Skip to main content

Toyota to Expand Production of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles

While Nissan and Tesla have put their money on electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries, Toyota has bet on hydrogen fuel cell technology and plug-in hybrid vehicles. In fact, Toyota plans to ramp up production of hydrogen vehicles while cutting production costs.

The Toyota Mirai was introduced in 2014 and was the first commercially available, mass-produced sedan to run exclusively on hydrogen fuel. In May, Toyota announced plans to increase ten-fold its production of the Mirai from 3,000 in 2017 to at least 30,000 by 2020.

Unfortunately, the car has high production costs and starts at $60,000. Due to limited production, the car is made by hand, adding costs. Hydrogen vehicles also contain platinum, a precious metal nearly 56,000 times more expensive than steel. Toyota plans to reduce the platinum in the hydrogen fuel stack to save money.

Toyota began to invest in hydrogen technology in the 1990s instead of battery-powered electric vehicles.

“Toyota is confident that hydrogen fuel cells have a prominent role to play in a zero-emission transportation future,” said Matthew Klippenstein, a principal with Electron Communications. “The technology is there, and once they get higher volumes, the [lower] cost will be there too.”

Hydrogen vehicles use pressurized hydrogen gas to produce electricity. The gas is stored in carbon-fiber tanks in the vehicle before it is fed to the fuel stack. When the hydrogen interacts with oxygen, to produce electricity that powers the vehicle. The only exhaust emitted is water.

Like gasoline, it takes just a few minutes to fuel a vehicle, but the network of hydrogen gas filling stations is currently very limited. Hydrogen cars face the same energy distribution challenges that Tesla and other EVs still battle.

Toyota’s hydrogen vehicles have an impressive range. Toyota’s new hydrogen fuel cell Class 8 truck prototype has a range of 300 miles, which is comparable to the Mirai at 312 miles. By contrast, Nissan claims a 150-mile range for the Leaf, which starts at around $30,000. The range of the 2019 Leaf, however, is expected to be greater. The Chevy Bolt starts at $36,620 and has a range of 238 miles.

When looking at larger vehicles, such as SUVs and trucks, hydrogen fuel cell technology is even more appealing. “As cars get larger and as consumers demand more range, more energy, more ability to do stuff, then hydrogen fuel cells look much better than batteries, even despite the goals of the next generation of batteries,” said Klippenstein. “And that is why the automakers still see hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as having value.”

Clearly, the Toyota Mirai will need to out-compete battery electric vehicles to really capture a sizable market share. Its rapid fueling abilities and range are impressive, but the lack of hydrogen fuel refilling station infrastructure and the price is likely troubling to potential buyers. The Mirai can compete on price with the Tesla Model S, but is considerably more expensive than the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Leaf. At this point, Toyota is putting its money into hydrogen. Time will tell which zero-emissions technologies the market favors.

Source: 
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-hydrogen/toyota-plans-to-expand-production-shrink-cost-of-hydrogen-fuel-cell-vehicles-idUSKBN1KG0Y0

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Photovoltaics: Band Diagram

In the previous post we discussed silicon, which is the most used material in photovoltaics. In this post, we introduce the band diagram, for which we will use silicon as an example. We will start our discussion of the band diagram with the Bohr model of the silicon atom. In semiconductor materials the outer shell of the atom, which is called the valence shell, is not completely filled. The outer shell of silicon contains 4 out of the possible 8 electrons, which we call valence electrons. As we discussed in the previous post, each silicon atom in a crystalline structure is bonded to four other silicon atoms. The bonds between the silicon atoms are called covalent bonds. These bonds actually consist of two valence electrons that are shared by two silicon atoms. All valence electrons are fixed in the lattice, forming covalent bonds, and are therefore immobile. However, at a temperature above absolute zero, thermal energy is supplied to these miconductor and some of the vale...
Post a Comment
Read more

Watching videos on the Internet also harms the environment

Surprisingly, even the videos we watch on the Internet have an impact on the environment. A new report indicates that the internet is one of the top "villains" in the digital sector's carbon footprint, which now accounts for 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This share could double by 2025, leaving the digital sector on a par with road transport, as energy consumption in this sector is increasing at the rate of 9% per year. Published by the French research website The Shift Project, the report "Climate Crisis: The Unsustainable Use of Online Video" quantifies the impact of Internet video (VoD, "tubes", pornography, social networks and others) on the environment and the global climate. The study shows that, within all Internet data, online videos account for about 60 percent of the stream, or the largest volume of greenhouse gas emissions in the industry, with about 300 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). Of this total emission,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Photovoltaics: Silicon

Welcome to this new post about semiconductor physics. Before we delve into all the important topics of semiconductor physics that are relevant to solar cells, we need to talk about silicon. Silicon is one of the most important materials when it comes to solar cells and we will be using it throughout this post series as an example for all the semiconductor concepts we will be going into. This will only be a short introduction to silicon, and there will be an extensive post series on silicon-based solar cells in the following course, Photovoltaic Technologies. Let’s start our discussion by looking at the reasons why silicon is the most used material for fabricating solar cells. The first successful silicon solar cell was fabricated in the Bell Laboratories in US in 1954. At present, the photovoltaic industry is dominated by silicon-based solar cells with 90%share of the market. Silicon is the most widespread material used for solar cells. But why is it that silicon is used so much?...
Post a Comment
Read more