Technology

Those capabilities don’t even make sense.

— Do ICE cars have 750 mile range? No. If you could really charge a battery that quickly, there’s no real reason to have more range than a typical ICE car, and you could follow ICE car habits. The incentive would be to make the car cheaper at that point.

— will that change charging at home? Also, no. I have a 50a charging circuit, similar to my 50a stove circuit. Many houses have wiring that can support that, or it’s not too big a change to support that. That’s sufficient for a full charge on pretty much any EV (except maybe that horrible excuse for excessive consumption that is the Hummer), but I’m usually just topping off from whatever I used during the day. If anything, EVs should get more efficient, so my overnight charge will support more range. A homeowner will never be able to afford the infrastructure to support that ten minute charge time. Even, say doubling the charge: a 100a charging circuit likely means upgrading your electrical service for most people, so now it’s expensive, and most of the time that’s wasted.

— will that change supercharging? Also, no. Think of how expensive superchargers already are: you already meet or exceed the cost of fuel for ICE cars. Now imagine the cost of the infrastructure to double or triple that charging rate. Are you really going to pay that premium?

Personally I’m really liking changing my habits to treat fueling my car like my phone: plug it in at night and it’s just always ready.

Toyota, who has been putting some of the most reliable and fuel efficient vehicles on the road for decades

That's kind of my point - they want to keep doing that and they can see the market rapidly moving away from them, so they're trying to make it stop.

Solid state battery tech is indeed a worthy endeavor, I just don't believe the company to actually deliver it will be Toyota. Judging from the woeful efficiency of their BZ4x they'd need advanced battery tech to get similar range as other EVs.

It's cool tech but it's expensive. Per mile, it can't compete on price with gas let alone battery EVs.

Hydrogen isn't working out for them so now they're just delaying as much as possible.

Hydrogen cars cannot be better than battery electric cars, because the laws of physics doesn't allow them to be.

A HFCEV is just a BEV with extra steps and efficiency losses. Reverse hydrolysis is used to generate electricity (with losses) that in turn charges a small battery that drives the car.

Smaller batteries can't provide the same amount of power as larger batteries (that's why the fastest EVs always have large batteries and why performance drops as the battery gets close to empty).

Already it's a loss for HFCEVs, but the bad news doesn't end there - that ultra-pressurised hydrogen doesn't just magically appear in your tank. So we need to look into that. In fact, let's look at the whole process.

I'm going to be very generous here and assume that all hydrogen is produced with green energy - this obviously isn't the case. Hydrogen production is far more carbon-intensive than almost all national electricity grids are.

BEV:

Electricity is generated, and sent over power lines until it makes its way to a charger. This charger directly charges the battery of the car (whole process, typically over 90% efficient). The battery drives the electric motor. The car moves (electric motors, 90-97% efficient).

HFCEV:

First water must be collected and purified. I don't know how energy intensive that is, but it could be a lot. Then it needs to undergo hydrolysis, which is extremely energy intensive. The hydrogen needs to be pumped out and compressed, which requires yet more energy. From there, the hydrogen needs to be loaded onto transport, be it shipping tankers, trucks, trains. It needs to be physically transported, which is more energy. Then if it was on a tanker or train it needs to be put into smaller distribution vehicles. Then transported to a fueling station. The pumps and station needs a lot of energy to run. People fill their cars up. The car runs an (again quite energy intensive) reverse hydrolysis, which charges the battery and powers the electric motor.

There's a lot more "work" being done than sending electrons down wires.

And this is before we even get into things like infrastructure or safety. A typical hydrogen fueling station costs over $5m to build, in part due to the safety regs of pressurised hydrogen being a very explosive substance (and fueling stations have blow up before, despite them virtually not existing).

Chargers range from $600 to $10k each. Say a location has 20 of them. That's still pennies compared to a hydrogen fueling station. Petrol stations cannot be used for hydrogen. They look the same but they are not the same, even ignoring all the additional safety requirements.

Electricity on the other hand has infrastructure everywhere, even wired directly to our homes. Electricians exist everywhere, it's a widely understood technology and pretty much any electrician is capable of installing at least a home charger.

Sorry for the rant, but no, HFCEVs will not take off. They're vastly more complex. More expensive. Less safe. Less performant. Nowhere near as energy efficient. There's not really any angle you can look at where they make sense even if we assume battery tech completely stagnates.

Hydrogen is not going to happen. It's wildly impractical and there is no infrastructure for it. EV is the way of the future, but Toyota's strategy is to bring customers along with hybrids first. Most of their lineup has a hybrid powertrain, and in most cases it is the same 2.5L HEV engine, just retuned for more HP on larger vehicles. The Camry up to the Grand Highlander and their Lexus counterparts use it. Meanwhile, if they are successful with solid state battery technology, it'll make the rest of the market obsolete. Their strategy is to make incremental steps toward EV vs trying to force the market into an EV.

And how do you produce hydrogen? Either with methane (producing tons of co2) or by wasting tons of electricity with hydrolysis. BEV is the superior technology in all aspects but one: recharge time.

Hydrogen cannot compete with BEVs for passenger cars. This will never ever change, because the problem isn't even current technology, the problem is physics.

Even putting that aside for a moment, there's a reason why VW and Mercedes cancelled hydrogen R&D the second batteries became dense enough for usable car range.

There's a reason BMW, once extremely anti-EV and pro-hydrogen has now switched. There's a reason why Toyota's new CEO is distancing the company from the absolute failures their hydrogen projects have been and have said they're getting into EVs.

BMW and Toyota were the two big pro-hydrogen carmakers, and they're abandoning it.

I don't want my reply to be a massive wall of text, so my issues with the physics of hydrogen cars will be in another comment.