It's official Toyota is full speed fuel cells for compliance after 2014

Unlike your normal informative links that old forbes editorial piece makes more of a point against toyota's fuel cells than plug-ins. But let's look at an editorial from 2011.

The Nissan Leaf is the first mass-produced “battery electric vehicle” (BEV). It uses state-of-the-art lithium batteries. Despite this, the Leaf makes no sense at all. It costs more than twice as much ($35,430 vs. $17,250) as a comparable Nissan Versa, but it is much less capable. The Leaf accelerates more slowly than a Versa and has only about 25% of the range.

At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.​

Ok leaf was too expensive for what you got in 2011, fast foward to 2014 and nissan has upped the value proposition, lowering the price for what you used to get, and adding some other things for more money. Check. He was right that 1 Million plug-ins by the end of 2015 was wrong, but its not like solyndra. The date was too soon. Now lets check the toyota fuel cell price versus the leaf or prius phv. What we can't because toyota won't tell us the price, only that it costs less than a bev. Let's go with the tuscon fuel cell then $499/mo fuel included. That isn't going pay off ever.

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.​

2014 any phev can refill at a gas station, and likely would last that 4 hours better than a conventional car. Tesla S can add 170 miles in less than half an hour. OK editorial writer was completely wrong here. How about a fuel cell vehicle? Well if you are caught in a blizzard in DC that fuel cell would probably wait days for the hydrogen truck to pull up. leaf and fcv don't work in blizzard areas Many other plug-ins work fine.

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My simple math says if Abenomics throws another $5B to Toyota/Honda/Nissan they can probably build refueling infrastructure and enough money to get 100,000 cars out there in Japan, if you figure $1B for 350 stations (they cost more in japan) and $40K subsidy per car. I don't think that is betting the farm, just maybe $500M/year for 10 years. It has a chance. Since GM is partnered with Honda, and Ford with Nissan, the US could cut all commercialization efforts, the US was spending around $250M/year at one point. DOE should spend $129M this year and California another $20M.

In 2000 Toyota and GM paid for research that said people would need to be paid to take BEVs. Toyota used it to as part of the effort with Lloyd to get research money for fuel cells. They may really believe, but have little to show for over 20 years of government sponsored research.
CALIFORNIA STUDY SAYS MASS MARKET NOT READY FOR ELECTRIC VEHICLES | News & Analysis content from WardsAuto

Love to see the bad experimental design on that survey. Anyway we know the history. Toyota and GM and Lloyd got CARB to change the mandate to favor fcv. This favoratism was supposed to change in 2012 when all the fcv would be so sucessful that plug-ins could be on an even footing. I believe toyota is still sticking to some of that bad over a decade old research.

GM, Honda, Toyota, and Mercedes have spent a great deal of their own money too. If it was easy, fuel cells would be on the road today. With $5B from the japanese government, who knows fcv may be ready in 10 years.

 

Hydrogen-fueled cars face uncertain market in California - SFGate

Nice hyundai has given us numbers. Between now and the end of next year they expect to sell or lease 600 vehicles. I'm not suer where the author got the figures for leaf and volt, perhaps that is california only, in the us 7871 volts and 9674 leafs in dec 2010- dec 2011 (13 months)would be the key comparison figure to 600 (18 months).

That's kind of sad, as if simply saying they are here and like ordinary cars, but just more expensive and no place to fill up, and the fuel if fairly priced will cost more than gasoline. Where do I sign up to buy?

hmm. it's spending a lot of money on hydrogen fueling stations and not much on electric or biofuel infrastructure, and is a founding member of the fuel cell lobby - california fuel cell partnership. That seems like conflict of interest not being agnostic.