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Toyota’s Hydrogen-Powered Big Rig

senectus1 4y ago
Loving the push for a hydrogen future, yes it's a tricky fuel to work with... but that doesn't mean we cant rise to the challenge!
gpas 4y ago
JCB is another big player in the hydrogen space. For what I understand they are adapting their old diesel ICEs to work on hydrogen, whilst Toyota are using newly developed electric engines powered by hydrogen cells. Two very different solutions to the same problem.
alexose 4y ago
Can anyone here speak to the practical aspects of making fuel cells work at this scale? What exactly needs to change to gets the costs more in line with ICE vehicles?
- p_l 4y ago
  From memory, so it might be wrong and probably outdated: - the cells themselves weren't exactly cheap (lots of platinum) but that was IIRC non-recurring cost - storage is non-trivial due to hydrogen embrittlement and the like, while methods that are safe from it have other issues. Toyota has, AFAIK, this year or last year presented a serious improvement in that area with removable, rechargeable hydrogen cartridges - even if they break, less expenditure to replace, plus they make off grid operation much easier - hydrogen has a chicken and egg situation where vehicles need a robust network of charging stations but to build such network you need customers - a circular dependency. According to NIST studies on the topic, charging stations with in-situ electrolysis equipment and only a buffer tank are best option, so you effectively have same requirement as for BEV chargers plus source of clean water Note that BEVs made a run around the problem by having early adopters depend on home chargers that offered enough range for city driving - essentially validating the need for charging network by having cars already on the road. (subsidies helped of course) That said, energy density of hydrogen is orders of magnitude better than batteries, so unlike with electric cars the question is not "we need unknown new technologies to get effective long range truck" but just a matter of money to actually turn prototypes into operational model.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Hydrogen and BEV trucks will probably both need to follow the model of picking a specific route and converting that, by adding infrastructure, and getting multiple companies to spread the costs. Shipping is doing something similar with Green Shipping Lanes. https://supplychaindigital.com/logistics/green-shipping-lanes-solution-net-zero-challenge https://supplychaindigital.com/logistics/green-shipping-lane... But many trucks and heavy duty vehicles have already experimented with alternative fuels like CNG fueled from their own depot, so it's probably only needed as a second step as use widens.
  - alexose 4y ago
    The Toyota Mirai platform is impressive, although it is still heavily subsidized. I guess my question was about the cells themselves, though, and less about H2 production / storage. I’m reading that the newer fuel cells have much less platinum— on the same order as a catalytic converter. If I try to buy a hydrogen fuel cell on the open market, they seem to cost around $10k per kW. Which makes Mirai that much more amazing given that it’s 114kW! I wonder how that’s even possible…
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I think the use of platinum catalysts is a current driver of costs for the fuel cell. There's similar issues on the electrolyzer side but I think cheaper alternatives are entering the mass production stage. Presumably people are looking for similar breakthroughs on the fuel cell side. Plus the subsidies for using polluting fossil fuels cramping the market, though they are, very slowly, being reduced. Worth remembering that FCEVs were in fact better than ICE for various reasons, but still not as good as BEVs, which is the main challenge for trucking as well, but better BEV trucks also improves FCEV trucks as they reuse a lot of the same tech stack after the hydrogen becomes electricity.
mike-the-mikado 4y ago
If the high-tech part is the fuel cell, then extending range would be simply a matter of adding relatively low-tech gas tanks. Heavy, but not something that would fundamentally limit the range. Or are their innovations in hydrogen storage as well? Do their "fuel-cells" store hydrogen which is converted to electricity elsewhere?
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Technically, a hydrogen truck is an electrical truck with an undersized battery that is topped up via a hydrogen fuel cell. Fuel cells don't really throttle up or down very well nor do they typically match the peak output of the engines, typically. So you actually need a fairly big battery if you drive into e.g. mountains. You can trivially improve energy efficiency by just using a bigger battery and getting rid of all expensive and inefficient hydrogen parts. By about 3x. Energy conversion from electricity to hydrogen involves losses, converting it back to electricity adds more losses. And hydrogen is hard to contain and there are losses involved with storing and transporting it as well. Transporting it of course involves using trucks. Which require energy. End to end it doesn't look good. About a 3x difference or worse in terms of energy efficiency. Producing hydrogen from clean electricity is a lot less efficient than simply dumping that electricity in a battery and using it. And since trucks are designed to haul lots of mass around, have engines with lots of torque, etc. a big battery is much less of a concern. Besides, hydrogen also takes up a lot of space. What it boils down to is the cost of the vehicle and the cost of the fuel (3x). Which is to say that using hydrogen for transport does not make a whole lot of sense. That's a huge cost advantage for battery electric trucks. And it's the reason that there are multiple manufacturers are already producing those in just about any weight class and form factor you can name. Including some long range heavy trucks, extremely large mining trucks, etc. The few manufacturers that also peddle hydrogen (Like Nikola) are increasingly focusing on battery electric trucks at this point. But they seem happy taking the subsidies for continuing hydrogen development. That is of course the point; without subsidies most manufacturers would immediately pull the plug on their hydrogen programs. Toyota included. They have very little hope of ever producing vehicles that are cost competitive with battery electric at this point. Certainly not this decade. At best you might argue that electricity will one day be so cheap that the inefficiencies stop mattering. But that's not happening any time soon. And of course recharging vs. refueling is a popular argument in this space as well. Filling up hydrogen tanks is very unlike fueling a diesel truck. It involves very high pressures and pipes/valves with relatively small diameters. It can easily take twenty minutes or more. During that time you could also dump a lot of electricity in a battery. Besides, truck drivers have mandatory rest periods that are much larger than that. So a 40 minute break is not that big of a deal for a long haul truck driver. And all of that assumes you'd actually have filling stations that you can use. Those don't exist yet in most places. And probably won't for a long time. Charging stations on the other hand are popping up all over the place. And there's the slight issue that methane just got a lot more expensive which means that converting it to hydrogen for the purpose of converting it back to electricity is now an even worse idea than it already was. And the main plan for hydrogen producers was to use grey (mostly) and some blue hydrogen for the next few decades. I.e. methane conversion without or with (some) carbon capture. This is bordering on criminally insane from a carbon emissions point of view. The notion of using grey hydrogen for transport for environmental reasons is ludicrous. You'd be using about 6x the equivalent in methane. You are better off using that methane as a fuel directly. Green hydrogen at large scale will require way more wind mills and solar panels to be installed than is needed to electrify fleets using battery electric.
iconosynclast 4y ago
Hydrogen tech is a bit of an odd one to me since people rarely talk about the one good thing about it that might offset the otherwise just straight bad performance, you can store it for a long time! So in a world with truly massive renewable energy surplus during peak hours/days/months maybe hydrogen vehicles will make sense as a way of making use of this very inefficient but shelf stable form of storage. Until then I really don't see why people are getting excited about something that is a lot worse than battery electric in a lot of ways
- NickNameNick 4y ago
  Hydrogen is notorious for it's ability to leak out of containers. I doubt it's a great choice for long term energy storage.
  - b112 4y ago
    This is false. h2 storage is a solved problem, people store, transport, and use h2 all the time.
    - senectus1 4y ago
      true, but its not a particular efficient way to store it. We'll get there. its early days
  - iconosynclast 4y ago
    It's just a matter of scale. make your tank 4 times as big and the surface area for leakage only grows by a factor of 2. also there is already a natural gas grid that can take a lot of hydrogen without modification. Again this really only ever makes sense if you have an absurd energy surplus as a sort of last resort way to use energy that would otherwise go unused. In terms of actually being a desirable power system it seems like a complete nightmare to deal with unless you need to go really far out on the gravimetric energy density front with very low power density all while having a fraction of the efficiency of battery electric
    - 4y ago
bamboozled 4y ago
This tech is still years away from seeing mass adoption on the roadways, but Toyota is readying its powertrain to see production start next year. As a simple proof of concept, the folks at Toyota stuffed their powertrain into a Kenworth T680 and took yours truly along for a ride. What is Toyota's plan while everyone else goes fully electric? Hope people just prefer a clunky old gas guzzler and high oil prices?
- seper8 4y ago
  This kind of sentiment existed in the 80's and 90's when talking about electric cars. Then a lot of innovation happened and suddenly everyone wants one. Don't be so arrogant.
  - onethought 4y ago
    You are comparing 80s tech to now? Where we literally have high performance electric vehicles that cost less to run than their lower performance gas cousins. It’s not arrogance to point out the obvious cognitive dissonance Toyota is experiencing, it’s stubbornness on Toyotas part to not acknowledge what is happening. My guess is Toyota has done the math and as a volume car supplier it could never secure enough BEV materials to make the kind of volumes it needs to to maintain its current sales, so it’s betting / hoping on an alternative.
    - rich_sasha 4y ago
      I think for the most part it's great for everyone, except perhaps Toyota - and perhaps not. If hydrogen is a dead end, plenty of car makers are making battery electric cars, little loss to the future. But you never know what invention is just around the corner. It might just be a good bet. Battery electric cars still have drawbacks that can be improved on, hydrogen is behind but it's great that alternatives are considered in earnest.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  The subject of this article is a class 8 semi trailer. The economics in this space accentuate some of Hydrogen’s advantages of Lithium batteries. For instance, trucks must meet certain maximum weight requirements to be legal on roads due the damage they might otherwise cause. Lithium based batteries store much less energy for a unit of weight, so designers must make a harsh trade off between cargo capacity and range. Toyota claims that their prototype has about twice the range than the BYD 8TT, which is an all electric class 8 semi trailer. Depending on how the development of batteries progresses, Hydrogen based tracks may end up being the most effective way forward. At least, till there is a fundamental advancement in alternative energy storage mediums.
rich_sasha 4y ago
How explosive is hydrogen on its own? Eg if I light a match to a hydrogen leak in air, how bad would it be? I thought it would just burn, without a pure oxygen counterpart. So comparable to petrol.
- rwmj 4y ago
  One memorable chemistry lesson at my school[1] involved the teacher bubbling hydrogen through soapy water, while a student stood on the bench with a lighted splint and set fire to the bubbles of hydrogen floating up. They didn't explode so much as rapidly burned. (Of course they didn't mix much with air first, probably if the bubbles had mixed air/H2 they would have exploded more?) [1] Health and safety wasn't much of a concern back then. I also remember another lesson where we lined up and plunged our fingers into a beaker of mercury. Quite a weird feeling.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7bbxOUExU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7bbxOUExU
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    That's a pure hydrogen-oxygen mix and with optimal ratio.
- jrootabega 4y ago
  There will be better, more factual answers. But when I was about 10 we had a science show at school where they lit two balloons on fire - one with air or helium and one with hydrogen. They were about .7 meters in diameter. The second time the show came to our school, I knew what was coming with the hydrogen balloon, and, hating sudden loud noises, excused myself to the bathroom until it was over. I think I stayed there about 15 minutes before they had to come check on me. So at least 15 10-year-old-bathroom-minutes explosive. In short, very loud. But if they do it repeatedly in front of a hundred children, probably not too much. I don't remember feeling any pressure wave. But I'm guessing that a hydrogen leak in an enclosed space could easily result in a dangerous H2/O2 mixture.
natmaka 4y ago
They also have a portable hydrogen cartridge prototype (for cars). It may lead to a way to quickly 'refuel' even a truck. https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/37405994.html https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/37405994.html
endisneigh 4y ago
It would be quite ironic if hydrogen vehicles ended up beating electric. Though it seems sort of silly given that hydrogen must be converted into electricity, but who knows.
- fujidust 4y ago
  I wouldn’t say ironic. Japanese automakers like Toyota were accused of being caught off guard by electric cars but the truth is that these companies have been developing hydrogen drivetrain and vehicle technology for a long, long time. Those that wonder why Toyota introduced the Prius and seemingly stopped short of an electric car after that haven’t been paying attention to what Toyota’s vision for transportation looks like.
  - nojito 4y ago
    They just didn’t think that governments would be so willing to subsidize battery electric.
- melling 4y ago
  We’ve been working on hydrogen cars for a long time. George Bush funded them, for example, in 2003: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ceq/hydrogen_090908.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ceq/hydrogen_090... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/george-w-bushs-favorite-green-car-is-making-a-comeback/452646/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/george-...
- seanalltogether 4y ago
  > Though it seems sort of silly given that hydrogen must be converted into electricity I would actually be curious to know if using an electric drive-train in a semi truck with a battery + diesel generator attached to it would be more efficient then a traditional truck anyways
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    I've noticed the suprising absence of hybrid trucks too. They do exist but generally don't get talked about about much. I'm guessing that if you have a fleet, then a hybrid fleet makes more sense than hybrid vehicles in your fleet. Use the BEV for the tasks they are good at, and slowly edge out the diesel trucks as the BEV tech improves.

Loving the push for a hydrogen future, yes it's a tricky fuel to work with... but that doesn't mean we cant rise to the challenge!

gpas 4y ago

JCB is another big player in the hydrogen space. For what I understand they are adapting their old diesel ICEs to work on hydrogen, whilst Toyota are using newly developed electric engines powered by hydrogen cells. Two very different solutions to the same problem.

alexose 4y ago

Can anyone here speak to the practical aspects of making fuel cells work at this scale? What exactly needs to change to gets the costs more in line with ICE vehicles?

p_l 4y ago
From memory, so it might be wrong and probably outdated: - the cells themselves weren't exactly cheap (lots of platinum) but that was IIRC non-recurring cost - storage is non-trivial due to hydrogen embrittlement and the like, while methods that are safe from it have other issues. Toyota has, AFAIK, this year or last year presented a serious improvement in that area with removable, rechargeable hydrogen cartridges - even if they break, less expenditure to replace, plus they make off grid operation much easier - hydrogen has a chicken and egg situation where vehicles need a robust network of charging stations but to build such network you need customers - a circular dependency. According to NIST studies on the topic, charging stations with in-situ electrolysis equipment and only a buffer tank are best option, so you effectively have same requirement as for BEV chargers plus source of clean water Note that BEVs made a run around the problem by having early adopters depend on home chargers that offered enough range for city driving - essentially validating the need for charging network by having cars already on the road. (subsidies helped of course) That said, energy density of hydrogen is orders of magnitude better than batteries, so unlike with electric cars the question is not "we need unknown new technologies to get effective long range truck" but just a matter of money to actually turn prototypes into operational model.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Hydrogen and BEV trucks will probably both need to follow the model of picking a specific route and converting that, by adding infrastructure, and getting multiple companies to spread the costs. Shipping is doing something similar with Green Shipping Lanes. https://supplychaindigital.com/logistics/green-shipping-lanes-solution-net-zero-challenge https://supplychaindigital.com/logistics/green-shipping-lane... But many trucks and heavy duty vehicles have already experimented with alternative fuels like CNG fueled from their own depot, so it's probably only needed as a second step as use widens.
- alexose 4y ago
  The Toyota Mirai platform is impressive, although it is still heavily subsidized. I guess my question was about the cells themselves, though, and less about H2 production / storage. I’m reading that the newer fuel cells have much less platinum— on the same order as a catalytic converter. If I try to buy a hydrogen fuel cell on the open market, they seem to cost around $10k per kW. Which makes Mirai that much more amazing given that it’s 114kW! I wonder how that’s even possible…
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I think the use of platinum catalysts is a current driver of costs for the fuel cell. There's similar issues on the electrolyzer side but I think cheaper alternatives are entering the mass production stage. Presumably people are looking for similar breakthroughs on the fuel cell side. Plus the subsidies for using polluting fossil fuels cramping the market, though they are, very slowly, being reduced. Worth remembering that FCEVs were in fact better than ICE for various reasons, but still not as good as BEVs, which is the main challenge for trucking as well, but better BEV trucks also improves FCEV trucks as they reuse a lot of the same tech stack after the hydrogen becomes electricity.

mike-the-mikado 4y ago

If the high-tech part is the fuel cell, then extending range would be simply a matter of adding relatively low-tech gas tanks. Heavy, but not something that would fundamentally limit the range. Or are their innovations in hydrogen storage as well? Do their "fuel-cells" store hydrogen which is converted to electricity elsewhere?

jillesvangurp 4y ago
Technically, a hydrogen truck is an electrical truck with an undersized battery that is topped up via a hydrogen fuel cell. Fuel cells don't really throttle up or down very well nor do they typically match the peak output of the engines, typically. So you actually need a fairly big battery if you drive into e.g. mountains. You can trivially improve energy efficiency by just using a bigger battery and getting rid of all expensive and inefficient hydrogen parts. By about 3x. Energy conversion from electricity to hydrogen involves losses, converting it back to electricity adds more losses. And hydrogen is hard to contain and there are losses involved with storing and transporting it as well. Transporting it of course involves using trucks. Which require energy. End to end it doesn't look good. About a 3x difference or worse in terms of energy efficiency. Producing hydrogen from clean electricity is a lot less efficient than simply dumping that electricity in a battery and using it. And since trucks are designed to haul lots of mass around, have engines with lots of torque, etc. a big battery is much less of a concern. Besides, hydrogen also takes up a lot of space. What it boils down to is the cost of the vehicle and the cost of the fuel (3x). Which is to say that using hydrogen for transport does not make a whole lot of sense. That's a huge cost advantage for battery electric trucks. And it's the reason that there are multiple manufacturers are already producing those in just about any weight class and form factor you can name. Including some long range heavy trucks, extremely large mining trucks, etc. The few manufacturers that also peddle hydrogen (Like Nikola) are increasingly focusing on battery electric trucks at this point. But they seem happy taking the subsidies for continuing hydrogen development. That is of course the point; without subsidies most manufacturers would immediately pull the plug on their hydrogen programs. Toyota included. They have very little hope of ever producing vehicles that are cost competitive with battery electric at this point. Certainly not this decade. At best you might argue that electricity will one day be so cheap that the inefficiencies stop mattering. But that's not happening any time soon. And of course recharging vs. refueling is a popular argument in this space as well. Filling up hydrogen tanks is very unlike fueling a diesel truck. It involves very high pressures and pipes/valves with relatively small diameters. It can easily take twenty minutes or more. During that time you could also dump a lot of electricity in a battery. Besides, truck drivers have mandatory rest periods that are much larger than that. So a 40 minute break is not that big of a deal for a long haul truck driver. And all of that assumes you'd actually have filling stations that you can use. Those don't exist yet in most places. And probably won't for a long time. Charging stations on the other hand are popping up all over the place. And there's the slight issue that methane just got a lot more expensive which means that converting it to hydrogen for the purpose of converting it back to electricity is now an even worse idea than it already was. And the main plan for hydrogen producers was to use grey (mostly) and some blue hydrogen for the next few decades. I.e. methane conversion without or with (some) carbon capture. This is bordering on criminally insane from a carbon emissions point of view. The notion of using grey hydrogen for transport for environmental reasons is ludicrous. You'd be using about 6x the equivalent in methane. You are better off using that methane as a fuel directly. Green hydrogen at large scale will require way more wind mills and solar panels to be installed than is needed to electrify fleets using battery electric.

iconosynclast 4y ago

Hydrogen tech is a bit of an odd one to me since people rarely talk about the one good thing about it that might offset the otherwise just straight bad performance, you can store it for a long time! So in a world with truly massive renewable energy surplus during peak hours/days/months maybe hydrogen vehicles will make sense as a way of making use of this very inefficient but shelf stable form of storage. Until then I really don't see why people are getting excited about something that is a lot worse than battery electric in a lot of ways

NickNameNick 4y ago
Hydrogen is notorious for it's ability to leak out of containers. I doubt it's a great choice for long term energy storage.
- b112 4y ago
  This is false. h2 storage is a solved problem, people store, transport, and use h2 all the time.
  - senectus1 4y ago
    true, but its not a particular efficient way to store it. We'll get there. its early days
- iconosynclast 4y ago
  It's just a matter of scale. make your tank 4 times as big and the surface area for leakage only grows by a factor of 2. also there is already a natural gas grid that can take a lot of hydrogen without modification. Again this really only ever makes sense if you have an absurd energy surplus as a sort of last resort way to use energy that would otherwise go unused. In terms of actually being a desirable power system it seems like a complete nightmare to deal with unless you need to go really far out on the gravimetric energy density front with very low power density all while having a fraction of the efficiency of battery electric
  - 4y ago

bamboozled 4y ago

This tech is still years away from seeing mass adoption on the roadways, but Toyota is readying its powertrain to see production start next year. As a simple proof of concept, the folks at Toyota stuffed their powertrain into a Kenworth T680 and took yours truly along for a ride. What is Toyota's plan while everyone else goes fully electric? Hope people just prefer a clunky old gas guzzler and high oil prices?

seper8 4y ago
This kind of sentiment existed in the 80's and 90's when talking about electric cars. Then a lot of innovation happened and suddenly everyone wants one. Don't be so arrogant.
- onethought 4y ago
  You are comparing 80s tech to now? Where we literally have high performance electric vehicles that cost less to run than their lower performance gas cousins. It’s not arrogance to point out the obvious cognitive dissonance Toyota is experiencing, it’s stubbornness on Toyotas part to not acknowledge what is happening. My guess is Toyota has done the math and as a volume car supplier it could never secure enough BEV materials to make the kind of volumes it needs to to maintain its current sales, so it’s betting / hoping on an alternative.
  - rich_sasha 4y ago
    I think for the most part it's great for everyone, except perhaps Toyota - and perhaps not. If hydrogen is a dead end, plenty of car makers are making battery electric cars, little loss to the future. But you never know what invention is just around the corner. It might just be a good bet. Battery electric cars still have drawbacks that can be improved on, hydrogen is behind but it's great that alternatives are considered in earnest.
scoopertrooper 4y ago
The subject of this article is a class 8 semi trailer. The economics in this space accentuate some of Hydrogen’s advantages of Lithium batteries. For instance, trucks must meet certain maximum weight requirements to be legal on roads due the damage they might otherwise cause. Lithium based batteries store much less energy for a unit of weight, so designers must make a harsh trade off between cargo capacity and range. Toyota claims that their prototype has about twice the range than the BYD 8TT, which is an all electric class 8 semi trailer. Depending on how the development of batteries progresses, Hydrogen based tracks may end up being the most effective way forward. At least, till there is a fundamental advancement in alternative energy storage mediums.

rich_sasha 4y ago

How explosive is hydrogen on its own? Eg if I light a match to a hydrogen leak in air, how bad would it be? I thought it would just burn, without a pure oxygen counterpart. So comparable to petrol.

rwmj 4y ago
One memorable chemistry lesson at my school[1] involved the teacher bubbling hydrogen through soapy water, while a student stood on the bench with a lighted splint and set fire to the bubbles of hydrogen floating up. They didn't explode so much as rapidly burned. (Of course they didn't mix much with air first, probably if the bubbles had mixed air/H2 they would have exploded more?) [1] Health and safety wasn't much of a concern back then. I also remember another lesson where we lined up and plunged our fingers into a beaker of mercury. Quite a weird feeling.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7bbxOUExU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7bbxOUExU
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  That's a pure hydrogen-oxygen mix and with optimal ratio.
jrootabega 4y ago
There will be better, more factual answers. But when I was about 10 we had a science show at school where they lit two balloons on fire - one with air or helium and one with hydrogen. They were about .7 meters in diameter. The second time the show came to our school, I knew what was coming with the hydrogen balloon, and, hating sudden loud noises, excused myself to the bathroom until it was over. I think I stayed there about 15 minutes before they had to come check on me. So at least 15 10-year-old-bathroom-minutes explosive. In short, very loud. But if they do it repeatedly in front of a hundred children, probably not too much. I don't remember feeling any pressure wave. But I'm guessing that a hydrogen leak in an enclosed space could easily result in a dangerous H2/O2 mixture.

natmaka 4y ago

They also have a portable hydrogen cartridge prototype (for cars). It may lead to a way to quickly 'refuel' even a truck. https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/37405994.html https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/37405994.html

endisneigh 4y ago

It would be quite ironic if hydrogen vehicles ended up beating electric. Though it seems sort of silly given that hydrogen must be converted into electricity, but who knows.

fujidust 4y ago
I wouldn’t say ironic. Japanese automakers like Toyota were accused of being caught off guard by electric cars but the truth is that these companies have been developing hydrogen drivetrain and vehicle technology for a long, long time. Those that wonder why Toyota introduced the Prius and seemingly stopped short of an electric car after that haven’t been paying attention to what Toyota’s vision for transportation looks like.
- nojito 4y ago
  They just didn’t think that governments would be so willing to subsidize battery electric.
melling 4y ago
We’ve been working on hydrogen cars for a long time. George Bush funded them, for example, in 2003: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ceq/hydrogen_090908.html https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/ceq/hydrogen_090... https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/george-w-bushs-favorite-green-car-is-making-a-comeback/452646/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/george-...
seanalltogether 4y ago
> Though it seems sort of silly given that hydrogen must be converted into electricity I would actually be curious to know if using an electric drive-train in a semi truck with a battery + diesel generator attached to it would be more efficient then a traditional truck anyways
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I've noticed the suprising absence of hybrid trucks too. They do exist but generally don't get talked about about much. I'm guessing that if you have a fleet, then a hybrid fleet makes more sense than hybrid vehicles in your fleet. Use the BEV for the tasks they are good at, and slowly edge out the diesel trucks as the BEV tech improves.