Toyota, Honda, Nissan and other Japanese automakers are serious about rolling out battery electric vehicles to catch up with the world’s frontrunners like Tesla and BYD
“We love battery EVs.”
Takero Kato, the executive in charge of electric vehicles at Toyota, said that not once, but twice, to emphasize what he considers the message at this year’s Tokyo auto show.
It’s a message ringing clear at the Tokyo Mobility Show, which will run through Nov. 5 at Tokyo Big Sight hall and where battery-powered electric vehicles are the star at practically every booth.
I always thought of hydrogen as tech that didn’t have a leg to stand on.
The tech is just a bunch of air
Yeah, but all these traditional car makers had all this expertise designing and making ICEs so they blindly stuck to the idea of continuing to make ICEs, by just moving to hydrogen.
They hobbled themselves since making electric cars requires a very different skill set which Tesla and many Chinese car makers were able to break into without the high entry cost that making quality ICEs has. Now they’ve set themselves to play catchup at the risk of being steamrolled by newcomers.
While from a technical point of view it would allow for the continuation of combustion engines, and is thus an attractive alternative for car makers, it doesn’t make sense to use hydrogen on such small scales. Making hydrogen cleanly requires a lot of energy, so the idea generally is to use renewable energy to generate hydrogen from water. This works for industrial applications like steel making, but on a small scale it just doesn’t make economic sense because it needs to be cooled down so much.
The main reason why hydrogen is pushed is because it is also a byproduct of natural gas exploitation, so called blue or grey hydrogen.