The Unfortunate Truth About Toyota's Hydrogen V8 Engine

It’s not necessary to build an engine to understand the inefficiencies of well to wheel hydrogen as a transportation fuel, especially in ICE engines.

It’s crushingly uneconomic.

The physics are not going to change, so no matter what clever engineering Toyota performs to manage the “challenges such as maintaining the ultralow temperature of -253°C during refueling and storage.” The inefficiencies of the system make it unable to economically compete with battery electric powertrains.

In Motorsport, where winning is everything, the cost may not matter to a sponsor.

For the average Joe who wants to get to work and back, this will never have any use.

It’s curious that Toyota continues to promote hydrogen. Between $21/kg H2 fuel in California, and the wheels coming off their BEV program, you’d think they would focus their resources on projects that will actually make a difference for customers, shareholders, and inhabitants of planet earth.

Didn't you know that Toyota is secretly owned by Exxon?..just kidding!
Methinks Toyota is too far in to get out easy so they are working their Hydrogen Projects to the best conclusions they can. And, who knows. Maybe all this expensive H2 research will someday be of value; perhap in the aero business.

Kelly Blue Book, via Cox Automotive, reported that EV sales soared 65% from 2021 to 2022, with over 800,000 electric vehicles sold in the US last year.

Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles shrank from 3,341 deliveries in 2021 to 2,707 in 2022 in the US.

The horses have left the gate, and the one in the lead has run nearly a quarter way around the track, but you can still place your bets, gentlemen.

Gee, Davemart, for someone who posts so much on Seeking Alpha, I would have thought you would understand trends better.

14 US states and several countries have announced that ICE cars will be phased out by 2035-2040.

What percentage of ZEV car sales do you believe will be H2 FCVs by 2035?

That’s a lot of ad hominem words to avoid the question Davemart.

What percentage of ZEV car sales do you believe will be H2 FCVs by 2035?

Well done Dave

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conceited
That shoe certainly fits one or the other.

@electric car insider:

You love utterly unequal comparisons, don't you?

Sadly, I not even sure if you realise how inept they are.

If you want to compare fuel costs, you should be comparing the cost of electricity to the cost of hydrogen.

How do their price increases/decreases compare?

I have no idea, and suspect that neither do you, since you don't even specify what regions you are talking about, or if you are simply assuming that California is synonymous with the world.

I did do a cost comparison for the UK, of petrol prices versus electricity.
If the taxes on the two were equal ( here in Europe petrol although not electricity for cars is taxed at of the order of 60% ) then there is no way at all that that would cover the extra cost of the battery,
The BEV market here is entirely subsidy dependent, in a spectacular upwards wealth transfer based on suppositions by interested parties about future falls in battery prices, which sometime in the wonderful future are supposed to make them competitive ex subsidy for less expensive cars, as well as the present lux mobiles being heavily subsidised.

The other valid comparison if you don't fancy that, would be battery prices versus fuel cell prices.

Don't even think about going there, as the technology at an earlier stage, fuel cells, has massively greater falls in cost than batteries over the last decade or so.

There is a lot to be said about the advantages of batteries, although perhaps less about anything which is very closely associated with present technology lithium ion, but your comparison mixing up fueling costs and with what they are powering, fuel cells or batteries, is just weird.

You have no idea what you are talking about, or how to do a valid comparison.

Don't compare eggs and oranges.

@electric car insider;

The US and in particular California is an outlier, not typical of the worldwide market where the vast majority of cars are sold, which preponderance will be far greater over the next 30 years.

For starters, most cars are bought for not much more than the price of the battery pack in current, ludicrously subsidised and mandated, electric cars for the well off.

Even in the US, most folk will never buy a new car, and the notion that 50K cars need all the help they can get at everyone else's expanse is regressive nonsense.

Now maybe batteries will be able to break that cost barrier, but they aren't going to be much like current batteries, or most people will have to settle for very low range.

And lets hope the batteries don't give up the ghost for people who have bought second hand, or they are screwed and the current 14 years or so of average lifespan of cars may be in trouble.

I genuinely hope that we get the far better, far cheaper, batteries needed, but a certainty any time soon, it ain't.

Some of the reasons why California is an outlier include that elsewhere the possibility of at home charging is a rarity, and most places there is no chance.

Likewise the notion that cheap solar panels on the roof can do the job of charging cars, which is an offsetting fantasy even in California as people are largely out at work when the sun is shining, not at home charging their cars.

But California can build more solar, for instance over parking lots.

You try charging your car from your rooftop array in Hamburg in December.

Unless there is heavy recourse to nuclear power (which I would support, thus increasing the viability of BEVs ) there is no way at all in some places that low carbon electricity can power transport without massive imports, of, for instance, ammonia for conversion to hydrogen.

And power is way cheaper anyway in California than in Europe or Japan, for instance.

Since the hydrogen network in the UK has not yet been built, I will illustrate very roughly with German figures.
It is not worthwhile being too precise, as things are too much in a state of flux, for umpteen reasons including not only technology but war in the Ukraine etc

Roughly, in Germany green hydrogen runs at 9 + Euros kg:

https://www.energate-messenger.com/news/222774/price-for-domestic-hydrogen-could-drop-to-5-euros-in-2025

That is the figure I am using, not the projected much lower cost in 2025, although there are substantial grounds for the 5 Euros kg given, including falling prices of electrolysers and increased volume in the distribution chain.

And electricity costs a household something like 40 cents (US) Kwh (0.38 Euros)

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-electricity

Taking a BEV at 3-4 miles KWh, (~5.5km) and an FCEV at 66mpge ( 3.6litres/100km)

Since 1kg of hydrogen is the energy equivalent of around 3.6 litres of petrol
then the fair way of stating things is that the costs of running a car on hydrogen and electricity are fairlycomparable, at of the order of 0.10 Euros/km for the FCEV and 0.07 Euros/km for the BEV

At the projected 2025 cost for hydrogen the FCEV may put its nose ahead, but really the fair way of saying things is that the fuelling costs are very comparable, although that disguises that neither would be contributing to the exchequer the way petrol taxes in Europe do.

Very roughly double the prices to allow for that.

This is all ballpark stuff, the result of googling, so that for instance the price I have given for hydrogen does not specify where the hydrogen is.

Here is another approach at the fuel pump, although it does not appear that this is green hydro

electric car insider:

And just for completeness, here are electricity prices in the UK:

' However, from 1st of October, the actual cost of electricity per kWh will stand at 52p per kWh, but with the new Energy Price Guarantee, it will average 34p per kWh (exact amount varies depending on tariff and other factors). '

https://energyguide.org.uk/average-cost-electricity-kwh-uk/

As can easily be seen, this is no better than Germany.
Scads of electric cars are being sold, on the basis of taking from the poor to give to the rich, as all sorts of subsidies and perks are disguising the underlying fact that they remain entirely uneconomic.

That is not to say that we don't need to move on from pure combustion engines, and explains for instance Toyota's preference for more gradual electrification, so that the cars can actually remain affordable to average folk.

One big difference for the UK compared to Germany is far better renewable resources in off shore wind.

The plan is to largely bring that ashore as hydrogen, as a hydrogen pipe can move several times the energy as an electric cable,

It seems to me that if it is coming ashore as hydrogen, it may often make sense to pump it into a car the same way, instead of turning it back into electricity.

@yoatman:

Anyone who calls fuel cells 'fool cells' is themselves a fool, IMO.

As for what you have done with your particular income in your particular location, fine, and congratulations.

To imagine that that is generalisable to all locations, with hugely variable solar incidence etc is absurd.

You do not mention where you are located.

Is it in the tropics, with essentially constant solar incidence throughout the year, or are you in fact taking input from the grid to balance what you oversupply in the summer, and in fact a user of fossil fuels, but with fiddled figures?

Are you charging your electric car during the day, or is that another offset, and more fiddled figures?

And why do you imagine that everyone can buy a house with a big enough roof correctly orientated to collect so much sunlight?

yoatman:

So no substantial reply, on where you are located, or whether your 'independent power ' is in fact courtesy of power from a fossil fuel grid?

Or whether you got buckets of subsidy as in California, courtesy of the costs being loaded onto folk like renters?

I am not sure why you think it relevant that you have worked hard, entirely for your own advantage, or why you imagine what I have done or not done relevant to anything.

That is true ad hominen, not my comments, as I simply critiqued your statements about energy, not your personal life, and when you yourself brought it up, your claims of independence, which in California at least has usually been courtesy of other people's pocket book

If you imagine most folk in the world can simply build a house, presumably at a favourable latitude, in the correct orientation to get enough sunshine to be independent in reality, not a fake independence courtesy of a fossil fuel grid, you are fantacising.

Grow up, and if you can't debate without recourse to abuse, or differentiate between criticising views expressed and the person who expresses then, then you might as well discontinue your 'contributions'