I had a funny thought walking around the Toyota FCV concept, the company's new Fuel Cell Vehicle set to go on sale beginning in 2015: This could actually be the one, I thought to myself – this could be the first fuel cell vehicle we actually see on the roads in real life.
If the hype is to be believed this time around (and you'd be forgiven for being skeptical about the arrival of this long-promised but never really delivered technology), then the stars could be aligning for hydrogen fuel cell-powered cars to take some modest steps toward reality.
First off, Toyota seems like the right company to move this vehicle forward. It's had the most luck of anyone pushing forward lower-emissions vehicles like its Prius, particularly in the hard-to-crack fuel-guzzling North American market.
As Gizmag has reported, the FCV would use Toyota's Hybrid Synergy Drive from the Prius, with a hydrogen fuel cell replacing the gas engine. Toyota claims the vehicle will have a range of 300 miles (483 km) and could be refueled in as little as three minutes, rivaling Tesla's plan to swap out entire electric vehicle batteries in just 90 seconds.
In a press conference at CES 2014, Bob Carter, a senior vice president for Toyota's automotive operations in the US, spent a significant amount of time talking not just about the FCV itself, but also about the planned 2015 rollout beginning in California. He also touched upon what is perhaps the biggest stumbling block to the whole thing – the needed fueling station infrastructure.
“The issue of infrastructure is not so much about how many, but rather, location, location, location,” said Carter. “If every vehicle in California ran on hydrogen – we could meet refueling logistics with only 15 percent of the nearly 10,000 gasoline stations currently operating in the state.”
Toyota and the University of California at Irvine collaborated on a study that found only 68 strategically-placed refueling stations between the San Francisco Bay area and San Diego could support a population of 10,000 fuel cell vehicles.
"We in the US have already asked our headquarters for substantially more volume than our original request," said Carter. "We believe that demand will outweigh our current supply plan."
He also noted that while there are only 10 active hydrogen stations in California, funding has been approved for 20 more by 2015 and 40 by 2016.
"Stay tuned," added Carter, "because this infrastructure thing is going to happen."
While Toyota focuses on the hard sell around the infrastructure issue, there's one other important thing worth mentioning about this car that I was able to experience first-hand: it's actually a pretty sexy vehicle.
After a decade of relatively boxy, cramped, uncomfortable and just plain weird-looking hybrid cars, the model on display at CES could rival a Tesla when it comes to being both zero-emissions and stylish.
What remains to be seen though is if the price will be right, and if enough of that infrastructure will materialize in time for Toyota's planned 2015 launch.
Source: Toyota
If you're going to add big features just for the looks, why not fins in the back? No, wait... already been done.
Such a car would have quite a lot of use for example if your power goes down you can use the fuel cell to power your house, also if the grid is about 100% renewable and there is a time with not enough wind/solar for days then people can just let their cars power the grid for a few days and visit the fuel station more often. Could be a lot cheaper than building power plants that only get used for a week a year.
So all we're interested in this article is where to get the fuel?
I'm pretty sure most people know which order of importance these things need "cracking".
Didn't Ford ages ago have a Ford Focus that had been converted to burn Hydrogen directly?
To me that is what we should be doing, then you can keep your existing gas guzzling cars and instead of guzzling petrol they guzzle hydrogen and produce water vapour.
All we have to crack then is a hydrogen fuelling station network and methods of ensuring that the Hydrogen tank is safe in an accident. Clearly if Toyota have this car that problem has been cracked.
Having millions of cars running around with all these weird substances in the battery that will cause a huge pollution nightmare in the future when these have to be replaced is not good. Let alone the huge costs of shipping the raw material around the World from where these rare metals are to be found such as China is a bad idea. So we finally lose our dependency on the Arab World for Oil only to create another one making us dependant on the Chinese!?
I have seen loads of projects here on Gizmag where Scientists are working on alternate ways to produce hydrogen, the most promising one was the one that used salt water and I think it was bacteria to convert the sea water into hydrogen and it also produced clean water so it could be a desalination plant as well. Why are we not pursuing this sort of thing and making ourselves entirely non-dependent on other super powers and not creating huge amounts of pollution shipping these rare metals for batteries around the World??
If cars ran on hydrogen directly rather than via a battery I would imagine all existing cars could go through a process similar to the one we currently have that converts them to run on liquid petroleum gas and in one fell swoop you have solved the pollution problem?
I think the only good thing about this is that it will encourage a hydrogen filling station network.
Siv