuel cell articles that have popped up here lately have mentioned this. It would be interesting to see an analysis of the Toyota strategy from this point of view.

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He was too nice to go there: Toyota's announced fuel cell car is expensive and has very poor performance. The fundamental problem is that high power fuel cells are very expensive, linear power with cost. And that expense doesn't seem to be changing quickly.

I'd like to believe that Toyota is making rational choices based on their experience with hybrids. But I'm having a hard time believing that.

The world's largest car maker isn't going to bet their entire future on irrational choices.

Clearly they have either something in the R&D pipeline or have consumer research which suggests that EV isn't the future. We can all disagree with their bet but you would be frankly a complete idiot to ever dismiss Toyota's decisions lightly.

GM was once the world's largest automaker, by far.

Two generations of leadership bankrupted the company by making irrational choices. Remind me how being the world's largest automaker means anything in relation to ensuring rationality.

And Toyota? You mean the one that just got done going through years of terrible quality control issues that saw their annual sales drop, their profit plunge off a cliff, and their market cap get chopped in half shedding some $100 billion in value. Clearly a company impervious to irrational decisions.

> The world's largest car maker isn't going to bet their entire future on irrational choices.

The world largest cellphone maker did.

So you are suggesting they can do no wrong, because they are the largest? This makes no sense at all.

Are they actually betting their entire future on fuel cells? As far as I know they've only announced one fuel cell model, with limited production, and not yet available. It looks to me like they're continuing to bet their entire future on gasoline and hybrid cars, with a bit of experimentation in the area of fuel cells.

> The fundamental problem is that high power fuel cells are very expensive, linear power with cost.

Does anyone talk about using fuel cells as auxiliary range-extenders to electric vehicles? If they're best at low power, and also highly efficient, they'd should be very good pootling away in the background, topping up a battery from a tank of methanol.

I am really really curious how anyone is trying to solve the problem of Hydrogen leaking out of literally any container you could put it into. Smallest molecule+huge pressure = leaks out of pure lead canisters. When Mercedes made their Hydrogen-powered concept car they said the whole tank would evaporate naturally within 3 weeks if I remember correctly? As hydrogen forms an explosive mixture with air, I cannot see the problem of it leaking into surrounding environment as not being completely critical.

I thought the solution was to have an insulated tank and a refrigeration solution to keep the hydrogen liquid. Of course you will still have "leakage", as some of the hydrogen needs to be spent periodically to run the refrigeration, but this can be minimized with enough insulation.

30% of the heating value of hydrogen is wasted for liquefaction.

I remember reading about how researchers were trying to store hydrogen in what are (essentially) nano-scale plastic beads.

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/news/nanobeads-could-store-liqu...

I wonder if that will negate the 'clean' aspect of the whole deal.

http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/313157701/why-those-tiny-micro...

Toyota's interest is surprising. I saw that recently, and was amazed. I thought everyone had given up on hydrogen as an auto fuel, now that batteries were good enough for electric cars.

Hydrogen is not itself a source of energy. It has to be made from something. Electrolysis of water is more wasteful of energy than putting the same electricity into a battery. Hydrogen from natural gas is possible, but why not just run vehicles on natural gas? That works fine; some bus and truck fleets run on natural gas.

Hydrogen is not itself a source of energy.

(The same can be said of both electricity and batteries)

While electricity is "not a source of energy", it does have the two fold benefit of being continuously generated, ans having widely available infrastructure. Hydrogen, while being 91% present in the universe, has only trace amount naturally occuring on earth. So to get it we can chop is off methane (a fossil fuel and already great energy store in it's own right), blast h20 with electricity (which could be fed directly into batteries with minimal loss) or biomass fermentation. http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_production.html

When you couple the lack of availability, lack of infrastructure, and inefficiency of production, you are left with a tiny element that is difficult to store and extremely combustable.

It just doesn't make sense vs electricity and batteries.

You don't have to cryogenically store batteries under pressure.

The difference is that everybody knows that's true of electricity (a shocking number of people think that hydrogen is just somehow... found), electricity infrastructure is way better developed, and electrical generation is considerably more efficient.

You're right that Toyota's stance on this issue raises a big question about the viability of hydrogen.

On the other hand, the fact that Toyota has such a long and successful history with alternative powertrains, and they still are not selling a hydrogen car makes me think it really doesn't work. If they of all companies haven't done it yet, what chance is there?

To me, the only argument you need is the infrastructure argument. I can go out and buy an electric car today and charge it in my garage and drive it all over the place without having any trouble finding places to charge. In the world of hydrogen, I can probably still count the number of filling stations on this continent on my fingers and toes, and that's not going to change any time soon.

>It would be interesting to see an analysis of the Toyota strategy from this point of view.

I feel the same. Of course I'm not an expert, but it seems like many of the issues he lists in the opening are things that can be overcome with improvements in technology (and could have been arguments against batteries or even gasoline at points in history).

Meanwhile, the engineers at Toyota are actually trying to make this work:

http://www.toyota-global.com/innovation/environmental_techno...

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