Accuracy Issues Real Reason For Free Hydrogen For FCV Owners

They're not dumb, but why can't they design a car that doesn't frighten women and children

Honda and Hyundai are in it too. Being a large automaker doesn't qualify you to make good business decisions, as GM, Ford, and Chrysler often prove.

I keep thinking that they have a trick up their sleeves, like reforming ammonia on the fly to produce the hydrogen for the fuel cell. Whatever it may be, these guys sincerely believe that the fueling and efficiency issues will be addressed. There just isn't enough PR value in these efforts for it to be merely green-washing.

@ClutchCarGo No tricks, just plain old government subsidies in Japan. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/26/business/international/japan-bets-big-on-cars-powered-by-hydrogen-fuel-cells.html?_r=0

@Lie2me It actually looks kind of weirdly cool in person. Better than a Prius.

@ClutchCarGo Bingo. (I don't know that that's the trick, but they know something that isn't obvious.)

@SCE to AUX Off the top of my head, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, GM, Ford, Nissan, and Daimler all have FC cars in/near production and/or FC systems at late stages of development. I may be missing some.

@John Rosevear Damning with faint praise, I see

@ClutchCarGo http://phys.org/news/2014-06-hydrogen-breakthrough-game-changer-future-car.html

Could be like Mazda and the Rotary. They were one of the first to get it feasible in a passenger car, however because they were at it alone, they couldn't get it to a high enough level of "perfection" to compete with Piston engines (apex seals, oil consumption, etc) Honda and Toyota are the same, they've sunk Millions (Billions?) into H2 development since before BEV were anything but a hobby. 15 years ago H2 and CNG were the leading non-gasoline technologies. They just need to admit defeat. The JDM would be better served by BEV than these, since they don't have Nat Gas to make H2 from, they are stuck with electrolysis. If you are going to be consuming electricity, get the BEV efficiency as NW pointed out, and reduce the number of Nuclear or Themal Power plants required to produce the elctricity.

@Silverbird Makes total sense, thanks

H2 fuel cells are merely plays for 9 CARB credits, nothing more. The energy it takes to electrolyze 1kg of H2 from water (60mpkg) would drive an electric car would move an electric car at least 100mi. When fuel cells hit $50/kW unsubsidized and H2 at the retail pump is $2/kg or less with pumps as common as diesel, and you can fit 100kW of fuel cell stack in the volume of a 4cyl engine, then maybe it's worth looking at. There will never be an H2 pipeline infrastructure and will never be H2 home filling, so cheap-enough H2 will only come from reformulating onsite or really cheap nuclear power (like 2c/kWh delivered).

There isn't much reason for automakers to invest seriously into EVs. They are manufacturers, not scientists, and can contribute little to improving batteries or other power storage technology. Those sort of advances would probably come from academia, and the automakers can adapt to those easily enough if those improvements do happen -- it won't be hard for the OEMs to build mass market EVs if the batteries make that leap forward. But that doesn't mean that hydrogen will work. However, automakers probably are in a position to improve fuel cells, and they'll own the IP if they achieve sustainable results. It can't hurt for them to try, and they're being pressured to do it, anyway.

@silverbird the problem with the rotary is that the design constraints imposed by an engine with three moving parts dictate that the combustion chamber must have the worst possible shape for efficiency. If it didn't have such a constraint, the rest of the big car companies would have porduced them.

@John Rosevear The work progresses http://www.greencarcongress.com/2014/11/20141121-doeh2.html

@David C. Holzman Hydrogen has a similar problem. Just like the rotary's poor combustion chamber shape is inherent in the design and can't be corrected , the thermodynamic inefficiency inherent in a hydrogen powered vehicle is not something that can be engineered out.

@ Dr. KN: What you said.

@ClutchCarGo Every engineer I have been able to talk to about their fuel cell programs seems to believe in the effiency. They seem to think that the only two real hurdles to overcome are the cost of the fuel cell itself, and being able to store an element that has the smallest molecular size and can therefore seep through anything.

>> Toyota’s not dumb, guys. Let's see now... the Scion iQ, Scion itself, ...

@Lie2me To me, it's the automotive equivalent of the "Antichrist" - promises salvation, but delivers the opposite. IOW, the "look" represents its true nature. ;-)