Mirai pricing announced

Honda has had their Hydrogen car out for several years now, and I see one every so often. I also see Mercedes and Hyundai testing and driving theirs around as well. There may be more of a future for these cars then you all think.

 

The tucson fuel cell is the number one lease leader in the US with 70 copies.

Honda has moved the date of US gen II clarity to just sometime before 2020, but speculated as 2017. Toyota thinks they will lease around 2700 mirai and sell 300 in the US by the end of 2017. That leaves us with less than 6000 fcv in the US end of 2017. To put that in perspective, the fuel cell lobby says plug-ins are selling poorly, but somehow managed to sell over 13,000 just in the month of december last year.

What kind of future in the near term, the next 10 years do you see? After that who knows, but the cars need to get better or cheaper than this generation.

 

Everything takes time to catch on, and once more and more players get involved, the more cars will sell. Toyota, Honda, GM, Mercedes Benz, Hyundai are all BIG PLAYERS. They know more then we do, and have decided there is a future in this technology.

 

Make sure you understand the criticism involved. Hopefully there is a big future for Hydrogen supplied engines. Aircraft, Tractor-Trailers and other big machinery certainly would be great platforms for either fuel cells or ICEs...if the H2 comes from sustainable sources. Likewise, I'm for any sustainable technology providing vehicle propulsion.

The criticism being leveled at Toyota and others "supporting" FCVs is all the government manipulation to take taxpayer money and fund the automakers for the technology development. Added to this is making regulation changes specifically targeted to give Fuel Cell vehicles extreme favoritism over EV and PHEV technology. Even more painful is the present H2 technology almost exclusively fuels H2 vehicles from Natural Gas. That is not sustainable.

So it is not the technology being criticized, it is the political shell game of taking taxpayer money to field a fossil fueled vehicle fleet under the banner of it being environmentally better when it is not.

 

I find it quite annoying how some people deduce that PIP is being abandoned. They aren't even mutually exclusive technologies. Each has a specific purpose and audience as well.

Planning both the rollout of FCV and the new PIP for the same time would be a waste. Why pile up liked that? It would be spreading marketing & oversight resources thin too.

 

You can spin Toyota's decisions with any logic you desire. I can only address the hard reality that they have abandoned selling the PiP in Florida for many years now.

 

What does that have to do with Gen-2 rollout and how is it influenced by FCV rollout?

We've all seen the Toyota long-term strategy plans.

Waiting to expand further into a limited market, by first introducing an upgrade, is good business.

 

So how many billions upon billions of dollars have been spent, and how many years/decades have we been waiting for daily driver hydrogen powered cars and the infrastructure to produce this clean fuel "cleanly" and distribute it to everyone? What I'm hearing now is maybe just a few thousand cars in a few more years with no support structure outside very, very limited markets with hydrogen produced from fossil fuels. So the rhetorical question is...what's wrong with this picture?

 

just give us 5 or 10 more years...

 

We're on a self-destructive path with oil.

Hydrogen is the only real solution.

What other energy carrier is available?

 

what is wrong with electricity?

 

Hydrogen can be produced from any fuel. Focusing on current production from natural gas is short sight. H2 in California already has more renewable than electricity. Why no criticism of electricity produced from NG or even Coal?

Once H2 is produced, there is no refuel bottleneck nor vehicle size upscale limit.

 

It is the energy itself, not a carrier.

When we use solar & wind to generate electricity (clean & renewable sources), not all of it can be sent to the grid for immediate use. The rest needs to be stored by some means.

There's also the reality of existing infrastructure. They're going to fight hard to retain some type of distribution & sales. Hydrogen would win their favor, as well as provide a means for consumers to rapid-refill.

 

i guess because there is no data showing it's more efficient to produce hydrogen than electricity.

 

optimism about hydrogen and pessimism about electricity are just personal beliefs. they're both way off in the future, and no one knows which will prove out.

 

to say that the electric grid is not currently optimal, and proclaim that hydrogen fueling will be cheaper and easier, is not reality, and no facts showing that to be the case. there is no political will to rebuild the grid, and hydrogen fueling will require the same if not more.

 

Plants have been producing hydrogen for billions of years. Does nature need any more proof?

 

that is such a general statement, i don't know how to respond. how does it help us down the road?

 

Toyota and the fuel cell lobby have heavily criticized the source of electricity. Mary Nichols, head of CARB and one of the chief lobbyists for fcv, in her angry letter to stephen chu claimed that hydrogen would get used in Indiana. Indiana, as if they are going to vote to fund renewable hydrogen and buy a lot fuel cell vehicles. Of course this is fiction.

SO lets look at some facts.
Tesla Trumps Toyota: The Seven Reasons Hydrogen Fuel Cell Cars Are Stalled | ThinkProgress
Now you may disagree with Mr. Romm, as the once fuel cell advocate at the DOE now is one of the leading voices against, but you have to address his points.

So while california may today at $220M in state plus major federal subsidies be able to get 33% of its hydrogen from renewable source this makes the fuel still expensive. It isn't anything likely to be rolled out to hundreds of thousands of stations, those in Indiana for Mary Nichols example, because it is so expensive. There need to be a number of breakthroughs to cut costs, and these may lead to solutions, but synthetic fuels and plug-ins are improving at the same time. The mirai isn't competing against the ev1 it is going to have to compete against the tesla model 3, and second generation volt and leaf, and other plug-ins and fuel efficient gasoline cars. I think the gen IV prius may have less ghg emissions than a mirai running on fossil based hydrogen. We await mpg values for both.

Now in California electricity to move a mile uses less fossil fuel than hydrogen cars to move a mile. Yes you could simply add to the renewable percentage, but this is much more expensive than putting the renewable into a plug-in. Why is obvious, hydrogen needs about 3 times the renewables per mile, and much more expensive infrastructure to get those renwables to a car. Audi is even working on making diesel and ethanol out of renewables, again probably less expensive than fcv plus fueling infrastructure for renewables.

When the outlander phev and tesla model S are available in less than a year we can compare the challenges of plug-ins versus hydrogen. It looks like plug-ins are ahead. For long haul trucking neither seem good. For busses plug-in seems much more scalable in terms of cost.
Five electric buses join Metro's fleet; more may be coming - LA Times

While this is more expensive than cng and diesel busses, it is much less expensive in terms of depreciation, fueling, and maintenance than fuel cell busses are today.

In 5 years we should have a better idea if hydrogen vehicles are 10 years away and always will be, or if they actually have some of these problems solved. Let us continue the test, but my bet would be in 5 years people will still be saying hydrogen is 10 years out.

 

They are *NOT* mutually exclusive!

Unfortunately, it's a very very common assumption that they are. In fact, that's the problem the cost-per-mile estimates perpetuate. Storage isn't included in those equations.

EV and FCV will coexist.

It's an interesting new type of misconception well have to find a way to overcome.