Hydrogen car naysayers, negative Nancies, pessimists, critics, skeptics, deniers, detractors, scoffers, whiners, malcontents, complainers, fusspots, gripers, snivelers, squawkers, curmudgeons, sourpusses, party poopers, faultfinders, nitpickers, grinches, killjoys, spoilsports, quibblers and defeatists have had a bad 2 weeks. Toyota and Mercedes-Benz (Daimler) has seen to that.
On Wednesday last week (October 25, 2015) Toyota made an historic move by selling the first consumer hydrogen car/s in the United States (the UK was a day earlier). The Toyota Mirai was rolled out on “Back to the Future Day” among a lot of fanfare.
Over the years, I’ve heard the critics say phrases like “Hydrogen fool cells will never be sold anywhere. It’s just a pipe dream.” Well, this zero emission tailpipe dream is now a reality. So, that was last week.
And now this week, 5 Mercedes-Benz B-Class F-CELL cars have made a 1,000 mile trip from southern California to northern California using only the existing public hydrogen fueling station infrastructure.
According to Daimler, “The opening of a new hydrogen station in Coalinga along the I-5 corridor made this opportunity possible. A team driving five B-Class F-CELL refilled at four permanent hydrogen fueling stations located in Burbank, Coalinga, West Sacramento and Emeryville, accumulating nearly 1,000 miles over the course of their three day trip. Three F-CELL customers were accompanied by a team from Mercedes-Benz Research and Development North America based in Long Beach. The purpose of this unique road trip was to highlight the growing hydrogen station network and to show that the vision of the California Hydrogen Highway is becoming reality.”
While I might shed a small tear for the anti-hydrogen car bellyachers (microscopic in size), I would prefer to end on a positive note saying that hydrogen fuel cell cars are now officially for sale and it is possible in some parts of the world to take a sizeable road trip using only public H2 fueling stations – we are making great progress!
In 2011 you wrote about a material for hydrogen storage that relied on scandium. At the time the concept was academic because there was no primary scalable supply of scandium at a stable price to allow commercialization of this form of hydrogen storage, which would go a long way to solving the delivery to refueling station problem. But since then new scandium deposits have been found in Australia which will within a couple years make unlimited scandium supply possible at $1,500-$2,000/kg. So I’m curious if the Al-Sc hydrogen storage concept failed on technical grounds, or simply got shelved because of the critical scandium input problem?
Hello John, you may want to check with these folks as they are involved with scandium storage: https://www.americanelements.com/sc.html
Hi Kevin, are you aware of any public databases that track the sales of the Toyota Mirai, and the Hyundai Tuscon FCV similar to those that track mainstream cars.
It would be interesting to watch how well the take rate on these vehicles grows
Hi Dan, I’m not aware of any such databases, but you’re right that it would be very interesting to track the sales of each hydrogen car once it comes to market.
I’m pretty sure that the sales of HFCVs will be on the Inside EVs website – http://insideevs.com/monthly-plug-in-sales-scorecard/
Their page devoted to Toyota is here – http://insideevs.com/category/toyota/
Thanks for the resources, Jim, we’ll have to keep checking back on these to see if/when they are updated.