Ford’s electric F-150 pickup truck

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

On another forum, they talk about how Toyota is so far behind that they will no longer be a company in another year. Toyota didn't "invest" in something that loses as much as the total profit of the company, and that is why they're going to fail.

Toyota could make as many EVs as it would either want or be mandated to do so right now. Hybrids were a more realistic approach to address some needs and concerns of the average Joe, and remain more realistic than any switch to full-EVs intended by bureaucrats.

[JSH]

Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr

Toyota could make as many EVs as it would either want or be mandated to do so right now. Hybrids were a more realistic approach to address some needs and concerns of the average Joe, and remain more realistic than any switch to full-EVs intended by bureaucrats.

They could be making EVs today if they decided to do so 4-5 years ago. Automotive has a long development cycle.

As I have said before - there are different ways to meet the same regulations. Honda / Toyota have taken a different approach than GM / Ford. The Japanese have focused on making all their bread and butter models hybrids. The US companies have focused on selling a small number of EVs to offset their ICE vehicles.

A lot of this difference in strategy has to do with different product mixes. Ford and GM are essentially truck and commercial vehicle manufacturers. The bulk of their sales are gas guzzlers. One Transit EV or Lightening EV can offset 10 - 20 F-150s. Honda and Toyota have full lines of vehicles and are MUCH less dependent on trucks. Selling a 2025 Camry that meets CAFE 2032 today offsets quite a few Tacomas.

However, we are getting to an big inflection point and that is CARB's Advanced Clean Cars II which starts phasing in starting in 2026. Unless Honda and Toyota are going to abandon almost 50% of the US market they are going to have to start making EVs toward the end of the decade as they burn through their stockpile of credits they earned. (LOTS of ZEV credits were earned over the last 10 years for selling ICE and hybrid cars)

[freebeard]

That's informative. Where do e-fuels fit in?

[JSH]

Originally Posted by freebeard

That's informative. Where do e-fuels fit in?

They don't - at least not for normal road vehicles. They make sense for race fuel as fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of racing so they can afford to pay $45 per gallon. They make sense for applications like airplanes where you need the energy density of a liquid fuel.

eFuels are basically turning electricity into fuel. The problem is that it is a massively inefficient process and then you take that product at burn it in an engine that wastes 70% of the energy. At the end of the day you are getting about 15% of the original energy to the wheels.

That means you need 5x the input renewable electricity if you are going to use that electricity to make efuel to power an ICE vs just using it to direct charge and run an EV. ICE H2 has the same problem

Fuel Cell H2 is about twice as efficient as ICE H2 or eFuel ICE but you still need 3X more electricity than what is required for EVs.

[freebeard]

Direct-ethanol fuel cell
Direct-ethanol fuel cells or DEFCs are a category of fuel cell in which ethanol is fed directly into the cell. They have been used as a model to investigate a range of fuel cell concepts including the use of PEM. Wikipedia

This is an area where opportunity beckons.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-ethanol_fuel_cell#Issues

Issues
Platinum-based catalysts are expensive, so practical exploitation of ethanol as fuel for a PEM fuel cell requires a new catalyst. New nanostructured electrocatalysts (HYPERMEC by ACTA SpA for example) have been developed, which are based on non-noble metals, preferentially mixtures of Fe, Co, Ni at the anode, and Ni, Fe or Co alone at the cathode. With ethanol, power densities as high as 140 mW/cm2 at 0.5 V have been obtained at 25 °C with self-breathing cells containing commercial anion exchange membranes.[2] This catalyst does not contain any precious metals. In practice tiny metal particles are fixed onto a substrate in such a way that they produce a very active catalyst.
....
Bio-Ethanol based fuel cells may improve the well-to-wheel balance of this biofuel because of the increased conversion rate of the fuel cell compared to the internal combustion engine. But real world figures may be only achieved in some years since the development of direct methanol and ethanol fuel cells is lagging behind hydrogen powered fuel cells.

If the Carbon and Oxygen come from air, then a closed cycle is driven by the power input.

Where does the Hydrogen precursor come from?

[JSH]

Ethanol is a dead end. Either you produce it the same way as today with massively polluting farming or you make it the same way as eFuels like synthetic gasoline and it is massively inefficient consuming far more energy than is returned.

The hydrogen for both green H2 or eFuel comes from splitting water with renewable electricity.

I didn't mention it above but another reason the eFuels aren't going anywhere for normal road transportation is that they have the same local emission problems as fossil fuels. NOx, PM, CO, HC are the same. Reducing GHG is generally talked about more when people talk about the need to move to renewables but just as important is reducing smog and pollution related disease in urban areas all around the world.

Looking at the available options - battery electric wins as the most cost effective way to reduce our carbon and local emissions from transportation. That is why companies around the world have focused their efforts on EVs. (We focus on meeting regulations in the most cost effective way). It is the economic winner even without subsidies if we continue to reduce the amount of pollutants allowed from our transportation sector.

[aerohead]

In Richmond, California, CHEVRON was using landfill methane as its feedstock for hydrogen production. It turned out to be more carbon-intensive than conventional fossil-fuel.
Some reports on former-governor 'Schwarzenegger's Hydrogen Highway' figured that hydrogen stations would be located along California's existing natural gas pipeline network, and since hydrogen is hard to store without leakage, it would just be made onsite, on-demand, from the methane. Kind of a bummer, as this would place it next to hydro-fracturing, and the rogue methane emissions, 82-X more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon-dioxide.
U.S. hydrogen might be 1% - 14% of energy demand by 2050, according to CARB. A carbon 'phasedown', not a 'phaseout' by 2045.
They're also going to have to absorb $40,000,000 plugging orphaned oil wells in Los Angeles and Kern Counties.
'Pay me now, and pay me later!'

[JSH]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Some reports on former-governor 'Schwarzenegger's Hydrogen Highway' figured that hydrogen stations would be located along California's existing natural gas pipeline network, and since hydrogen is hard to store without leakage, it would just be made onsite, on-demand, from the methane.

There is zero reason to turn natural gas into hydrogen to power vehicles. It is far cleaner and cheaper just to use the natural gas directly.

[redpoint5]

According to the Green Chicken, disparities in the price per BTU between differing distillates will tend to arbitrage through the adoption of machines that run on the cheaper fuel. At the moment, that is natural gas, and China has been increasing the production of equipment that runs on it.

[Isaac Zachary]

Originally Posted by JSH

There is zero reason to turn natural gas into hydrogen to power vehicles. It is far cleaner and cheaper just to use the natural gas directly.

Unless maybe we're talking about a space vehicle?