Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
Not everyone can recharge at home. Hydrogen have all of the same advantages except recharging at home (and even this is a “kinda”, because home refueling is possible, and plug-in cars exist).
The problem is that we are hitting the limits of the BEV, and no amount of handwaving is going to make the problems go away. This mirrors the push for ethanol powered cars, and sudden realization that we cannot grow enough corn to make it happen. And fantasies about how China or whatever solving the problems is just a repeat of cellulosic ethanol, which was suppose to magically solve the problems of ethanol production.
Storage and transportation of hydrogen continue to be the limiting factor for hydrogen and those hurdles don’t seem like they can be cleared easily. Only Toyota has really given it much of a try and the hydrogen stations are available in very limited areas. Plus with how complicated the stations are and the problems they can encounter, I’ve heard they go out of order pretty frequently. Plus the number of vehicles that can fuel at the same time is limited. Given how the hydrogen has to be pressurized or liquefied or whatever, I’m struggling to understand how a home setup would work.
The cool thing about batteries is that there are all sorts of materials to choose from. For example, sodium-ion batteries are hitting the scene now. There are trade-offs, but options are there. Yes, not everyone can recharge at home, but it’s a lot easier to set up a charging station than a hydrogen fuel station (or a gas station, for that matter). I think the best option at this point is a plug-in hybrid petrol vehicle, though the downside is the complexity of the drivetrain.
Those are wildly exaggerated. The main limitation is that society hasn’t invested enough in hydrogen infrastructure. At least not yet. The problems would quickly go away if we did.
You also forget that we’ve poured many billions of dollars into electrification and battery production. That amount of investment would have solved a lot of those limitations.
As green hydrogen is made from water, there is basically no battery chemistry that can rival it in terms of availability. It is basically the best energy storage mechanism of this type already. Saying that batteries can get better is just misdirection. Also, you can have plug-in hydrogen cars too. The natural path is probably hybrids -> PHEVs -> plug-in FCEVs. Pure BEVs are in many ways a side-trip.
You’re downplaying the efforts involved in making hydrogen mainstream. Hydrogen infrastructure would be more costly to build out because you need specialized tanks and mechanisms to pressurize/liquefy hydrogen to make it easier to store. You’d also need to convert gas stations to hydrogen stations which is very costly. Hydrogen fuel stations can’t serve as many vehicles as a petrol station at a time and hydrogen being less dense means needing a much bigger tank to serve a day’s worth of vehicles. Then there’s the matter of generating hydrogen. Most productive processes now not are green.
The money poured into improved batteries has many applications other than vehicles. Hydrogen doesn’t have as many consumer applications. It’s not necessarily true that more investment in hydrogen would solve its problems because there may be roadblocks you’re not anticipating. Battery tech is improving all the time, but you’re calling it misdirection even though hydrogen isn’t anywhere near as viable. Water is more available than petrol, but that doesn’t mean hydrogen is more practical than petrol.
At the end of the day, you are just turning sunlight/wind and water into a fuel. The marginal cost is nearly zero. Which is why the development trajectory will be the same as the rise of wind and solar energy. Both of those ideas also had nearly zero marginal cost. As a result, you can expect hydrogen fuel to be extreme cheap and basically inexhaustible. That is a major advantage and there is nothing batteries can ever do to match that.
I wonder if you are projecting here: Hydrogen, not batteries, have many more applications. You can’t even make the steel used to make a car without a reducing agent like hydrogen. Same is true of the metals in the battery itself. So if we want to hit zero emissions for real, hydrogen is mandatory, but batteries are not. In fact, BEVs are totally dependent on green hydrogen to real reach zero emissions. Everything from industry to long-duration energy storage all requires hydrogen. You can skip BEVs altogether but you cannot avoid hydrogen.