- There was so much security they had to put covers over
the cameras on our phones. (air whooshing) We're back from our road trip. I'm here with my production
crew, these wonderful people. I've been saying that I
care about renewable energy and the environment, and I
want a sustainable future. But how do you show that
you care about something? Step number one is you learn about it. And I've been putting that off because it's so daunting to learn about all of renewable energy, but then Toyota came along and they offered to lend
us a Mirai, the new 2021. They just gave me the keys! It smells new. I just want to drive it. I was hesitant because I
didn't feel like I knew enough because if you're new
here, hi, I'm Dianna. I am an MIT physics alum,
and I don't usually do cars. Although I did do that one video where you get out of the car and I taught you how
to not shock yourself. But I was excited about the idea of getting to drive a hydrogen car. And I thought, yes, this is how I learn. Meeting experts, getting
to ask all the questions. So we took the car on a two-week road trip and made four episodes, each a deep dive on a
subject in renewable energy that we didn't normally see featured. You'll have to wait and see
whether we survived. (laughs) So to start off the series,
here's hydrogen fuel cells, 'cause that's what powered
our entire road trip. (inspiring music) I had never thought about
hydrogen fuel cell cars. - I don't think most people
even know they exist. - No, I didn't! Did you guys know before the trip? Enthusiastic head shakes no. I knew already that it
was an electric car, but for like the two
months prior or longer working with Toyota, I thought
it still burned the hydrogen. That was a big misconception and kind of an embarrassing one, but... Wow. So there's like a
whole display going on. (gasps) Look at the steering wheel. People are gonna watch
this video and be like, she's never been in a car before. (laughs) What does the H2O button do? Is it peeing? It said F C
V system purge in progress. (gentle music) Then our first stop was the
Toyota Technical Center. Often we'll come to a place and we'll film the entrance and exit, but we couldn't do that here because there was so much security they had to put covers over
the cameras on our phones. We weren't allowed to
film one side of the room. They were like, you can only face this way 'cause everything else is
incredibly confidential. It is the most secure location
in North America for Toyota. - It's by design that this
is a black box, right? We are the north American hub
for research and development for fuel cell electric technology. My dreams were actually to
work on just really fast cars. I was total gear head. I was a mechanic. One of my first classes
talked about at the time petroleum dependency. I'd never thought of the negative impact that the industry I loved so
much was having on the planet. - So, let's talk about how
hydrogen fuel cells work. Let's open the hood, if we can. They're producing electricity
through this magical process. - It is an all electric
vehicle first and foremost. The difference between
this electric vehicle and the battery electric
vehicle that we hear so often is that instead of plugging
it in and recharging it, we refill it with hydrogen,
which takes about five minutes. So it's just a quicker refueling time. And then the energy is
stored in the hydrogen instead of in the battery. - A fuel cell works very
similarly to a battery. - So what happens when you
push on the accelerator is you're opening a valve and allowing the hydrogen
to come in from the tank. And then oxygen is just coming
in from the intake system, from the air and oxygen in the air. I hope. (laughs) And oxygen comes in on the cathode side, just like a battery there's
an anode and a cathode. Oxygen comes in on the cathode, hydrogen comes in on the anode. Hydrogen in the atmosphere is never alone. It's always bonded to something. As soon as the hydrogen
enters on the anode side, it hits a platinum catalyst and ionizes. - A platinum catalyst? What is
that, and what does that do? - Platinum is a highly active noble metal. Really what it does is it
just activates the hydrogen and it causes the proton
and electron to break off and it immediately tries
to bond with the oxygen. It really wants to form water. And so what we've done
in this anode cathode, between the two we have what's called a proton exchange membrane, it's a porous material that
can hold the water molecules. And the proton can kind
of like hop across that, but the electron can not get through that. It's non-conductive. - [Dianna] So then what happens going through the proton
exchange membrane? - Just the proton travels across and then meets up with the oxygen. There's also a bit of a
platinum catalyst on that side to also ionize, to get
the oxygen excited too. So the two are all excited, right? And they really want to form water, right? So the electron's stuck on
the other side and it's like, I really want to get to the oxygen. Well, we've provided a conductive
path around the membrane. And so the electron finds that, it travels around the membrane,
meets up with the oxygen and with the proton it forms water and goes out the tailpipe. What happens when you have that reaction happening quick enough, you get a lot of electrons
flowing around that path, that creates an electric current, that then goes to the electric motor and then that's what
actually drives the vehicle. - So yeah, that's the cool
part to me, which is that you're just bringing in the
hydrogen, touching the platinum, and that chemical reaction happening there is what splits apart the
electron from the hydrogen. And that's all you
need, flowing electrons. And that is electricity. That's it. That is a fuel cell. And I don't know if I made this clear, this is an electric car. There's battery electric, and
there's fuel cell electric. - But that's why when you're
driving down the road, you can put your hand under
the exhaust of the Mirai and actually feel the water. Whereas in an internal
combustion engine vehicle, you would never touch the exhaust, right? It's super hot. - We finally figured out
what the H2O button was, which was you press it and it has this compressor
that just blows through and blows all the water out
of the fuel cell stacks. The question from our
patrons on Patreon is how is the hydrogen stored? Inside the car, the hydrogen
is stored as a compressed gas. In preparing for this
video, my dad was like, I heard that there's some
storage problems with hydrogen, 'cause it's a tiny, tiny molecule so it gets through some materials. So I was like, okay dad,
I'll ask about that. And I asked her, she was like, oh, there are regulations
that we can't have that. - There's a very minute amount of hydrogen that can be leaked. That's a global regulation. For the tanks themselves, the tanks are made up of three layers. So the inner layer's like a plastic liner. Around that's carbon fiber and that's what gives the tank strength. And on top of that's glass fiber. And all of those are meant to, first of all, contain the hydrogen, right? So the hydrogen can't
just leak out of the tank. You can leave it in a
garage for its entire life, and you'll still have a full tank. - To wrap up this section, I thought it was so fun hearing Jackie talking about how the car works and how it was all designed,
and how they made it. And it probably looks way different than when you were working
on prototype pieces of it. - Yeah, there was a lot more
zip ties and duct tapes. And actually our windshield
washer fluid came in a plastic baggie that we just
kind of schlepped on there. You're getting to see
how the sausage is made. - So that brings us to
the next point, which is- Donuts! How they test this car - It's really pretty aggressive. And it does include things like, we use a saw and cut into
the tank and then we cycle pressure, depressurize,
pressure, depressurize to make sure that that one flaw doesn't become a weak point in the tank. - How do you test the fuel cell stacks and the storage of the
hydrogen, the hydrogen tanks? - Set it on a bonfire at like
800 degrees C flames, right? And ensure that the tank doesn't reach a pressure that
causes it to rupture. We drop it. We actually have a crane and
we'll bring it up, drop it. - It didn't immediately make sense to me. But I remember us talking about why they pierce it with armor rounds. - They're so strong that actually to get through one wall of
the tank when it's pressurized requires armor-piercing rounds that we can actually only get in the US. Thank you, US military, right? - And the reason that
they had to pierce it with these armor-piercing rounds was because all these extreme crash tests, they could never puncture the tank. - We say it's like if you have a soda can and you put a rock in it and you crush it, that rock is going to be
still in the soda can. That's like what these
are in a crash test. - All right, moving on. What is it like driving a hydrogen car? What was the experience like? Get in here and you're driving
a car powered by hydrogen. I had never driven an electric car before. So that was, I think the significant
experience of actually driving it is you hear that whir. (car whirring) - The quietness of the fuel cell itself is when you're sitting at
a light or something. If you have a passenger, you literally can converse with them. - I mean, it's great. I had been driving a 2010
Prius. It was an upgrade. I had to look up reviews of cars 'cause I was like, yeah,
it turns really well, which I guess they call handling? So I asked Jackie what she thought, because she actually raced
cars on like tracks and stuff. - Once you drive an electric motor and it's silent and there's no shifting and it's continuous torque, you're like why is conventional
vehicles still a thing? - The thing that sticks with me the most about driving a hydrogen car that's the most different
from driving a gas powered car is how much you have to
plan around refueling. Plan around where your
hydrogen stations are and how far you're going. 'Cause sometimes the stations run out. Sometimes there's an issue
with the hardware or something. There's a site that you can go to, the California fuel cell partnership. And it tells you where all
the refuel stations are and the status of them. This is so cool! Shall
we pressurize this tank? Makes it easier that
you've got the fuel credit. Everyone that has bought
a hydrogen car so far has gotten a $15,000 fuel credit because the price of
hydrogen is still pretty high relative to the same
energy density of gas. I don't know how to better say that. I talked to three different drivers, but what struck me was that
they all felt nerdy about it. - I wasn't sure if you could
drive it to Palm Springs, but I'm kind of a nerd and I like doing math
before I drive somewhere. So that part of it's really fun, but I really hope that they
get a station in Palm Springs. I had a little bit of a hard time the first couple of times
I learned how to refuel. Now it's just second nature to me. - Thank goodness someone's here to help me and I'm not left to my own devices. We did get to a station one
night that didn't have any fuel. Going back to my apps.
We're at the Campbell one. The station is low on fuel. See, there we go. Offline. It was refilled by the next morning. Ooh, that is cold. The other thing that happened is that the nozzle
froze to the receptacle. A-ha! When the gas is coming out,
it's decreasing in pressure, so it gets cold and that nozzle,
it freezes the receptacle. One of the biggest questions I had was why is Toyota doing this? Everyone wants to know, there's battery electric
vehicles out there. Why is Toyota working on
fuel cell electric vehicles? We're gonna very much get
into that in the next video. People are paying attention right now. A lot of people wanna see us
turning to this all electric. We want all electric vehicles 'cause we want to bring
the emissions down to zero. So people are like, well, why fuel cells if
you've already got batteries? I wondered that too. - You know, even here in LA, we have a huge health
issue around places like the port of Los Angeles,
ports of Long Beach, where higher rates of asthma, all these things that are
attributed to poor air quality, the electrified portfolio is part of our environmental challenge
2050 was to try to really reduce our negative
impact on the environment. The target is a 90% reduction
in CO2 emissions by 2050. And the only way to get there
is through electrification. That's why I drive a Mirai right now, because I'm a proponent of
all electrified powertrains. But I think that we can't get there with battery electrics alone. - I'm so curious about the
competition between automakers. And so I asked what that's been like working on this technology together. - We don't talk about anything.
We don't share anything. All of our vehicles, our
prototypes are camouflaged. Normally in the automotive
industry, it's very competitive. In the hydrogen and fuel cell space, it's pretty different
because we can't do it alone. When it comes to the development
of all the regulations and the codes and standards, which isn't really like
the sexy engineering, but it's critical. Every nozzle can hook onto every receptacle of
every fuel cell vehicle because we sat in a room with Daimler, with GM, with
Ford, with Honda, with Hyundai. - You were there? - Yeah, I was, we all sat around a table
and all agreed on a standard. There is still a lot of competition, but it's that shared mission. And everybody kind of putting aside the competition
for the greater good. You know, at least for
the things that matter. - So Toyota has some
pretty ambitious goals for lowering their emissions
and also for mashing up with some of the emission regulations
of some of the US states, a lot of countries around the world. But their argument is
that we cannot get there with battery electric vehicles alone. - The fact that you're a trailblazer, the fact that it's all sciencey. Oh yeah, you definitely
feel like you're at the cusp on what's next. - Didn't feel like we were
experiencing hydrogen. It felt like no, we're experiencing this
change in technology. I'm not a car person, but I
drive a car every single day. And I have to think about where to get gas and how much I'm emitting,
where the energy is coming from. That's why a lot of people
are turning to electric cars. Thank you so much to Toyota for
giving us the car, the keys, for bringing us into the Technical Center, talking to Jackie. Yeah, leave some questions in
the comments if you have them about fuel cells. I will hopefully be able to answer. Maybe even by the next video. Bye. Happy physics-ing. Good job guys! We made it back. Woo! (upbeat music)
