Platinum Cost in a Toyota FCV

Considering Mirai has no catalytic converter, the additional cost is less than some people try to overblow.

 

For a $50k car, the platinum cost isn't big. For a $30k one, one to two hundred dollars for a catalytic convert is a lot less than a thousand for a fuel cell. But the high cost isn't just the platinum. There is the total cost of the total fuel cell and high pressure tanks. While those costs could come down in time, there is the high cost of a hydrogen network on top of that. So even if FCEVs get to ICE car costs, roll out will be slow, and the cars not even available in some ares because of those costs.

 

You are preaching to the choir.

DBCassidy

 

Catalytic convertors don't cost that much. It might cost that much to replace with labor, if the joints and bolts are all corroded.

 

Like the cost of lithium in a tesla, the cost of the platinum in a fcv is not a big percentage of its price, but helps limit how low it can go.

In a simple aluminum air battery you don't need to process the aluminum much, and could probably sell the battery at 3x the price of the aluminum, about $150 for a 1000 mile primary cell, and of course the aluminum oxide is recycleable to help pay for the next one. For batteries lithium must be alloyed and manufactured adding to the cost, and we are about $14,000 for the 70kwh (satisfactory price) battery to power a tesla for 240 miles using less than $1000 worth of lithium. Perhaps people can get it down to $70/kwh. The gigafactory will use more US lithium which is more expensive to mine than south american lithium, but this will have much lower transpiration costs (panasonic currently ships the lithium from south america to japan, then the cells from japan to california, versus simply mining and using the lithium in nevada with some tax breaks to support us mining jobs.

For fuel cells the manufacturing cost is even more. That is where manufacturing innovation, or easier to work with materials (technical breakthroughs) come in. I would expect that if fcv start selling in the hundreds of thousands, which the doe thinks is necessary for the manufacturing costs to significantly come down, the price of platinum and palladium will rise. The key is technical advances at these lower levels to get the price down, or enough government money to get to the higher levels.

 

GM, Honda join forces for one fuel cell design

How's the progress on the fuel cell stack?

It's coming down very, very quickly in terms of precious metal loading. The workhorse fuel cell stacks have 29 grams of platinum. The next-gen stack is down in the 10 gram range. The next generation is running in our laboratory now. Weight is down by almost one half. Size is also down by almost one half. And cost has come down in orders of magnitude.

Source

 

Nice from the interview

It will be nice when they get the costs down so that variable manufacturing prices are bellow sales prices. Definitely not in this generation but maybe in 2 (ten years?) or maybe 5, or maybe never. If you lose money on each one, you won't be able to increase volume.

 

my understanding is that the Platinum stack elements were sized as small as possible to keep costs down. But if the precious metals markets keep tanking, that would be a great time to build a bigger stack. That would give Toyota's hydrogen car a better "oomph" off the line. What dues it do from 0-60mph? 10seconds? 12? A bit more power would be nice, if you're shelling out $57k. Plus, with a bigger stack, it wouldn't need as large a battery pack.
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