Here's Why Toyota's New Hydrogen Car is the Future (Goodbye Tesla)

what's the first thing you think of when you hear the word hydrogen maybe you think of the first element in the periodic table or the hydrogen bomb or maybe the zeppelin and here's a fun question what does cow manure have to do with automotive engine today we're looking at hydrogen engines how do hydrogen cars work and how do they differ from cars with internal combustion engines and from battery powered electric vehicles there are two ways to power a modern car most cars today use the internal combustion engine ice or internal combustion engines burn petroleum-based fuel generate heat and push pistons up and down to drive the transmission and the wheels when we hear the word electric vehicle many people tend to think of the battery powered ev or bev like tesla model s nissan leaf and the chevy bolt battery-powered electric cars have already achieved a certain popularity more than two million of these cars are on the planet's roads right now and networks of charging stations have been created for them in europe and the u.s typically a battery ev doesn't have an internal combustion engine fuel tank or exhaust pipe but relies on an electric motor hydrogen cars are a type of electric car but with an entirely different electrical technology yes you heard it right it's not about electricity consumption but electricity production hydrogen car is a type of fuel cell vehicle or fcev fuel cells are like a cross between an internal combustion engine and battery power like an internal combustion engine they make power by using fuel from a tank but unlike an engine a fuel cell doesn't burn the hydrogen instead it's fused chemically with oxygen from the air to make water the process somewhat resembles what happens in a battery electricity gets released and then used to power an electric motor to drive the car you can think of fuel cells like batteries that never run flat but instead of slowly depleting the chemicals as in a normal battery fuel cells can run on a steady supply of hydrogen and keep making electricity as long as there's hydrogen in the tank what are some of the practical differences between a battery-powered electric vehicle versus a hydrogen one first it can take hours to fully charge a battery ev if you don't have access to a fast charger even with a full battery most battery electric vehicles struggle to travel half the distance of a conventional car on a full tank but fuel cell cars don't have that problem hydrogen can be pumped into a vehicle's fuel tank just like gas you can fill it up quickly the same way you do with gasoline or diesel so how does a fuel cell make electricity from hydrogen a fuel cell has three key parts similar to that in a battery a positively charged terminal a negatively charged terminal and electrolyte which is a separating chemical between the positive and negative terminal here's how it works hydrogen gas travels from the tank to the positive terminal oxygen from the air enters the negative terminal the positive terminal is made of platinum a metal catalyst designed to speed up the chemistry that happens in the fuel cell when hydrogen atoms reach the catalyst they split up into hydrogen protons and electrons the protons are positively charged they're attracted to the negative terminal so they travel through the electrolyte towards the negative terminal in the meantime the electrons flow through the outer circuit and thereby power the electric motor that drives the car's wheels eventually the electrons arrive at the negative terminal too at the negative terminal the protons and electrons recombined with oxygen from the air this chemical reaction produces water the water gets released from the exhaust pipe as water vapor or steam how safe are hydrogen cars well first of all they don't need gasoline so you don't have to worry fire or explosion risk from gasoline also they don't need to be plugged into an electric socket they produce zero exhaust emissions and can drive 300 miles or more on one tank of fuel researchers state that they're just as safe as a gasoline car one research test involved shooting ammunition at a hydrogen gas tank the goal was to understand how the hydrogen would behave under intense pressure despite initial hypotheses it turned out that the punctured tanks released the stored hydrogen so quickly that even if it were to catch fire it would have left the tank before the explosion could occur that's because hydrogen is the lightest chemical element it's about 14 times lighter than air which is mostly oxygen and nitrogen so even though it's easy to ignite it also evaporates faster anyway when the bullets broke through the tank of liquid hydrogen the ignited gas evaporated into the air so quickly that the researchers were somewhat upset because nothing exciting happened after the experiment they decided hydrogen should be stored in large ventilated tanks that are higher above ground this setup optimizes how fast the hydrogen can access outside air and disperse quickly if anything bad did happen another experiment was done directly on an ordinary gasoline car the researchers broke a fuel line and then set fire to the gas knife separately they also set fire to hydrogen on the tank of an suv of course it's obvious what happened to the gas car but the hydrogen car wasn't damaged because the burning hydrogen gas dispersed into the air and dissolved before any damage could be done they repeatedly tested the pressure tanks with hydrogen and found them to be safe even in the event of collision the toyota mirai for example has the hydrogen tank that's built in a three-layer structure toyota says it can absorb five times more crash energy than steel the honda clarity has dual hydrogen tanks made of layers of aluminum carbon fiber designed to withstand both extreme pressure and high temperatures machines with hydrogen engines have sensors which sound an alarm and shut off valves and fuel lines in case of hydrogen leaks so you can rid the feeling that you're driving a four wheeled hydrogen bomb so why are many car manufacturers switching their attention from gas and diesel engines to hydrogen engines well the internal combustion engine market is facing a change for many reasons there's a limit to hydrocarbon resources like crude oil and many countries and cities want to reduce the environmental pollution and are considering banning sales of cars that run on gasoline or diesel so the days of gas and diesel engines are numbered a study published in the bloomberg news energy finance projected that annual sales of electric cars including hydrogen cars will increase 35 percent by 2040. analysts also project that the cost of hydrogen cars will decrease over time they estimate that by 2025 the cost of hydrogen cars will equal to the average cost of a conventional internal combustion engine car today hydrogen cars can be purchased at an average price of 60 000 what are the disadvantages with hydrogen technology one of them ironically is hydrogen production as of 2019 98 of the hydrogen is produced by steam conversion of methane which produces carbon dioxide which is the very thing we don't want from cars in the late 1800s before the appearance of automobiles european architects feared that large cities would drown and horse manure today large cities create air pollution daily on the surface hydrogen cars themselves have zero emissions and are environmentally friendly but on a global scale the production of hydrogen that fuel these cars does create carbon monoxide emissions as a byproduct so it's not the perfect solution either toyota operating officer shigeki tarashi showed how revolutionary car technology could be at the tokyo motor show in 2019. he chose a non-standard example using a toyota mirai fuel cell electric vehicle evidently the manure from one cow can provide enough fuel to power a hydrogen car for one year and he wasn't kidding the company has been looking into cow manure for several years now in 2017 toyota announced michelle that they'll build a power plant in long beach california that will take methane from dairy cattle manure and convert it into water electricity and hydrogen in 2018 the companies implemented the project called trigen for filling stations for hydrogen trucks and this is just the beginning another challenge is the need to construct an infrastructure of filling stations that can supply high pressure hydrogen this means that companies need to invest in the stations themselves as well as the production and compression of hydrogen and also the transportation to all of the filling station currently the toyota mirai is only available in two places where hydrogen filling exists california and hawaii in california most of the hydrogen filling stations are only within los angeles and the bay area if the owner of a hydrogen car wants to go to another part of the country well dream on because hydrogen infrastructure barely exists anywhere in the u.s new york and connecticut have some stations but they're still several years behind california the third problem is the cost of hydrogen gasoline is sold by volume and gallons where hydrogen is sold by weight in kilograms a gallon of gas has about the same energy as a kilogram of hydrogen gallon of gas is averaging about 220 right now whereas the average price of hydrogen for a light duty fuel cell ev in california is 16 dollars a kilogram so you can really see the difference another way to think of it most fuel cell evs carry five to six kilograms of hydrogen but go twice the distance of an internal combustion engine car with equivalent gas in a tank that works out to a gas per gallon equivalent between five and six dollars the choice is yours it all depends on your preference and lifestyle only time will tell what's the best choice for the environment and for our wallets if you like this episode please subscribe for more tech and history related videos thank you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Scotty Kilmer

Views: 1,032,033

Rating: 4.8220739 out of 5

Keywords: hydrogen, hydrogen car, toyota, toyota mirai, new car, new hydrogen car, here's why, here's why toyota's hydrogen engine is genius

Id: tnzuuLpYFVg

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Paladin32776]

Wow. I guess I sell my Tesla and get the Hydrogen-Tesla-Killer. Oh, wait: I can’t buy it because it doesn’t exist ... darn. Was already waving my Tesla goodby ....