Mirai production begins @ 3/day

Which is why PHVs or some type of non-ICE EREV will be more popular than even an affordable 200mile BEV in the US. I don't bother with trying to be fuel efficient when driving the 600miles to my parents.

But it is a YMMV thing. The charge stop can be timed with a meal break if one is all you need. I checked out the Supercharger locations for my regular trip down south. Would need 3 charges with an S. One for a meal, and be sure to pack the Kindle and a game. Going from 9hrs to 11hrs for the trip is a jump, but the extended breaks out of the car may reduce the actual tediousness of the drive. Back in the gen2 days, there were reports of driving a hybrid lowering the person's stress. Perhaps taking breaks for charges will have the same affect. Comes down to the person.

I'd say they are in the US. The ones available, or will be, are only in small areas, and 2 of the 3 companies don't have a BEV for CARB compliance.

For Japan, or the UK for that matter, hydrogen FCVs could work out in the long run because the required infrastructure doesn't need to be built out to the scale as required for the US. Then they can also allow some independence in imported fuel amounts and selection; which is important to Japan.

They could end up replacing the ICE as the range extender for a plugin. When the car is mostly grid powered, the investment required for hydrogen infrastructure becomes smaller. Same if metal hydride hydrogen storage comes to market.

An alcohol or natural gas fueled FCV would be needed to replace a non-plugin car though.

 

I agree with you in general, but IMHO it is a mentality shift more than anything, not the size of the country. For example russians could drive from Moscow to St Petersburg, but they won't; they will opt for cheaper and faster train ride. Most japanese will use for shinkansen but some will drive from Nagoya to Aomori. Very few, yes, but then if you look at statistics there are less than 30,000 people in US who driven across country, and I suspect most of them are long distance truck drivers.

 

A bloggger here in VA (promoting EV) recently wrote that Japan already has more EV charging stations than gas stations.

 

Makes some sense, bc the time nedded for charging is much more. A gas station may have 6 or more lanes also...

 

the whole discussion about the lack of infrastructure reminds me the internet TV thing. I tried to stream foreign language broadcasts video back in late 1990's via modem and it didn't work very well as you may imagine. there was not enough internet "infrastructure" then. yet, people were saying how internet TV would be the future and i had difficulty believing it. now, i bet more people watch video through internet than the traditional broadcasting. yet it was a very slow evolutionary process.

the same will happen with alternative fuel. it will take decades to switch from oil economy to renewable energy. i have no idea whether EV or FCV will lead, we will see. I'm grateful Toyota leads here like they led with hybrids.

 

My 2 cents.
FCV currently have to rely on oil economy...
Toyota does not lead like it has done 20 years ago with the hybrids. Some other makers' FCV have been available before, and full marketing the Mirai is not going to happen, there simply is not enough demand for Toyota to produce cars like Prius NHW10 back in 1997. It's not totally Toyota fault, but the hype has been favoured a lot by the current brand marketing [we've seen this before!].

 

so you only traveled 200mi or less a day? and missed on all lesser traveled off beaten path National Parks?

 

Absolutely. 60kWh available in Mirai H2 tanks and FC stack weight 700 lbs plus 100 lbs HV battery making total 800 lbs. In comparison, the 60 kWh pack in Model S weights 1,125 lbs.

60kWh is from the plug-out feature to power your house. The actual energy available from 5kg of H2 with 60% efficiency of FC stack is 101 kWh. That is what it would allow it to have ~300 miles driving range.

The weight of the battery scales in linear, H2 doesn't. The higher the driving range, the more advantage for FCV. Ditto to the size of the vehicles.

The same could be ask of BEVs. Will they compete with electricity usage of home/manufacturing/other sectors?

Dr. Steven Chu changed his stance on hydrogen due to the availability and efficiency of generating H2 from natural gas.

Of course there are many other methods to generate H2. One of them is to mimic photosynthesis and covert directly from sun light into hydrogen and oxygen. Production has yet to start but a Japanese company has invested in it.

 

The 15amp outlet in your garage is like the dial up modem. It works for PHVs now, and can for BEVs if needed, but it is too slow to fill up a 100+ mile BEV over night. Broad band internet is already available, and so is installing a faster charger, though. The public chargers(wifi hotspots) are lacking in some ares, but they aren't required for most people's daily drives.

Refueling for hydrogen FCVs is only available in a few areas. Southern California, and perhaps a tiny area will be on the East Coast. Continuing the internet analogy, it is like the DoD's pre-internet network(ARPNET?). It is also more costly to build out than public chargers, and the timelines discussed mean renewable liquid fuels for ICEs are competition to it.

 

The best analogy I have seen.

Large downloads with modem can be done overnight, just like charging EVs overnight. However, the convenience of finishing in minutes will drive people to upgrade.

Today, cable modems are cheaper than the dial up modem used to cost.

FCV has two big obstacles. The number of (lacking) fueling stations and the vehicle cost. Both can be overcome by mass production, which is the end goal, so things will work out well for FCVs.

 

This production rate seems about right to meet the demand . . . those who advocate fuel-cell cars. Give one, even for free, to anyone who ever writes an article or paper advocating fuel-cells as 'part of a study.' Require them to keep a journal, say weekly of their experience. This is what I call 'reality training.'

My Dad used to tell me there are only two things that make man unhappy:

1. Not getting what they asked for.
2. Getting exactly what they asked for.

Bob Wilson

 

...the EV advocacy community feels strongly that CARB is giving an unfair degree of favoritism to FCV as a ZEV compliance alternative. That's the main source of the recent FCV criticism in the US. I don't know if the lobbying is having any effect as far as getting CARB/California to back off on its FCV support.

 

+1

A great suggestion, and I am not against fuel cells per sse, its the hype and demand that bevs get huge range because if we spend hundreds of billions for infrastructure and trillions to subsidize fuel cell vehicles they will be greener and more convenient.

So for those advocates out there. Buy a fuel cell car. Oops you can't. Ok move to a place where you can lease one, and use it as your sole vehicle for a month, and then tell me that infrastructure is not a problem.

Sure with your $499 lease you will get fuel included for 3 years if you can find a station where you are going and drive to it. After that they probably need to continue to give you free fuel to keep it. Get to 100,000 cumulative fcv though, you know less than 1 year US sales of plug-ins and you'll have to start paying for that fuel, and the tax payers will be fed up with the subsidies for the cars. Then it becomes who is willing to pay that much more for depreciation, maintenance, and fuel. In Japan the government can simply raise taxes and pay for more fuel cell subsidies, but not in the US. And why would we want to? FCV need a large number of breakthroughs to be competitve with plug-ins.

As long as we are only talking 10,000 vehicles in California, even at $1M subsidy per car its only $10B ;-) (US government has already spent over $3B)), Fuel cell lobby is press congress hard for more DOE budget and anouther $8K per car even though that subsidy expired with it bring only hundreds of fcv to the roads.

 

FCV were given even more favorable treatment just last year, as well as a tax increase extended to pay for hydrogen subsidies. If fcv are so much better than plug-ins and easier to sell as toyota says, what is the reason for higher credits and higher subsidies? Toyota's planned production tells that story.

We know that CARB has numerous conflicts of interests, it is even a member of the fuel cell lobby, and the former head of CARB headed both organizations at once.

 

You realize of course they can only come in one color:


Bob Wilson

 

No, we travelled about 500-750 miles per day.
more off the beaten path stops than we normally would take. We stopped a number of times in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and a variety of other places for the scenery, short hike, etc.

Part of the reason it was such a good trip may have been that we stopped and stretched our legs every 2-3 hours for 20-30 minutes.

In any event, I'm looking forward to our next cross country EV trip.

 

I am confused: for example to make from ChargePoint station in Bolder to Tesla supercharger in Grand Junction you have to travel 264mi. A few times over continental divide, so your 200mi range will be def less then stated. And you won't be able to take side trips to Loveland pass or mount Evans. There are also no super charges around Death Valley, Lassen Volcanic Field, in Yosemite Village, etc.

Really confused; perhaps your and mine definitions of "beaten path" are somewhat different?

 

Let's look back 10 & 20 years ago, when folks had already begun saying, "They could end up replacing the ICE as a range extender plugin ...." ... and saying "in the very long term (20+ years) I wonder if they [] have better potential to replace gasoline cars" (actually - they started making those claims a couple decades earlier - but never mind that).
So - from ONLY ... (never mind decades prior) 20 years back ... here we are ... still saying things like, maybe in 10 ... maybe in 20. (sigh)
Still too expensive - with promises of getting cheaper. Yet, the middle class, which continues to get poorer & poorer as our economy morphs into a $17 trillion debt burdened disaster - it's supposed to be able to afford a somewhat less expensive, expensive car. That's quite a thing to hang our hats on ...
Saying things like, "well computer memory is cheeper" and "internet is better" ... that can't guarantee to translate to "hydrogen cars will be affordable to mass markets"any more than cold fusion, because it tends to defy the known laws of physics - at least within the knowable future.
Hydrogen has SOME valid applications, yes ... but cars? Unlikely - even in ANOTHER 10 years.
.
BTW . . . . didn't we just rehash all this aleady?
First Hyundai now BMW. Ditching Fuel Cell Vehicles | PriusChat

Oh , and as we also already rehashed, Dr Stephen Chu's position - which is that hydrogen is, "an important technology" ... does NOT mean he reversed his position that it'd take FOUR miracles to ever make fuel cell cars work for the middle class. In fact, his 'important technology' statement only came after years of being beaten up by the fuel cell lobby ... just to keep the record straight.
.

 

Must be Friday! You need to find a happy hour ... and I'm posting from one.

So I was working a hard problem when up pops a message 'Upgrading your computer right now. Rebooting!'

I am fixin' my attitude and will come back to work when I won't be interrupted doing my work.

Bob Wilson