Toyota is listening

I think hydrogen makes sense only if you can produce it with a renewable form of energy. And since you are at that, why not use the electricity directly for an BEV. I think the argument about the H2 comes from range. And that's it. And probably the Mirai can work well in Japan, where probably Toyota has the means to build a network. I don'T see that happening any time soon anywhere in the world, except maybe as mentioned CA (parts of it).

Like the first EVs, I'd say an H2 car is useful for daily driving/community. With the difference that a socket is available everywhere if you really need it. You want to go elsewhere without the hassle of recharging., you need to rent a 19th century vehicle (like you might need to do with a Tesla in some parts of the world), or a 21st century car, like the Prius is.

I cannot believe that Toyota will never come out with a BEV. They have to do it, because the business case of the Mirai is very thin. Very.

 

Toyota, please consider making the "Z" tail lights come on with the brake lights.

Please add sound insulation to the doors, floor, roof, and firewall.

 

Because batteries suck.

They're heavy, expensive, and have poor lifetime overall.

And cost, and weight, and refueling time.

 

Condescend much?

More perhaps, but obviously not better. I strongly suggest those interested in the topic do their own research. I've read a number of presentations from critics and proponents over the years, and on balance I don't find the proponents' case convincing. The repeated error is in focusing on the FCEV as a standalone exercise instead of in the context of building a whole new grand distribution system for a new fuel, a system that does not currently exist. The consequences of that ripple on and on . . .

I'd written a lot more, but realized this is all wildly off topic, and I'm sorry for bringing it up. H2FCers are true believers, and this forum is not about their religion.

 

it's okay, toyota is listening to this as well. personally, i don't think it matters much. the governments are going to do what the governments are going to do. the manufacturers will take the easiest most profitable road based on that. the rest of us get what we get.

 

In the U.S. the gov't is going to favor giving portions of the gasoline market to alternative fuels such as ethanol and BEV and H2 FCV for reasons of national security <NOT REALLY>. The real reason is to stimulate job creation.

 

I'm holding off on a purchase until I can reconcile my feelings about the spare tire issue. I want a top level trim... and I want a spare tire. I've purchased the lowest trim of every car I've ever owned. Because: sacrifice for the family. Well, now I'm retired. I want all the goodies in my next car. All of them. This one is for me and no one else.

 

Please be aware the non-spare 4 and 4 Touring can be converted by several different techniques. The 3 and 3 Touring have the spare. Basically you can ask the dealer to move the 3 rear insert and spare over to a 4, if you and the dealer wanna go that way.

Mariposa Grove is closed so we took the path less traveled to hike over to Tuolumne Sequoia grove, quite a hike due to the huge redwoods fallen over the hiking path and it was still a little snowy and wet so it was hard and messy to get over the down trees. Talking Yosemite here.

 

For me the path of least resistance would be: stay with level 3. Or wait a year or two, see if the situation changes. Suspect it won't though.

Also check out Toyota Canada levels: they all have spare except the level with optional (you guessed it) tech package.

 

Anywhere you can put in an electric charging station, you can put in an H2 filling station that has the capability to "charge" a car at a rate of about five miles of range per second (compared with around five miles per minute with a supercharger station or five miles per hour with a 120V outlet), while using ten times less peak power than a supercharger station does.

 

But so what? They take all day to charge. The problem is supercharger stations are way too slow, and way too few.

If there's a line for a supercharger, there's power for H2 production, and the advantage is, the "charging" is done in advance so the car being charged doesn't have to be there for it. You just fuel up in three minutes and go. When you're on a road trip, that's an absolutely MASSIVE advantage. And one line for a supercharger can produce enough H2 to refuel around 20-30 cars a day, all of which could be done in an hour, if necessary. In other words, it's as good for road trippers as 6-8 supercharger stations.

 

Neither are relevant here in Australia, but particularly H2 - you can't buy H2 except in one outlet in a small city in the country - and then only if it's a Hyundai. And unless you're restricted to short commutes in the main capitals, full electric isn't going to be relevant due to lack of chargers. PHEV or hybrid are the only ones making sense here for probably the next ½ decade.

 

Just not going to let this H2FC proselytizing go, huh? This is kind of what I was expecting, and why I know this is going absolutely nowhere. Once you've drunk the H2FC koolaid, it's very hard to hear inconvenient criticisms, and sadly all too easy to assume the mantle of enlightened futurist. I don't know LJ's credentials, but I know those of the folks I've read, and I've reached my conclusions based on their informed opinions, arguments, and counter-arguments (and honestly, the likely agendas of their organizations). I'm not asking anyone to believe me - just do your own reading and think through the whole stack of issues instead of embracing the H2FC fantasy because it sounds so wonderful (which it kinda does). But, with apologies to the forum that I'd tried not to clutter with this, to my own reactions (and all that writing I said I'd withheld) . . .

That bit about peak power's pretty funny, since an H2 station doesn't really have a choice on that score - it's not practical to generate that 5 mi/sec refill in real time, so you'll need storage tanks, right? Heck, two can play at that game - you give me the real estate and the money you're going to use for your mini-H2 plant, and I'll put in energy storage to allow buffering my battery-charging electrons (which is pretty much what Superchargers do, come to think of it). Peak power problem addressed.

As for putting a H2 station anywhere you could put a DCQC station, well, no, as a practical matter, you absolutely can't. Have you ever SEEN a DCQC station? They need a footprint of something like 20 sq. ft., and that's being generous.

But let's ignore esoteric physical realities like size and space and move on to more mundane matters. As opposed to the magical land of unicorns and free hydrogen, I live in the real world, where I can put in dozens of DCQC stations for the cost of one H2 station, and where H2 stations will have to provide the energy for 100% of miles driven by FCEVs, where DCQC's share of BEV miles driven is in the single digits (vs. just topping off from the grid at home overnight). Again, this is the key difference you keep overlooking. I do not know, maybe you're a traveling salesman, in which case H2FC would seem like a great idea. For those of us who park our cars in our own garages overnight, most BEVs don't need any public charging for everyday use, much less DCQC. Public charging is an enhancement/supplement for BEVs; for FCEVs, H2 stations are the whole shooting match. But even though you literally can go nowhere without H2 stations, you somehow think it's reasonable to say:

Are you high? Electricity is literally everywhere - stop pretending that we need a dedicated BEV charging station on every street corner for vehicles that operate within range of the garages where they charge. Those public chargers are the only "infrastructure" that's missing, and they're not nearly as essential as you're trying to argue. Even in the hypothetical case where the whole BEV idea leaves the mass market, there's going to be electricity in any house I'll buy, and I can use it to charge my BEV. Comparing that situation to H2 verges on the delusional. If you're foolish enough to buy a Mirai and the CA government subsidies for building/maintaining H2 infrastructure stop, or FCEVs are determined to be a dead end for whatever other reason, you'll have yourself a comfortable trailer to be towed around in, nothing more. If I'm wrong on that point, please post info here on where we can buy our home H2 generation and storage systems now so folks can assess the affordability and feasibility of that option.

Only if by "entire system" you mean one car, Mr. Research. You repeatedly gloss over the basic problems of building out this unnecessary and redundant hydrogen-generation infrastructure. My grid's everywhere - yours is in very few places outside your imagination. The mistake, repeated again and again, is talking about the virtues of FCEVs in a vacuum, when in fact their practicality depends on a massive outlay of capital to effectively replicate the gasoline distribution system for a new fuel, something I don't have to do for BEVs. The fact that this "fuel" is generated instead of mined just takes us back to the problem of the energy it takes to do that generation.

But never mind - let's be fair and get back to "entire system" in the sense that you meant it - the system inside the vehicle, which you claim is way more efficient because the vehicle doesn't have to haul those stupid heavy batteries. And sure enough, the Mirai does manage 67 MPGe, impressive until you realize it's 32 miles less than the Tesla Model S at 89 MPGe. Looks to me like the Model S could haul around hundreds of pounds more battery before matching the overall inefficiency of the Mirai. Whatever the advantage from weight savings, it doesn't seem to be enough to achieve better MPGe, so I'm not sure I'd score this a win for H2FC.

BTW, I notice some of your comments suggest you're thinking about putting more battery in a FCEV to use it as a plug-in/FC "hybrid". If so, that idea has its merits, but you'll be adding that battery weight to the Mirai, which last I checked was an all-H2 exercise, and whoops, there goes that MPGe down some more.

It seems to me you're doing a lot of cherry-picking to arrive at your pro-FCEV conclusions.

Nicely weasel-worded, but no sale. They're entirely practical for many use cases, and who said they had to be all-around vehicles right now? Most households have multiple vehicles, and if a BEV can "only" handle 95% of a particular household's actual transportation needs, why not own one given the other significant benefits (lower TCO, excellent performance, laughably low maintenance)? That's today, and every year I've owned my BEV it's only gotten more potentially useful with build-out of that public charging infrastructure you regard as essential (since it sure the heck is for H2FC) but I never use.

Yeah, again, as noted above, the only infrastructure I believe already exists is the electrical grid, because it does.

Now, shall we compare the itinerary limitations of a Tesla vs. a Mirai? Where is your Mirai going without a tow? Nowhere outside of CA, that's where. Don't like waiting for a Tesla to charge in the hinterlands? How would you refuel a Mirai at any rate in those areas? This is just more of the cherry-picking, "heads I win, tails you lose" selective arguing I noted above.

So let's be fair, apples to apples. On a road trip where there are H2 stations and Superchargers wherever they're needed, starting with full tank/batteries, how many hours do you plan to spend behind the wheel, taking how many breaks? I'm going to stop my Tesla every three hours for a half-hour break at a plaza with Superchargers, rest rooms, and a diner. And with your Mirai, you're doing what? Sitting in your diaper, washing down CLIF bars with Red Bulls? Nah. Let's say your hefty bladder and lack of interest in anything but McDonald's means you're stopping for 20 minutes every four hours. So if we're driving 12 hours in a day (which I don't recommend, but I'm a wimp), I'll need 13:30 for my four legs separated by three :30 breaks. And you, you master of time efficiency, you, you'll take 12:40 (three 4:00 legs separated by two :20 breaks), for a grand total savings of less than 1 hour, on the sort of long-haul trip that you claim gives H2FC an overwhelming advantage.

For this infrequently realized and incremental benefit, you want to build out a multi-billion-dollar system of stations over a decade or more (because of the whole chicken and egg thing slowly boot-strapping its way into a virtuous circle), during which time you're betting that the whole shooting match won't be rendered obsolete by an unexpected breakthrough? Seriously, compared to that, building out DCQC is like buying a T-bill.

Look, I hope lots of folks keep working on H2's problems, because it does have the very real advantages that you've described, and maybe great engineering and some tech breakthroughs can make the concept a practical reality. Pretending that's already the case is either dishonesty or self-deception. Implying that today's BEVs should be disregarded because they aren't a 100% solution for 100% of use cases in 100% of the country is no better. You can dispute all this, and doubtless some will want to believe you. Again, I would just urge them to spend some time researching this for themselves. It's an interesting topic and there are smart people arguing about it, so I don't think they'll be bored.

 

TOYOTA is not listening or we would not be saddled with Entune for another generation of cars.

Almost every mfg has gone to a version of Android auto , or have a model featuring it ..but Toyota .

Kenny

 

yes, they're a bit tone deaf in certain areas. entune must be a sweet little profit center.

 

Now if they did a flow battery and gave us "stations" we could refill/exchange the liquid... EV without the range anxiety.

Also read somewhere that hydrogen my not be feasible long term as the transport tubing will eventually allow leaking... but don't know how accurate that may be.

 

the only thing i want to know about hydrogen is, where is it going to come from? and please don't give me the cow poop theory again, i'm too old to believe that bull$h!t.

 

From electricity and water. It's just an energy carrier, the same as batteries are, just with different properties, some better, some worse. H2 is the energy carrier in NiMH batteries.

 

No, it's not addressed. I can recharge a gasoline or H2 vehicle at 5MW equivalent. Even a 90kWh Tesla battery can't come close to absorbing energy that fast. So the peak power problem is "fixed" by the fact that it takes 45 minutes to charge, instead of 3 minutes.

Yeah...got one where I work.

Which is, of course, nothing.

But let's ignore esoteric physical realities like size and space and move on to more mundane matters. As opposed to the magical land of unicorns and free hydrogen, I live in the real world, where I can put in dozens of DCQC stations for the cost of one H2 station, and where H2 stations will have to provide the energy for 100% of miles driven by FCEVs,

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The problem is, you need dozens of quick charge stations for every H2 station because charging takes so darned long. And I'm not proposing cars that run on H2, I'm proposing plug in hybrids with H2FC range extenders. That's how 2/3 to 3/4 of the miles don't come from H2.

I'm a power electrical engineer who's spent his entire career doing energy research.

Which is fine, if you don't leave the city. Even L2 charging is mostly unnecessary for that. But so is a 200+ mile range.

A road trip is something else altogether.

For such vehicles, you don't need charging stations at all, or 200+ mile ranges. A Leaf and a 120V outlet is all you need. Tesla's tote around an extra 800 pounds of batteries all the time for nothing if that's their use case.

I take probably 30 trips a year you couldn't do in a Leaf and 12 you couldn't do in a Tesla without significant delays. And most of that is just to visit family, go up in the mountains, or go to neighboring towns.

You finally caught on.

Because the other 5% have to be handled by another car, reducing the value of the BEV by the cost of the other car. That makes a Model 3 worth about $5k to me. Think I can pick one up for that?

The electric infrastructure is totally useless if you don't have a charge station. That's why Elon is busy trying to build superchargers and destination chargers as fast as possible. The same problem could be solved with H2 stations at the same locations using the same power system.

I'm going to stop every couple of hours, for no more than 10 minutes a stop except for meals. And I'm not going to choose my meals or my route based on where charging stations exist.

I'm planning a trip next year that has a stretch with nearly 800 miles between supercharger stations. I'm planning a second trip that would require a BEV with a 480 mile range.

The supercharger and destination charging system is free in your world?

Look, it's very simple. I just took a trip that you would not be able to take in a Tesla P90D without serious delays, missing some of the things we did, or taking extra days to fit everything in, and that's because of the fact that supercharger stations are too slow and too sparce. And that was in a trip across the midwest mostly on major highways. Next year's trip is going to take us hundreds of miles away from any supercharger station, and that's in the middle of the country. Even if they were available, talking kids into standing around in a parking lot for 45 minutes while you charge isn't going to work. I got a bit of feedback from a 5 minute gas stop at times because they were in and out of the bathroom before I finished filling up, and had to wait for me to get out after the tank was full. That 2 minutes in the car sitting at the gas pump was stressful. Imagine 45 minutes at a supercharger station. It's so bad that 95% of the time, I'd skip supercharger stations even if they were right on the side of the road, or just stay for no more than 8 minutes.

If you want BEVs to be practical for road trips, you need to be able to put in 170 miles of range in 8 minutes, you need to be able to do that no more than 2 miles from any location in any city with more than 30,000 people, or you need a 1,000 mile range with batteries that weigh 200kg and cost $4,000.