Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
Those are wildly exaggerated. The main limitation is that society hasn’t invested enough in hydrogen infrastructure. At least not yet. The problems would quickly go away if we did.
You also forget that we’ve poured many billions of dollars into electrification and battery production. That amount of investment would have solved a lot of those limitations.
As green hydrogen is made from water, there is basically no battery chemistry that can rival it in terms of availability. It is basically the best energy storage mechanism of this type already. Saying that batteries can get better is just misdirection. Also, you can have plug-in hydrogen cars too. The natural path is probably hybrids -> PHEVs -> plug-in FCEVs. Pure BEVs are in many ways a side-trip.
You’re downplaying the efforts involved in making hydrogen mainstream. Hydrogen infrastructure would be more costly to build out because you need specialized tanks and mechanisms to pressurize/liquefy hydrogen to make it easier to store. You’d also need to convert gas stations to hydrogen stations which is very costly. Hydrogen fuel stations can’t serve as many vehicles as a petrol station at a time and hydrogen being less dense means needing a much bigger tank to serve a day’s worth of vehicles. Then there’s the matter of generating hydrogen. Most productive processes now not are green.
The money poured into improved batteries has many applications other than vehicles. Hydrogen doesn’t have as many consumer applications. It’s not necessarily true that more investment in hydrogen would solve its problems because there may be roadblocks you’re not anticipating. Battery tech is improving all the time, but you’re calling it misdirection even though hydrogen isn’t anywhere near as viable. Water is more available than petrol, but that doesn’t mean hydrogen is more practical than petrol.
At the end of the day, you are just turning sunlight/wind and water into a fuel. The marginal cost is nearly zero. Which is why the development trajectory will be the same as the rise of wind and solar energy. Both of those ideas also had nearly zero marginal cost. As a result, you can expect hydrogen fuel to be extreme cheap and basically inexhaustible. That is a major advantage and there is nothing batteries can ever do to match that.
I wonder if you are projecting here: Hydrogen, not batteries, have many more applications. You can’t even make the steel used to make a car without a reducing agent like hydrogen. Same is true of the metals in the battery itself. So if we want to hit zero emissions for real, hydrogen is mandatory, but batteries are not. In fact, BEVs are totally dependent on green hydrogen to real reach zero emissions. Everything from industry to long-duration energy storage all requires hydrogen. You can skip BEVs altogether but you cannot avoid hydrogen.