Hydrogen is the vehicle fuel of the future if, we assume, battery electric vehicle tech doesn’t end up meeting all of our needs. Automakers, especially Japanese ones, are crazy for hydrogen, and they have some support from a traditional fossil fuel industry that sees a possible end to its seemingly endless profits. Up first is a hydrogen car dressed up in the safest and most familiar car imaginable: The Honda CR-V.
The Hydrogen Honda CR-V Fuel Cell Could Be A Future
Honda had a big press conference earlier today in Japan and the company announced its plan for the hydrogen fuel-cell Honda CR-V. You can read a press release about the plan right here, but the highlight is that Honda’s going to use a next-gen hydrogen fuel-cell system it developed with GM and toss it into the utterly non-threatening CR-V small SUV.
This was partially announced in November, and you can read about that in a previous Morning Dump here. The concept is a car that’s really an electric vehicle you can charge at home with a big enough battery pack to get decent range and the option to top it off with hydrogen for longer journeys. I’d argue this is the most sensible possible option for a hydrogen-powered passenger vehicle since it means you can group hydrogen filling stations around highways and interstates (which will also be used to power way superior hydrogen commercial vehicles). Honda plans to start building these vehicles soon and put them on sale by the end of the year in Japan and the United States.
The two most important pieces from the announcement are the scale and the costs. From the press release, here’s the cost bit:
With the next-generation fuel cell system being co-developed with General Motors (GM), Honda will aim to more than double the durability and reduce the cost to one-third. After achieving these targets with GM, Honda will continue its fundamental research on future fuel cell technologies to double the durability again and halve the cost from the newly reduced level.
That’s a lot of cost savings and also, likely, a reflection of how expensive these are (according to one estimate, it costs Toyota $11,000 to build just one fuel cell stack for its Mirai). Assuming it costs Honda $12,000 to make a fuel cell (just a guess) then the company would want to get the cost down to $4,000 per pack and then, with more development, down to $2,000. That number could actually be much higher, of course.
The other big piece here is the scale:
In the mid-2020s, Honda will begin external sales of its fuel cell system at the level of 2,000 units per year, with a plan to expand sales in stages. Honda will strive to increase sales to 60,000 units in 2030, and to a few hundred thousand units per year by the second half of the 2030s.
I sort of did a double-take when I saw that, but Hans Griemel from Automotive News heard the same thing at Honda’s press conference so I guess Honda means it. That is a lot of cars.
How is Honda going to get you into a hydrogen car? Here’s the game plan, so far as I can see it:
- Take the friendliest and most familiar Honda product and don’t change it too much (learning the lesson from weirdo Insights)
- Make it a completely usable EV with a plug so you’re not wholly depending on hydrogen
- Pair with companies to expand the hydrogen filling network (Shell, for example)
- Build it in the United States so it might qualify for tax credits
It’s just crazy enough to work.
This Is The 2024 Range Rover Velar, I think
The Range Rover Velar, the official car of “my commercial real estate business is taking off,” is out with a mid-cycle refresh. Here’s a link to the press release if you want to get all the details. I like the Velar. It’s comfortable. The 2020 Land Rover Range Rover Velar SVAutobiography Dynamic Edition was both surprisingly fast (550 hp!) and also had the longest name I can think of for a vehicle.
The new one looks, good. The designers redid the front a little. The interior gets a floating 11.4-inch curved glass touchscreen, which is also new. Land Rover actually used the press release to talk about the brand getting a TikTok account, which says a lot about how new this vehicle is:
Range Rover offers the most refined, luxury vehicles for discerning clients. The world of modern luxury is changing and so are expectations for experiences. Launching a Range Rover TikTok channel is an opportunity to reach diverse, new audiences with unique content; building advocacy among creators and modern leaders. But not only this; we have a responsibility in reimagining the future of mobility and modern luxury, and we cannot do this without a global community. TikTok will help enable that
Neat!
[Editor’s Note: Did we see the Velar’s color options?
I think someone on Twitter called it the Range Rover 50 Shades of Gray Edition, which is clever. -DT]
Tesla Raising Shanghai Output For Obvious Reasons
Who’d have guessed that Tesla lowering prices would stoke an increase in demand? Since it has the exclusive, here’s the Reuters headline we all saw coming: “Exclusive: Tesla to raise Shanghai output after price cuts stoke demand -memo”
Here’s what Reuters says is in the memo:
The automaker plans to produce a weekly average of nearly 20,000 units at its Shanghai factory in February and March, according to the memo, which detailed output plans for Tesla’s most productive and profitable manufacturing hub.
That level of production would take the plant’s output to roughly its rate in September, when it turned out 82,088 Model 3 and Model Y cars, according to data from China Passenger Car Association.
Industry watchers look at the Shanghai plant like Roman Catholics look for white smoke out of the Vatican because this has a lot of downstream impacts on various other countries. The price-war either forces competitors to lower prices or lose out on demand share. There are only so many suppliers in the industry and the suppliers are going to go where the production is.
Everyone’s expecting Tesla to lose market share over time, but clearly the company isn’t going down without a fight.
Our Next Energy Gets $300 Million In Series B Funding
Our Next Energy, the Michigan-based battery manufacturing startup, just closed a $300 million fundraising round with a valuation just above $1 billion. Who is ONE? The core is a bunch of ex-Ford and A123systems people and the company is run by former Ford engineer and Apple car developer Mujeeb Ijaz. These are the folks that did the Tesla with the 752-mile battery. Here’s the scoop from The Detroit News:
The latest infusion of investment, combined with economic incentives from the state of Michigan, gives the company the capital needed to launch production at its first battery cell plant in Van Buren Township by the end of next year as planned, CEO and founder Mujeeb Ijaz said in an interview.
The Van Buren facility — where ONE will assemble its lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, battery pack products — itself is now complete and ONE is in the process of ordering equipment to outfit the plant. It will take its first delivery in July, Ijaz said, in preparation for the launch of production next year. The plant will be built out in phases as the market for electric-vehicle batteries evolves and ONE signs up additional customers.
There are as many battery startups as there are bad ideas for car purchases in the Autopian slack, but I’m friendly with some of the people over at ONE and filmed some stuff there for my old gig and my impression is that the company’s march to get to scalable production as quickly as it can seems the right one to me given all the money that’s out there. Again, I’ve known some of the people there for more than a decade and anyone who will put up with me for that long is already suspect so take my impressions with a grain of salt.
The Inside Straight
What would it take to get you into a hydrogen car?
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Photos: Honda, Range Rover, Our Next Energy, Tesla
The Inside Straight: I see Hydrogen as ONLY a transitional energy source, not a permanent (aka >40 years?) one.
Also, what is “The Inside Straight”???? Is it the opposite of “The Outside Gay”?? Aren’t all gays “out”, wait. The Inside Straight is what you call a gay person who has not come out? I’m so confused and not meaning to offend anyone.
It’s a fuckin poker term, my dude. Nothin to do with who anyone chooses to smash bits with.
The outside gay is really into camping/hiking, and might be excited to see a bear in multiple contexts. The inside straight prefers to stay home and read or play board games with a partner of the opposite sex. The indoor/outdoor asexual might spend this weekend inside and next weekend outside, but they’ll have their own tent and sleeping bag.
One moon circles.
+1 for next generation reference.
Hydrogen simply isn’t going to happen, unless someone finds a massive reservoir of underground hydrogen gas, or a way to cheaply convert fast food wrappers into hydrogen. The current options for production are either to make it out of fossil fuels, which is a nonstarter, or make it using water and electricity. Which will always be inherently more electricity-intensive than just using an EV. So why bother? Hydrogen is the laserdisc of fuel alternatives: unwieldy, expensive, and ultimately long past when it could have been useful.
All I need is for the car companies to sell them outside of California.
I suspect the Velar color palette image in in black and white. The selected color is “Varesine Blue”. While it’s not a particularly vibrant shade of blue, it’s definitely not black as the image suggests.
I just checked and my nearest hydrogen filling station is in Quebec, a mere 844 miles away. Seems too far.
I’m still betting on Mr. Fusion.
The NSIdStr8: Make the operating costs cheaper than my Chevy Volt and sell me a 4-year old one for $11,500.
Well, the only way hydrogen could ever have any chance at customer acceptance – and I’m talking even a slight, fraction of a chance – is with some sort of backwards compatibility with existing infrastructure to get around the whole fact of hydrogen stations not existing at all outside a few places in California, but electrical outlets and gas stations both being literally everywhere.
Either make a dual fuel hydrogen/gasoline ICE (that 99% of owners will just run on gasoline all the time) or a dual FCEV/EV (that 99% of owners will just charge like a normal electric car all the time). If the whole point of the exercise is to just get cars with hydrogen fuel capability into more customers’ hands, without caring whether that capability is actually used, that is
Hydrogen produced from natural gas emits carbon dioxide. Hydrogen produced from water requires a tremendous amount of electricity, much more than just putting that electricity in a battery. Guess how the fossil fuel industry wants to produce hydrogen.
Sure, but hydrogen allows you to transport energy better than batteries and to store it in a more flexible format. As a collective society, we’re not storing our sunny days in batteries. It’s simply not happening. Mauritania and Australia aren’t shipping their solar energy in batteries or transferring them in superconducting transmission lines. Hydrogen/ammonia allows for excess energy to enter the global market. It will certainly happen, and it will be a great addition as an on-demand load provider in addition to pumped hydro, nuclear base loads, and various thermal storage devices.
“The Hydrogen Honda CR-V Fuel Cell Could Be A Future”
Yeah it *could* in some alternate universe, but in reality, it won’t.
PHEV Hydrogen vehicles… hmm…. It’s bad enough putting out a BEV fire… now imagine trying to do the same when there is a tank of compressed hydrogen just hanging out nearby. Considering that GM is also part of this equation leaves me even more sus than if Honda were to go it alone.
Considering that we really do need to get away from traditional ICE vehicles, it is clear that we have to do **something** that reduces our reliance on burning fuels that contribute to climate change. What that **something** is yet, also isn’t super clear. Lithium-based BEV’s seem like a great idea until you realize just how bad for the environment it is to mine it, the safety hazards, the disposal and recycling, and then finally, it’s not always clear if you’re using coal power to recharge it. Granted, the grid is getting greener, but it’s not where it needs to be yet anyways.
Hydrogen is great, because it IS a clean fuel… but storing it is a pain, and the costs and energy required to produce it at scale still has a pricey carbon footprint.
Mass transit AT SCALE is the only way to really deal with the climate problem… make it more cost prohibitive to own/operate individual and subsidize that and make car share services more cost-attractive for when you do need to run your own ride for a bit. The fact that any ol’ redneck can buy a giant duallie and roll coal on a McDonald’s salary need to end.
“What would it take to get you into a hydrogen car?”
Oh, that’s easy. Strap a set of hydrogen tanks to the roof of an Austin A40 and you can count me in.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Austin-A-40-Hybrid-car-of-KVKordesch-Six-hydrogen-bottles-were-mounted-on-the_fig2_237258441
When Honda and Toyota announce a joint US-wide SuperHydro filling station network, then I’ll listen.
If you want to be a first-mover like Tesla, you’d better bring the whole package.
The thing that gets me about Japanese manufacturers is they seem to have a very “you will get your car the way WE want it to be” attitude. There are plenty of other manufacturers out there that will let you custom order stuff and provide wide arrays of options, crazy color palettes, et cetera. But Honda and Toyota won’t let you order a car, they have almost no interesting colors outside of their “special” cars, most of their attainable performance products are manual only and they refuse to develop a decent auto, every option is tied to expensive packages, and they rely on the dreaded allocation system so you may never get what you really want. I’d know because I got far-ish along in the process to get a GRC and I eventually gave up and bought an N product at under MSRP that was already on a lot.
And this is yet another case where they’re trying to tell us what we need rather than listening to consumers. No one wants hydrogen vehicles. As other commenters are saying, the technology has been around for a while and lives in a state of perpetual “waiting for a breakthrough”. It’s eons behind ICE and far behind EVs already.
Normies want EVs, PHEVs, hybrids, or reliable ICE powertrains. Make those or watch your market share gradually decrease. Your call, but I know I’m not buying a Honda or Toyota for myself anytime soon since their “have it our way” approach leaves nothing in their lineup that’s suitable for my needs…and while as an enthusiast I’m a secondary concern, they’re going to fall behind with regular customers too, because their core buying demographic of older folks who want something simple isn’t going to be around forever.
God Range Rover trying to blow up on Tik Tok is the most Range Rover BS imaginable. They make lackluster ostentatious vehicles for lackluster ostentatious people to be seen in. And what better place to conspicuously consume than the vapid black hole of inhumanity that is social media? It’s a match made in hell. Can’t wait to (not, I don’t engage with any of this crap) see “influencers” posing in front of pearlescent white Range Rovers while they repeat some dumb hustle culture slogan about how they had to GRIND for this FLEX or something.
In conclusion: get off my lawn! Unless you’re an Autopian. In which case come on in, I’ll fire up the grill.
I’ll bring the beer. Or any other beverage of your choice.
I don’t see how hydrogen works for the mass market. Like ever. EVs have emerged as the next technology capable of replacing the ICE.
Hydrogen works for the mass market by just replacing gasoline/diesel in a traditional ICE. Basically, everything below the head gasket remains exactly the same, while head gasket up gets swapped out for a hydrogen fuel system. H2 fuel cells are… an idea, but there’s a good question as to why you would go through the hassle of H2 fueling to use it as a battery.
H2-EV probably has benefits in a simpler more reliable motor and packaging of an electric motor. I don’t have solid evidence of this, but it makes sense to me.
I’m someone, and I want a hydrogen powered vehicle.
Preferably hydrogen fueled ICE, but I’m flexible.
Home fueling is feasible through DC electrolysis and a high pressure compressor, just needs someone to bring one to market. That gets you EV convenience and ICE fun. Toss solar on the roof and use excess generation to power it rather than selling that at a discount to your electric company and it’s an energy storage device too.
That’s an awful lot of handwaving. It’s much more energy intensive to generate hydrogen through electrolysis than to charge a battery, so not only do you need a solar array, you need a solar array that is multiple times larger than you would need with a BEV. Oh, and some equipment that may or may not ever realistically exist for home use. I’m betting home electrolysis would be prohibitively expensive for all but the hydrogen true believers.
A simple “here’s why you’re wrong, let me explain” would’ve sufficed
I mean, his solution to powering our transportation infrastructure is something that is, in his own words, “impossible to transport”. I don’t think anyone is taking him too seriously. 😉
I beg to differ. Stupidity is the most recycled element. You obviously haven’t spent enough time on the internet.
” Know what you give up with the Mirai compared to a traditional ICE? Nothing. Zero. Nada”
“Nothing”… just as long as you ignore the 50% less efficiency compared to BEVs, ignore that the price of hydrogen is heavily subsidized during the lease and when the lease is up, you get fucked with the full cost of hydrogen that makes it more expensive to operate than a regular ICE gas vehicle.
Oh and also if you ignore the lack of fueling infrastructure that makes it completely impossible to drive across the country with one.
Yeah… you give up ‘nothing’ with a hydrogen vehicle… riiiiiight…
Wrote an essay on something that’s never going to be feasible. Never.
One single error tells you all you need to know about hydrogen ignorance: “Know how hard it would be to build a hydrogen filling station? Decent amount of power lines, an aboveground storage tank, and done – orders of magnitude cheaper and easier than a gas station.”
Nope. Dead wrong. A hydrogen electrolysis station costs about $3.2 million to build, and can serve about 120kg of hydrogen a day. A Mirai takes 5.6kg per fill. This is only 21 cars a day.
An electrolysis hydrogen filling station costs $3.2 million dollars to build and can only serve 21 cars a day.
21 cars a day is pathetic, insanely expensive and never going to happen on a large scale. And that doesn’t even include H2 production costs.
Delivered liquid hydrogen is cheapest, and at best is about $2.8 million for 350kg per day, or 62 cars a day.
Still insanely expensive, and that is not including production and transportation!
https://h2stationmaps.com/costs-and-financing
A $2 million gas station can server 1,700 cars a day.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099548_gas-electricity-hydrogen-how-many-cars-can-fuel-and-what-will-it-cost
Hydrogen is a stupid fuel. If you want an alternative liquid fuel, you’ll always be better off with something liquid at normal temperatures, like alcohols or biodiesel.
The Inside Straight?
I’ll never not like a good vague sex innuendo. Well done, team!
I was thinking it was laxative inspired…
Something like 15 years ago, I attended a Honda press event in California that showed off the first “Clarity” prototypes, which looked pretty much like greatly enlarged Honda AN600s. These were fuel-cell cars, with “super capacitors” for brief extra power. So, they essentially drove like electric cars, which is what they were.
Honda also showed a “hydrogen generator” they claimed would be for home use. It was ostensibly solar-powered, though there were massive high-voltage cables attached in case the sun couldn’t provide enough juice.
The plan, which I don’t recall having been carried out, was supposedly to lease these puppies to early adopters. I tried to borrow one for testing, as I lived close enough to their Torrance facility to pop in for fillups, but no soap.
Getting me into a hydrogen vehicle over gas powered would require exactly the same criteria as getting me into an EV.
-No sacrifice in TCO.
-No sacrifice in capability.
-No sacrifice in ease of use.
I’m open minded on powertrain choices, but I’m closed minded on reducing quality of life for no discernable reason.
I’ve been saying, hydrogen is the future! And the future is…well, not now, but you know, some day yet to come…Yeah.
Nothing would get me into a hydrogen car short of me having my own home hydrogen factory, which would probably be pretty unsafe to have in a home, even if professionally installed.
Many car companies want Hydrogen to replace Gasoline, however current Hydrogen infrastructure is basically nonexistent, making it LESS convenient than owning a BEV because for most homeowners you have electricity which means that even if there are no charging stations within your BEV’s range you can charge at home. With hydrogen powered cars if there is no hydrogen refueling station within your car’s range you cannot own a hydrogen powered car practically. Sure you can pay for a massive hydrogen tank to be installed at your house and pay a hydrogen company to fill it up via truck (likely for a massive markup because you wouldn’t buy much), but that’s not practical nor is it cheap.
Having a BEV with a house that’s off the grid with its own power generation is like having an pumpjack and refinery in your backyard fueling your ICE car/s but without the toxic crud, but even having a pumpjack and refinery in your backyard would be more feasible than a hydrogen factory.
Hey, if fuel cells were good enough to take us to the moon and back, they’ve got to be good enough to operate a Honda CR-V, right? As long as they don’t price them as early adopter vehicles, I would considering buying one. I think they will be much higher in price (like any premiering technology) and we’ll see how they catch on. If the fuel cell maintains its efficiency as a used vehicle, maybe I would buy then? I still itch thinking about flammable hydrogen and an electric car drive train conveniently combined in one package but I would imagine engineers and fire departments will have that figured out.
We all know they are only going to sell about 500 in North America so why try and make a profit at all? Sell for $1000 more than the hybrid option and eat the losses, then increase prices later.
I think many buyers would want their CRV to be able to complete more than one return trip. 😉
Hydrogen tech would have to be pretty good for me to go hydrogen. As it stands, we have using the hydrogen down pretty well, but the process to make it still takes a lot of energy and storage really isn’t solved for the scale of a passenger vehicle fuel tank. Admittedly, making it a hydrogen PHEV could sort of solve the latter, assuming you basically just get the fuel you need for a trip and leave the tank empty most of the time. That could mean less hydrogen escaping and less deterioration of the metal and brittleness.
Maybe we’ll get there on hydrogen production and make it work for passenger vehicles, but I’m not willing to bet on that horse just yet.
In a completely unrelated thing, Matt I found you a Mercury Capri https://www.ebay.com/itm/295459427520
Damn. That is nice.
That’s got a ton of potential.
ohhhhh ohhhh boy. That’s nice.
The urge to get another captive Euro Ford beckons!
To get me into a hydrogen car would need a hydrogen pump available at most big franchise gas stations, with comparable price to gasoline. Otherwise I’ll stick with an EV that I can literally ‘fill up’ at my house, or get a PHEV that I could fill up from my house or from any gas station.
H2 fuel cells certainly have the potential for being the range extenders of the future, as well as the core powertrain of heavy duty vehicles, trains, and anything that tows. It seems like we’re perennially away from a breakthrough, however.
I agree with you on heavy duty vehicles. Semis can hold large fuel cells for decent range and medium-scale hydrogen production could take place at or near truck stops.