this truck runs totally on hydrogen as
it goes down the highway it is producing nothing but water that is certifiably
awesome but hydrogen technology has gotten quite a bit of hate in the past
couple years hate I don't think is warranted so let's Deep dive this thing
where does hydrogen power make sense where does it not and should you buy a
Toyota marai okay the the answer to the
last one is basically no but it's early days it's so early I haven't even segue
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below there are two ways you can use hydrogen to make a cargo internal
combustion and Fuel Cell electric on the surface internal combustion sounds
pretty sweet
literally you just take a direct injection engine replace the injectors
with hydrogen ones and with a very non-trivial amount of tuning later
you're Off to the Races Toyota did this with the engine from the Gris and
entered a 24-hour endurance race to middling results there are quite a few
problems with hydrogen internal combustion engines the biggest being
efficiency only about a quarter of the energy available is turned into making
your cargo which brings us to fuel cell
electric vehicles like the truck we saw earlier and this right here the second
generation Toyota marai these work similarly to a battery
electric car with normal electric motors providing your acceleration the
difference is though that when you hit the gas I really appreciate that I can
still say that here hydrogen is allowed to flow from the storage tank to the
fuel cell stack inside the fuel cell oxygen like just from the air around you
is allowed to enter and hydrogen which is just a single proton electron really
wants to bond with that oxygen to create water unfortunately for that hydrogen
Toyota placed a proton exchange membrane between the hydrogen and the oxygen
which only allows the proton to pass through leaving the electron behind this
causes the electron to have massive fomo like you if you don't shop at LTD
store.com so it will happily do the Sprint around a conductor to meet up
with the hydrogen and oxygen creating electricity and powering the vehicle in
the process the largest benefit of this is that hydrogen can be put into your
car in just a couple of minutes through a process that is very similar to
filling your car with gas but is this
actually that easy there are two ways to
store hydrogen liquid and compressed liquid hydrogen is nice because it's
super easy to pump and easy to store a bunch of it no pressure vessel required
unfortunately hydrogen becomes a liquid at -2
22.8 de C getting that cold takes a lot
of energy adding to the already high price liquid hydrogen is promising for
use in planes and some trucks but for cars it's just too expensive and the
general public does not want to deal with cryogenics instead what we have
here is compressed hydrogen at 10,000 PSI which honestly sounds kind of freaky
how is to fill your car with it Jee really hope this works out the
last time we did this we were not very successful and a kind young M had to
come over and show us how to do it the first thing you'll notice with these is
that they're really cold and normally pretty wet this is a different connector
than I used before maybe this one's easier oh wow it is if we knew what we
were doing this was honestly really easy
and here we go we've already pumped $5 which oh my God this is $16 per kilogram
that's so much more expensive than the last one we had I guess that's why they
give you the marai with like $155,000 gas card
jeez connect okay this connector is awesome I like this one honestly at that
station with that connector it was actually easier than gas really we have
a full tank and we're good to go now
while I've been filling the marai with a highly compressed highly flammable gas
you've probably been thinking about the other time there was a bunch of hydrogen
in one place fortunately I don't think that will happen here the high pressure
is actually make the whole thing safer like think about it at a normal gas
station pump if you want you can just go all Zoolander and spray gasoline
everywhere but with compressed hydrogen it's really easy to detect if a leak is
there by the pressure drop also hydrogen is super light so if the tank is
ruptured instead of pooling under the car it just quickly depressurizes and
all the gas floats away Toyota even has footage of one of these tanks getting
shot like they lit a car on fire shot the tank and the footage is really
boring they found that the tank depressurizes so fast the hydrogen
doesn't even really have a chance to explode so that's nice hydrogen has
another problem though and this is the point that critics will really try to
hammer home it can never be as efficient as a battery electric car and on a price
per kilometer basis it will always lose
for a battery electric vehicle getting from generated power to your car moving
is pretty simple the electricity is generated gets sent through the grid
real efficient and then it goes you know into your car's battery some AC todc
conversion there and the whole process is like 70 to 90% efficient depending on
a couple of variables for hydrogen the
process is more complex the cheapest way to produce it is by well burning a bunch
of natural gas which kind of defeats the whole purpose this means electrolysis is
preferred which is essentially the same process we use to get the marai to go
except in reverse using electricity to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen that
hydrogen then needs to be compressed which uses more energy and transported
via pipe or truck to its final location
then the final step taking that hydrogen and turning it back into electricity is
only about 50% efficient with all of
those steps you're looking at roughly 25
35% efficiency total and since electricity is being used to make the
hydrogen in the first place it will always cost more per kilometer than a
battery electric car but battery electric vehicles have a problem physics
at the end of the day f equals Ma so if you want to accelerate several tons of
vehicle or tens of tons in this case
you're going to use a lot of energy like
sure they could fill this area with batteries instead of hydrogen tanks but
then you're not only adding Mass but also greatly increasing the charge time
and sure battery charging rates are going to improve and electric motors
will become more efficient but it will never be able to beat this nozzle right
here let's do some math so each one of
these ports can transfer 60 G of hydrogen per second which works out to
about 7.2 megaw of energy since
efficiency is less than battery electric we can say it has an effective charging
rate of 3.6 megaw to achieve that with
an 800 volt battery like most Electric Vehicles use you would need 4400 amps
unless you build a literal Power Station you cannot do that also the charging
cable would have to be like this big
using hydrogen for a truck has loads of other benefits too although most of
these are shared with battery electric vehicles instead of 18 gears these only
need two it has a Prius shifter wow
there's way less vibrations and they create almost no noise also at the Port
of truck drivers aren't allowed to idle well in que to reduce emissions which
can result in some very toasty cabins in the summer and a hydrogen truck though
they can just keep it running the whole time AC all day
awesome for whatever reason people seem to think there can only be one winner
hydrogen or battery electric but why not
both I alluded that musk was wrong at the start of this video but AO Toyota
has been just as bad in the next 10 years battery electric will be the clear
winner even if the infrastructure isn't quite there people have electricity in
their homes and for shorter Computing it just makes sense if the use case
requires going over about 400 km
regularly is for heavy vehicles or a
vehicle that requires near constant use hydrogen is going to be the winner for
me personally I think hydrogen vehicles are going to happen and the important
question isn't if it will happen but how it happens here is the environmentalist
piie in the sky pitch in the future almost all electricity is renewable so
solar wind water and so on is what we use but the problem with these is that
they don't output a consistent amount this means that there are times like
right now where it's really freaking windy and a bunch of these windmills
have the brakes on cuz there's more electricity Supply than demand instead
of just applying the brakes we could convert that into hydrogen some of it
can be turned back into electricity and what's left over is used to power
our cars Wicked I love this
future a more cynical take is that currently 90% of the world's hydrogen is
produced through Steam methane Reformation process I mentioned earlier
that's basically burning a bunch of natural gas creating loads of carbon
dioxide in the process this could be excellent for oil producers since
they're still able to make heaps of money off of you while you drive your
zero emissions car pretty much the only thing that gives me hope this will end
well is the Department of Energy's earthshot which is basically the US
government putting $400 million a year behind the goal of making renewably
sourced hydrogen available for $1 per kilogram by
2031 if the earthshot and hydrogen
trucks happen I think we'll be in pretty good shape currently if you're a massive
industrial plant or whatever you are buying hydrogen in bulk you are not
paying the $16 per kilogram we did if
more hydrogen starts getting bought to power these trucks and cars the price
will drop simply because of buying in bulk and the ability to produce hydrogen
on location will likely be a huge benefit to many companies also helping
bring the price down this all leaves us with one final question do you want to
drive a hydrogen car like is the Mariah any
good honestly me and Andy both really
like it it's built on the same platform as the Lexus LS and it features wi
quality that just does not exist in electric cars anywhere near this price
point it's much lighter which means that they didn't have to really stiffen up
the suspension so it can absorb all of the little bumps while not getting too
wallowy over the big ones compared to a model 3 night and day it's also you know
basically alus so seats are comfy driving positions good and it's even
rewh drive to boot so it's kind of fun to Huck into Corners my biggest problem
with the marai though is that it is
slow let's look
here it throttles from 0 to 60 in about
9 seconds uh Toyota come on if your car is 50 Grand
it should not be getting chopped by a base Civic like it might lead a lot of
people to think that hydrogen cars are slow they don't have to be it's just an
electric motor there's already a battery in here if you can't supply enough
energy with the hydrogen you can just make it up with the
battery Toyota says these weak electric motors were to allow them to hit their
Target price point but frankly I think that's stupid this is never going to be
a practical car you can only use it if you live in LA or San Francisco and why
not just make it fun please just stick a Lexus badge on it give it 500 horsepower
and price be damned this car is proof that hydrogen power works and is a
genuine Marvel of engineering but no youngsters are putting it on their wall
and I think that's a sin oh and at the start of this video I asked if you
should buy one of these no absolutely not we're down in Orange County not even
that far from LA and most of the hydrogen Stations don't have hydrogen
there's a shortage or something so the couple that do are marai car meetups
with like a dozen in line it took us like 40 minutes to get hydrogen last
night oh it does pee though watch
this it do it Stern it didn't you'll
have to trust me anyway do you know who also pees a little bit our business team
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Linus so huge thanks for watching this video we hope to do loads more on
location car shoots like this one hope you liked it and if you want to watch
something else maybe watch our xc40 review Toyota we saw your bz X4 in
camouflage we want to actually try it please please it looks really cool