Welcome to the chicken and egg show, the most overused metaphor in the fuel-cell business. It probably wasn’t uttered by Sir William Grove in 1839 when he discovered the principle of producing electricity from an electro-chemical reaction between hydrogen and air, but I bet it was in 1955 when General Electric’s Willard Grubb and Leonard Niedrach produced the first proton exchange membrane fuel cell.
So which should come first? The chicken, a production fuel-cell car, or the egg, a hydrogen supply infrastructure? Speeches were filled with eggy chickens at this week’s launch of Toyota’s Mirai (meaning ‘The Future’), the world’s first mass-produced fuel-cell car; Honda’s FCX Clarity was first on sale, but was made in much smaller numbers than the tens of thousands of Mirais that Toyota is planning by the 2020s.
Over two decades and countless squillions of R&D blood and treasure has produced this - a state-of-the-art, showroom-ready, four-door saloon, capable of 111mph, 0-62mph in 9.6secs and a range of 300 miles on the 5kg of hydrogen stored in two tanks under its rear seats. Refuelling them takes about five minutes.
Toyota’s major innovations in this car are those immensely strong and lightweight woven carbon-fibre tanks, the 153bhp/247lb ft fuel cell and a revised power converter which steps up voltage 3 times to 650 volts allowing the use of a smaller electric motor. Toyota claims it has reduced the overall costs by 95 per cent compared with its previous fuel-cell car, the 2008 FCEV Highlander.
So what about the egg? Big Oil has shown itself remarkably uninterested in supplying hydrogen to the public, even though it creates a lot of hydrogen by steaming it out of natural gas for refining petrol. So Toyota is reluctantly becoming an infrastructure provider. In America the car maker is investing $7.2 million along with partners Aire Liquide to install a 12-station East Coast hydrogen highway between New York and Rhode Island to kick start sales. California is already familiar with fuel cells and there are about 10 filling stations with the Californian Energy Commission promising $200 million to build that total to 68 stations in the next two years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/toyota/mirai/
AS PREVIOUSLY REPORTED THE PRICE TAG WAS $69,000 FOR SALE IN JAPAN TO BE FOLLOWED BY SALES TO THE US AND EU.
TOYOTA INTRODUCES THE HYDROGEN FUEL CELL AUTOMOBILE–PRICE TAG $69,000–WHILE HYUNDAI LEASES A HYDROGEN POWERED CROSSOVER FOR $499 IN CA
http://henrypatrick1736.blogspot.com/2014/07/toyota-introduces-hydrogen-fuel-cell.html
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