It'd be just perfect for Toyota, then, once they give up on Hydrogen, The Fuel Of The Future.
https://www.electrive.com/2019/06/05/hyundai-to-sell-their-f...
And Volkswagen is keeping fuel cell cars open as an option:
https://www.audi.com/en/experience-audi/models-and-technolog...
Battery EV is high-capacity battery + engine + thermal management system for the battery.
Hydrogen EV is fuel cell + low-capacity battery (for smoothing out peaks and recuperation) + engine + thermal management system for the fuel cells.
BEV have low price per km (here it's about 1/4 compared to gas cars), but lower range, while H2EV have higher price per km (in Germany where there's actually infrastructure available, its about the same price per km as gas car) but higher range, so it can make sense for some use-cases, like long-range buses or whatever.
You could even build Plug-in Hydrogen EV with medium capacity battery and have BEV-like usage where you charge at home but still get 1000 km range if necessary - it seems needlessly complex, but it just means adding bigger battery and charging port to H2EV, so it can make sense.
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/26050/exclusive-toyota-hydroge...
Before getting back to Hydrogen when the world realize there is not enough Cobalt and Lithium on Earth for every car.
We're not going to run out of lithium any time soon, current supplies are limited only by the fact that it's only been desirable for a few years. There's a LOT of lithium mining capacity coming online now or in the near future.
Hydrogen was a dead end in 2000 and it's only getting deader.
Easy sentence with no content. Dead on which aspect ? In Elon Musk propaganda speech ?
Hydrogen never was a dead end technically. It's only blocker is cost of generation, cost that goes away with scale and cheaper electricity.
2) Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence - meaning that it escapes through any container you put it in. A 70kg pure lead bottle only holds about 1L of hydrogen, and all of it will evaporate within couple months naturally. And as it does so, it makes the metal brittle. So "producing loads of hydrogen for storage" is not a great idea either.
That's kind of the case in a few different places though - e.g. Solar is "free" and the losses don't really matter in many places.
1) generation (very inefficient, or generates tons of carbon)
2) storage, both offline and in vehicles (very expensive, dangerous, heavy, very inefficient, or a combination thereof)
3) transport (same, due mostly to 2)
4) usage efficiency (not bad with a fuel cell but still not great)
5) power density (fuel cells have low power to weight which is why no-one uses the generated power directly)
6) fuel cell lifetime (fuel cells don't last that long)
7) fuel cell cost
I've held this opinion since the best EVs were using Optima Yellowtop PbA batteries and Mr. Musk over there was working at Paypal.
Their hydrogen fuel cell is clearly not the way the industry is going. So are they going back to batteries, the tech they said would never be commercially viable?
H2EV don't "burn" the hydrogen, because fuel cells are much better than engines that burn stuff in cylinders. So you end up with electormotor and fuel cell.
And since you can recuperate into fuel cell and fuel cells aren't very good at providing big short peaks of power, it makes sense to add a battery to smooth things out and to store energy when braking.
But the battery doesn't need high-capacity, because it's just a temporary store of energy. It's a very different battery technology than what you find in a Tesla or Kia e-Niro or whatever.
In the end, Toyota H2EV (Mirai) is basically 1) electromotor from Lexus hybrid 2) battery from Prius 3) Fuel cell.