Answer by Mark Rogowsky, Entrepreneur, raconteur, @maxrogo, on Quora,
It's a gimmick and it's going to fail.
Toyota keeps telling the world, "this is like the Prius, people made fun of that too!"
But the first Prius could refuel at every gas station in America. The hydrogen-powered Toyota FCV can refuel here.
Where "here" was a super generous description as the yellow flags don't exist yet and the orange ones are private stations. The green ones are real.
So even though the range of the vehicle will easily eclipse, say, the Tesla Model S, one of those vehicles can comfortably be driven between San Francisco and Los Angeles. And it's not the Toyota.
If the Toyota FCV was able to say as an odd, but much-more-convenient Nissan Leaf competitor, it might have a chance. Unfortunately, it's going to cost about twice as much and offer only some unique attributes. For example, the Leaf won't do a day trip from Palo Alto to Napa; the FCV would. And if things go funky, you can refuel the FCV in a few minutes.
Of course, with the $20,000 you'll save buying the Leaf, you can rent a lot of day-trip vehicles to do that Napa trip. Or the L.A. trip. And you "refuel" the rest of the time in your garage. Oh, and by the way, the cost of the electricity is about $1/gallon equivalent. At least that's what we're seeing in our Volt. The cost of hydrogen is not going to be noticeably cheaper than gasoline -- if it's cheaper at all. Now, Hyundai is going to wrap hydrogen into the lease of their fuel-cell car the first go-round. Toyota might do the same. But if that's true, it's only because they know that basically no one is buying it.
The problem with hydrogen is that it has a few appealing attributes:
- Fast-ish fill-ups. About 5 minutes vs. 20 minutes for a Tesla Supercharger 150-mile refill, 30 minutes for a Level 3 charger 80% refill in a Lead.
- Zero vehicle-level emissions.
The negatives are:
- Home refueling is only theoretical.
- Public refueling is mostly theoretical and costs $500K to $1M per station.
- Public stations are actually not that great. After refueling a vehicle, each "pump" needs a bit of downtime to get ready for the next time.
- Making hydrogen is a profoundly wasteful way to power a car vs. using electricity. There are losses of 30% to make the hydrogen (if using electricity) and then about 30% more in the compression and recombination.
- Making hydrogen using natural-gas reforming is less bad energy-wise but actually not particularly efficient vs. just building natural-gas powered vehicles, which are cheaper.
- Fuel cell cars are complex. They still need batteries because they have to built as "hybrids" or else the power is inadequate. So they aren't cheap inherently. And fuel-cell stacks are never going to be cheap.
- Fuel-cell advocates have dumb beliefs like, "we can get by with a lot fewer H2 stations than we have gas stations because we'll build them smarter." They point out that some corners have multiple stations (true) and therefore we don't need to duplicate that kind of thing. But then they cite studies that ignore human behavior and use population density to suggest that people will drive 5-10 minutes out of their way to a station just because it's the only station. They won't! Where I live -- in the heart of the greenest part of the country -- those 5-10 minutes on the way home from work would put you home about 30 minutes later than planned thanks to traffic. No one is going to do this. Because of this, advocates wildly underestimate the needed number of stations. The amount of money required for even 1,000 stations in California deployed as public/corporate Level 2 and Level 3 electric vehicle stations would be enough of a critical mass of chargers to basically tip California into an EV cascade that would be unstoppable. (Not everyone would get an EV, but the move to an EV majority would be underway and the threshold would be crossed by mid-century.)
Toyota is anti-EV because of its substantial investment in hybrid technology. It would like to see attention drawn away from EVs, so it is highlighting their biggest and most important weaknesses: charge time and range. if it can generate smoke and FUD, it hopes to delay the EV transition, perhaps make hydrogen somewhat viable, and eventually adapt to whatever is really going on. One idea, for example, that might have "legs" down the road is short-range EV powertrains (like the Leaf) with a range extender (like the Volt has) using a hydrogen fuel cell. This could allow for an all electric powertrain and the hydrogen stations would be freeway based only since they'd only be needed for longer trips. This would allow smaller, lighter batteries for day-to-day use and maybe the range extenders would even be removable and suitcase-sized. But for now, this is all science fiction.
In the land of the real, the Toyota and the Hyundai are stillborn, designed to comply with the California Air Resources Board's mandates for Zero Emission Vehicles. But not designed to actually sell in any meaningful numbers, because they are ridiculous to buy.
This question originally appeared on Quora: Will Toyota hydrogen fuel cell car be a success (to be sold in 2015)?. More questions:
