Want A Free Car?
Fuel-cell cars like the 2023 Toyota Mirai can be bought for $52,000, but if you act quickly, you can save $40,000. With the $15,000 in free hydrogen over six years and the option for a loan with no interest, Toyota is pretty much paying people $3,000 to get rid of their cars.
If you can find the hydrogen to run it, it would be great.
Shell announced three weeks ago that it would be stopping its hydrogen filling stations in California. This discount from Toyota comes right after that. For the record, the oil company only had seven stations to begin with, and five of them were broken. However, that’s still more than 10% of the stations in California, and most of them are near Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership says that of the ones that are still there, about a quarter are not working.
California was and still is the only state where it makes sense to have a fuel cell vehicle—as long as there is a working gas station close. Also, if you blink. You cocked your head.
Just don’t tell Honda, because they just recently found the time to turn their best-selling CR-V into a plug-in hybrid fuel-cell vehicle, which is kind of like Frankenstein’s monster in the car world.
The crossover’s 17.7 kWh battery gives it a range of 29 miles when running on electricity alone. When that runs out, the front-mounted fuel cell starts taking hydrogen from two carbon-fiber tanks. Both tanks take up a lot of room in the trunk. One is under the back seat and the other is behind it.
What do you get for all that trouble and compromise? A range of 270 miles, which is about the same as a mid-range electric car. However, the EV can go anywhere, not just LA or SF.
As a fuel source for many parts of a carbon-free economy, hydrogen has a lot of promise. It could be used to heat factories, make steel, and ship goods long distances. That’s why a lot of hydrogen startups are marketing themselves as carbon-free options for those industries. Electric Hydrogen has raised $600 million and wants to work with companies that make steel, electricity, methanol, and ammonia. Advanced Ionics, a finalist in Startup Battlefield 2023, is aiming the hydrogen from its electrolyzers at companies that make ammonia and chemicals. Hgen is also after ammonia and steel. Do you see a pattern?
The only place hydrogen hasn’t caught on is in powering passenger cars and trucks. Still, hydrogen production and delivery aren’t stable enough for owners of the Mirai or CR-V to go on road trips. Also, fuel cells aren’t cheap, even though the Mirai is on sale right now. Also, FCEVs will need to run on green hydrogen instead of the gray hydrogen that comes from fossil fuels today if they want to cut down on carbon pollution. They’re not much better for the environment than advanced hybrids until that happens.
It’s pretty clear that light-duty cars with no emissions will need to use batteries in the near future. That being said, why do Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and other companies still think hydrogen is a good idea?
Behind closed doors, it’s hard to know what goes on, but automakers may be pushing fuel cells for a number of reasons. Cynical people think that automakers know that hydrogen infrastructure and fuel-cell vehicles won’t be ready for at least ten years. But by promoting the benefits of the drivetrain, such as its quick fueling, they can persuade people who aren’t sure about electric vehicles (and politicians) to buy fossil fuel-powered cars for now. In a way, it’s like they wanted to project an image of being environmentally friendly and technologically advanced while avoiding electric cars, which are the most common way people think of a future with low-emissions transportation.
A kinder view is that the businesses can’t do anything about their internal inertia. Fuel cells might just get the engineers and executives of the businesses excited. Like internal combustion engines, they are complicated and mostly mechanical. Pumps and tubes bring in fuel, and exhaust pipes take it away. Batteries, on the other hand, are almost always made by outside sources, so most of the design and production know-how can stay in-house.
Lastly, automakers may believe that customers won’t switch until electric cars can be refueled as quickly as gas-powered cars. But even though EV charge times keep going down, they probably will never be as short as five minutes like hydrogen can. Automakers may really think that an extra five or ten minutes will make or break a deal for most customers.
Also Read: Toyota Tells 50,000 Us Car Owners to Stop Driving and Get Fixes Done Right Away
Automakers might be proven right one day. If the hydrogen companies of today are successful and can build up enough capacity to meet the needs of shipping and industry, it might be a good idea to start selling fuel-cell cars to regular people. How many years from now is that day? Or maybe twenty? Let’s put it this way: no one has it on their plan right now.
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