Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.
The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).
One of the trade offs is that engines are actually ridiculously heavy. Compact, extreme high power electric motors are starting to be commercialised. But also, fuel burns so you lose weight as you’re flying whereas batteries stay the same.
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
Structural batteries were supposed to be the solution where the density wasn't so important. I don't really have a good understanding of the ration of fuel weight to structural weight in existing aircraft though.
There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Hydrogen mixed with air has a very wide range of concentrations where it is explosive. It accumulates inside containers or just the roof of the car… where the passengers are. It takes just one lit cigarette for it to go boom.
It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).
Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
Remember that China briefly embargoed Japan for rare earth metals in 2010, and Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014. My theory was that it was developed as a national fallback for Japan in case that embargo continued or got worse. Think 1930s Volkswagen. Anyone can comment on that?
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.
It's hard to work with, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is everywhere.
At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
Apparently 1kg of hydrogen is about 60 miles range, which seems like a lot, but apparently fuel cells are that good.
Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.
By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.
I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.
It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off.
This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.
The part that's interesting to me is how much the depreciation is posed as negative rather than positive.
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
> The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value.
Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.
It's extremely fair to compare depreciation against MSRP. What's not fair is to say that they were being "sold new at massive discounts" when in reality it's an asterisk-ridden rebate process that applied to one model year under specific circumstances. That article was spam when it was written, can you provide a first party source for these massive discounts?
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Maybe that's what it was - produced onsite via steam extraction from piped in natural gas (which means you could just as easily burn the natural gas in the vehicle).
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage.
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.
Let alone the compressors or the flow measurement equipment. Also significant portions of the pipesline (especially in neighborhoods / last mile) aren't metal anymore.
They were popular in Thailand and Cambodia for awhile due to domestic natural gas reserves. But after those wells began to dry up Thailand at least decided EVs were the future instead.
That makes no sense. If the oil companies were pushing H2, every car would be H2 by now.
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable. Both are alternatives to BEVs, which are the better approach to electrifying transport. If Toyota had gone all in on BEVs when it began its H2 strategy, it would be selling more EVs than Tesla. Instead it entirely ceded the field to others, first Tesla and BYD.
But isn't that a counter point? Just putting the electricity directly into a car seems sensible instead of converting it to H2 and then back to electricity. Especially now that wo don't usually have a huge oversupply of green energy. We can think of ways to use the oversupply when it really becomes a problem. But I'd assume then BEV will be so dominant the no one will go through the hassle of supporting H2.
you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")
if transport switches to electric, what's your role?
answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant
but what if hydrogen took off instead?
if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel
but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business
at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas
>We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.
EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.
Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.
Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.
That’s not a thing. Anyone who’s seen hydrogen being split from electrolysis knows it takes a lot lot lot of electricity and is very slow. If two people needed to fill up in the same day it would run the well dry.
Okay not driving it around then. But somehow it's worse. You still have to build the special tank and the special pump and also get an electrolysis device that is big enough to create enough hydrogen and also you have to get heaps of power somewhere that could instead be just straight put into a battery in a car. Make it make sense. What's the point? Who is willing to do that?
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
Isn’t this bad? This means H2O molecules are being destroyed and the water is not returning to the water cycle to be reused. We will literally run out of water if everyone did this.
Water gets split into oxygen and hydrogen using energy. The hydrogen then gets burned to release usable energy, which creates water. At least as far as I remember from chemistry class ages ago.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Maybe if we had smartphones that emitted greenhouse and toxic gases by using a mini ICE engine that were so cheap nobody would buy anything else, we would subsidize the electric ones. We may even ban the gas phones.
> we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.
Storage is the bigger problem, specifically very long duration or rarely used storage (to cover Dunkelflauten, for example) for which batteries are poorly suited. Hydrogen (or more generally e-fuels) is one way to do that, but another very attractive one is very low capex thermal storage. Personally, I feel the latter would beat hydrogen: the round trip efficiency is similar or better, the complexity is very low, power-related capex should be lower, and there's no need for possibly locally unavailable geology (salt formations) for hydrogen storage.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
Moving renewable power is easy, we have a grid for that. Infrastructure for movement of electricity is ubiquitous in places that have never seen a hydrogen pump.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.
Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Approximately zero regular consumers purchased hydrogen cars. They were all fleet purchases designed primarily to publish burnish eco-friendly credentials, like this:
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
> and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...
As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.
If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.
It's got the EV problem, but 100x worse. No only do you have to worry about where to find a place to refuel, there are far fewer of them, and level 1 charging isn't a fallback. It also doesn't have the EV upsides.
Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?
I think that + it's an EV that Toyota don't have to source the battery cells. FCEVs are full EVs just like Tesla, that uses a different kind of battery than Li-ion.
To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now.
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life.
The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
I think there's some truth to this. Toyota desperately needs the future to play to their strengths, something more complicated than EVs, which I think is behind their obsession with hybrids.
Not sure that a fuel cell vehicle isn't just an EV with extra steps, however.
Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km.
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user.
In fairness, hydrogen from gas would enable the CO2 to be sequestered. If the vehicle itself burned the natural gas that would require recapturing the CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which is much more challenging.
None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.
Carbon sequestration is another of those "if we did this, it might solve the problem, but there's no serious move to do it and pay for it on the scale required, plus it's prone to cheating".
Certainly not with hydrogen directly. It might be involved in the production chain, but it's such a pain. If it's at all possible to electrify, that'll very likely win.
For flights, a combination of batteries for smaller, regional planes starting with "islands hoppers" now and SAF from either Biofuel or produced from Electricity (with Hydrogen as an intermediate step). Although I think that we might first see moves to reduce the 2x non CO2 Climate Impacts which can be much cheaper to tackle (such as Contrails).
For maritime applications, batteries when regularly near ports, probably hybrids with methanol for cross-ocean passage far away from coasts.
There's a bit of a movement for battery electric ships, but currently limited to short haul ferries. I have a suspicion this simply won't be "solved" for quite some time after car and heating electrification.
Hydrogen is not great for airplanes since the extremely low density makes the tanks too large. The best solution would be synthetic hydrocarbons (synthesized using hydrogen) which can outperform fossil jet fuel.
Creating hydrogen isn't the only problem. Storage and transportation is a big one since it is an actual gas instead of a liquid. Needs to be compressed, causes embrittlement, highly flammable, etc...
I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...
There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment).
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
If you think depreciation on a few cars is bad wait until you find out how many hundreds of millions taxpayers spent to build hydrogen stations for cars that don’t exist.
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
Given the complete collapse in sales last year (-83% to 432 units, in a market of over 4M cars sold), I'd venture to guess they're faring pretty badly.
When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
> An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
EVs are so much more cheaper to own that it is difficult to explain to people who own ICE cars as they, in majority of cases, just cannot comprehend it
My EV has cost me ~$1,100/yr less to operate over the last few years for the same mileage compared to my ICE, and I didn't even have any major issues with my ICE. Meanwhile its been charged with almost exclusively 100% renewable, zero-emission energy.
I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
The convenience of filling is only there if you have the fuel stations. Considering how expensive it is I’d argue that it’s far better to spend that money on EV charging infrastructure, you get a lot more bang for gour buck. And EVs are arguable significantly more convenient when you have the infrastructure. Would you buy a phone that lasted a week or two, but you had to go to a phone filling station to refill it?
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
I'll take the convenience of being able to charge my car every night compared to having to drive out of my way to go to the extremely rare hydrogen fuel station.
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
The inefficiency of creating, transporting, and converting hydrogen into motion is way too much to bear for the purpose of eliminating a 45 minute charging stop.
Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
We're actually not that far off.
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
Has the hydrogen storage problem been solved yet?
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
There are some innovation like hydrogen paste but it’s not going to be useful for a combustion engine cycle.
The Mirai does not combust hydrogen.
> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
The bZ4X? 10+ years after the Nissan Leaf?
And the bZ3, bZ5, bZ7, bZ3X, the Lexus RZ, and soon the Hilux EV:
https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...
Toyota sells bad EVs and was the last OEM to offer one. It’s the most anti-EV OEM by far and engages/engaged in the most EV FUD.
I have only purchased Toyota vehicles (currently in the market for an EV) and it baffles me that Dodge created a Charger in EV form and Toyota hasn’t made even an EV Corolla or Camry.
The bZ4X was particularly bad. Toyota adopted a combo of NIH syndrome and DNGAF. They didn’t anticipate cold weather. The batteries lost like 30% of their capacity in the cold and the resale value of it tanked.
The energy density doesn't work for now. Everybody hoping for that breakthrough, and battery aircraft are moving into certain sectors (drone delivery, air taxis etc).
One of the trade offs is that engines are actually ridiculously heavy. Compact, extreme high power electric motors are starting to be commercialised. But also, fuel burns so you lose weight as you’re flying whereas batteries stay the same.
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
Structural batteries were supposed to be the solution where the density wasn't so important. I don't really have a good understanding of the ration of fuel weight to structural weight in existing aircraft though.
What does this mean? They have electric vehicles too.
> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Yes, it's not the new oil, it's the same oil in "green" packaging. Plus some comforting lies about carbon capture.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
See: the Hindenburg disaster
afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.
There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.
Ignoring some of the other issues:
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
It’s horrible to work with - dangerous, embrittlement issues etc., and very energy intensive to compress into very heavy cryogenic storage containers…
> dangerous
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
That's assuming the hydrogen is just loose in the area, like it'd been released from a balloon in a chemistry classroom. That amount of hydrogen is extremely small, from an energy standpoint. Equivalent to a teaspoon of gasoline or so.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Hydrogen mixed with air has a very wide range of concentrations where it is explosive. It accumulates inside containers or just the roof of the car… where the passengers are. It takes just one lit cigarette for it to go boom.
And it burns really hot
It's hell to store. The energy density is terrible and as a tiny molecule it escapes most seals. When it transitions from a liquid to a gas, it expands manyfold (i.e., explodes).
The cheapest way to make hydrogen is to use fossil fuels.
Check out the "Clean Hydrogen Ladder" document.
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
Unless you produce it using the Sulfur-Iodine cycle in a high-temperature nuclear reactor.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...
Besides being expensive to generate unless you already happen to have an electrolysis plant handy, hydrogen is awkward and hazardous to store. Once generated, it costs yet more energy to liquefy, and then it seeps right through many common metals, weakening them in the process. It's just not a good consumer-level energy source, and nobody could figure out why Toyota couldn't see that.
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...
Remember that China briefly embargoed Japan for rare earth metals in 2010, and Toyota launched the Mirai in 2014. My theory was that it was developed as a national fallback for Japan in case that embargo continued or got worse. Think 1930s Volkswagen. Anyone can comment on that?
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
Hydrogen is the minimum viable atom: one proton, one electron. H2 is a tiny molecule. "hydrogen embrittlement" is when it's small enough to diffuse into solid metal, because it's that much smaller than iron atoms.
It's hard to work with, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is everywhere.
At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
$15,000 worth of fuel card sounds generous until you find that hydrogen stations have jacked up prices to $36/kg.
still means nothing, what is the mileage or $/mi there?
Apparently 1kg of hydrogen is about 60 miles range, which seems like a lot, but apparently fuel cells are that good.
Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.
By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.
> This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric
Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.
Full tank capacity of a Mirai is ~5 kg / (120 liters in volume).
I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.
It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...
This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.
The part that's interesting to me is how much the depreciation is posed as negative rather than positive.
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
> The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value.
Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.
My state assesses annual car taxes based on MSRP rather than real market value, unfortunately, so these fake MSRPs matter to me. :-(
It's extremely fair to compare depreciation against MSRP. What's not fair is to say that they were being "sold new at massive discounts" when in reality it's an asterisk-ridden rebate process that applied to one model year under specific circumstances. That article was spam when it was written, can you provide a first party source for these massive discounts?
Depreciation is measured against the price someone actually paid.
The MSRP doesn’t matter. The S stands for suggested.
I lived a block away from a hydrogen fuel station in Oakland, and in the ten years I was there I maybe saw two different Mirais use it.
Obligatory paper - Does a Hydrogen Economy Make Sense? (2006)
https://alpha.chem.umb.edu/chemistry/ch471/evans%20files/Pro...
Nothing fundamental has changed in the last 2 decades to refute the arguments Bossel made in 2006.
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
My understanding is most hydrogen fueling stations produce the hydrogen onsite via electrolysis of water.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
Completely wrong.
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Maybe that's what it was - produced onsite via steam extraction from piped in natural gas (which means you could just as easily burn the natural gas in the vehicle).
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
The electrolysis needs power and could be fueled by fossil fuels.
If you can do that at a meaningful rate you might as well install ev charging and just not electrolyse when cars are charging
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage.
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
This is not quite true. The original gas pipes in most cities were built for "town gas" which was produced from coal and is 50% hydrogen by volume. The infrastructure could handle hydrogen just fine, but the low conversion efficiencies make it impractical.
h2 can be co-mingled with Ng and extracted with a molar filter at the other end.
Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.
None of the pipes or valves are designed for hydrogen. It will steal leak. And leaking a very flammable gas isn’t great.
Let alone the compressors or the flow measurement equipment. Also significant portions of the pipesline (especially in neighborhoods / last mile) aren't metal anymore.
this is the case while they're in the hype building phase, when people are paying attention
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
Natural gas vehicles make way more sense than hydrogen. But they didn't survive in the (US) market outside specific fleet applications.
Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
They were popular in Thailand and Cambodia for awhile due to domestic natural gas reserves. But after those wells began to dry up Thailand at least decided EVs were the future instead.
That makes no sense. If the oil companies were pushing H2, every car would be H2 by now.
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
H2 from electrolysis is wildly expensive. H2 from natural gas is more affordable. Both are alternatives to BEVs, which are the better approach to electrifying transport. If Toyota had gone all in on BEVs when it began its H2 strategy, it would be selling more EVs than Tesla. Instead it entirely ceded the field to others, first Tesla and BYD.
But isn't that a counter point? Just putting the electricity directly into a car seems sensible instead of converting it to H2 and then back to electricity. Especially now that wo don't usually have a huge oversupply of green energy. We can think of ways to use the oversupply when it really becomes a problem. But I'd assume then BEV will be so dominant the no one will go through the hassle of supporting H2.
> We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.
And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".
There's no point. EVs go 50% further on the same amount of energy, are easier to charge and are, of course, cheaper.
say you're Shell
you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")
if transport switches to electric, what's your role?
answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant
but what if hydrogen took off instead?
if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel
but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business
at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas
... and that's exactly what they're trying to do
>We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.
EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.
Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.
Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.
Your understanding is entirely wrong.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
That’s not a thing. Anyone who’s seen hydrogen being split from electrolysis knows it takes a lot lot lot of electricity and is very slow. If two people needed to fill up in the same day it would run the well dry.
Okay not driving it around then. But somehow it's worse. You still have to build the special tank and the special pump and also get an electrolysis device that is big enough to create enough hydrogen and also you have to get heaps of power somewhere that could instead be just straight put into a battery in a car. Make it make sense. What's the point? Who is willing to do that?
Don’t forget keeping everything cold enough.
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
Is the shape round? I bet it's round.
Ultimately, it's shrapnel-shaped.
Is that shrapnel arranged in a roundish pattern?
> battery
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
Batteries do not create a lot of toxic waste and are essentially fully recyclable.
The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.
Isn’t this bad? This means H2O molecules are being destroyed and the water is not returning to the water cycle to be reused. We will literally run out of water if everyone did this.
Water gets split into oxygen and hydrogen using energy. The hydrogen then gets burned to release usable energy, which creates water. At least as far as I remember from chemistry class ages ago.
> It is just so much simpler with electricity.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Maybe if we had smartphones that emitted greenhouse and toxic gases by using a mini ICE engine that were so cheap nobody would buy anything else, we would subsidize the electric ones. We may even ban the gas phones.
We also wouldn't need to if environmental externalities were costed into petroleum prices.
ICE love is cultural, and there's a bunch of FUD from entrenched interests.
> we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
These problems are grossly exaggerated in popular discussions. Hydrogen has been routinely transported and stored in standard steel cylinders for over a century. Most cities originally used coal gas (50% hydrogen by volume) for heating and illumination before switching to natural gas after World War II. What kills the idea is the abysmal efficiency of electrolysis and hydrogen fuel cells. Standard high-voltage DC power lines would be much better suited for getting solar power from Arizona to Alaska.
Storage is the bigger problem, specifically very long duration or rarely used storage (to cover Dunkelflauten, for example) for which batteries are poorly suited. Hydrogen (or more generally e-fuels) is one way to do that, but another very attractive one is very low capex thermal storage. Personally, I feel the latter would beat hydrogen: the round trip efficiency is similar or better, the complexity is very low, power-related capex should be lower, and there's no need for possibly locally unavailable geology (salt formations) for hydrogen storage.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
Moving renewable power is easy, we have a grid for that. Infrastructure for movement of electricity is ubiquitous in places that have never seen a hydrogen pump.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.
Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.
At that point you're just building a weird battery storage system again though.
> Pretty much every gas station already has [electricity].
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Still seems like a smaller investment to get a bigger cable than H2 infrastructure (Tanks, Pumps, maybe even electrolysis system).
True, but they already exist.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
H2 can be transported by trucks. Must lay expensive hydro infrastructure to do the same for electricity.
But not by the same trailers, not stored in the same tanks as gasoline, nor transferred by the same pumps.
This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.
Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Edit: typo
Approximately zero regular consumers purchased hydrogen cars. They were all fleet purchases designed primarily to publish burnish eco-friendly credentials, like this:
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...
Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
Well… I did/do see many around the Bay Area. Especially during the morning commute. But I agree, overall it was a low volume car.
Funny thing, Air Liquide. They were going to build a massive green hydrogen plant in upstate NY and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...
https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224...
> and backed out when the tax credits disappeared...
As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.
If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.
Hydrogen systems just don't make sense. Neither do molecular Hydrogen Fuel Cells.
Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.
It's got the EV problem, but 100x worse. No only do you have to worry about where to find a place to refuel, there are far fewer of them, and level 1 charging isn't a fallback. It also doesn't have the EV upsides.
Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
A full tank would cost $200 for about 300-350 mile range.
Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?
I think that + it's an EV that Toyota don't have to source the battery cells. FCEVs are full EVs just like Tesla, that uses a different kind of battery than Li-ion.
To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now.
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
I think there's some truth to this. Toyota desperately needs the future to play to their strengths, something more complicated than EVs, which I think is behind their obsession with hybrids.
Not sure that a fuel cell vehicle isn't just an EV with extra steps, however.
Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km.
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
> And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen
That original owner was probably doing all those miles on the free hydrogen given by Toyota.
This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user.
Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.
In fairness, hydrogen from gas would enable the CO2 to be sequestered. If the vehicle itself burned the natural gas that would require recapturing the CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which is much more challenging.
None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.
Carbon sequestration is another of those "if we did this, it might solve the problem, but there's no serious move to do it and pay for it on the scale required, plus it's prone to cheating".
How do you solve aeronautical and maritime applications?
Certainly not with hydrogen directly. It might be involved in the production chain, but it's such a pain. If it's at all possible to electrify, that'll very likely win.
For flights, a combination of batteries for smaller, regional planes starting with "islands hoppers" now and SAF from either Biofuel or produced from Electricity (with Hydrogen as an intermediate step). Although I think that we might first see moves to reduce the 2x non CO2 Climate Impacts which can be much cheaper to tackle (such as Contrails).
For maritime applications, batteries when regularly near ports, probably hybrids with methanol for cross-ocean passage far away from coasts.
The Toyota Mirai neither flies nor floats.
There's a bit of a movement for battery electric ships, but currently limited to short haul ferries. I have a suspicion this simply won't be "solved" for quite some time after car and heating electrification.
Hydrogen is not great for airplanes since the extremely low density makes the tanks too large. The best solution would be synthetic hydrocarbons (synthesized using hydrogen) which can outperform fossil jet fuel.
Creating hydrogen isn't the only problem. Storage and transportation is a big one since it is an actual gas instead of a liquid. Needs to be compressed, causes embrittlement, highly flammable, etc...
It's possible to create hydrogen from coal and carbon capture is supposed to be feasible. Though I don't know how commercially viable this is.
Carbon doesn't really contain all that much hydrogen.
Feasibility is key.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSV2kVkO1w
> Carbon doesn't really contain all that much hydrogen.
The hydrogen also comes from water reacted (mildly endothermically) with carbon, and by further reaction of carbon monoxide with water.
C + H2O --> CO + H2
CO + H2O --> CO2 + H2
I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...
Cars are not investments.
Depends on the car. Some are so special they will have a better ROI than your retirement plan.
https://www.myartbroker.com/investing/articles/top-10-most-i...
I've seen exactly one of these in person while in San Diego for a month or so. I never did see a fueling station for it though.
There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment).
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
https://h2-ca.com/
And they are not even supposed to explode anymore!
If you think depreciation on a few cars is bad wait until you find out how many hundreds of millions taxpayers spent to build hydrogen stations for cars that don’t exist.
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
Not that much worse than an ev.
Used models for my five year old EV are still selling for ~50% of what I paid for, so no, its far worse than most EVs.
I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
In the US. How does their value fare in Japan?
Given the complete collapse in sales last year (-83% to 432 units, in a market of over 4M cars sold), I'd venture to guess they're faring pretty badly.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fal...
https://www.carsensor.net/usedcar/bTO/s235/index.html
When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
> An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
EVs are cheaper to own – the fuel savings are enormous.
EVs aren't cheaper to produce yet, but battery costs are still falling and they will reach parity with ICE vehicles soon.
EVs are so much more cheaper to own that it is difficult to explain to people who own ICE cars as they, in majority of cases, just cannot comprehend it
My EV has cost me ~$1,100/yr less to operate over the last few years for the same mileage compared to my ICE, and I didn't even have any major issues with my ICE. Meanwhile its been charged with almost exclusively 100% renewable, zero-emission energy.
I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
The convenience of filling is only there if you have the fuel stations. Considering how expensive it is I’d argue that it’s far better to spend that money on EV charging infrastructure, you get a lot more bang for gour buck. And EVs are arguable significantly more convenient when you have the infrastructure. Would you buy a phone that lasted a week or two, but you had to go to a phone filling station to refill it?
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
> The convenience of refilling quickly is great.
Is it more convenient than plugging in an EV overnight at home, and having a full "tank" every morning?
It is not.
Electricity supply is everywhere. More so than Gasoline supply, and far far more so than hydrogen supply.
I'll take the convenience of being able to charge my car every night compared to having to drive out of my way to go to the extremely rare hydrogen fuel station.
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
The inefficiency of creating, transporting, and converting hydrogen into motion is way too much to bear for the purpose of eliminating a 45 minute charging stop.