The battle between hydrogen energy battery cars and traditional battery cars

Toyota Motor provided 2205 vehicles for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, of which 247 hydrogen fuel vehicles let the outside world understand Toyota's new technologies and new ideas in the field of hydrogen fuel technology. Hydrogen energy has become a hot topic in the major media.

Hydrogen fuel has no future?

At the end of 2021, Akio Toyoda, the head of Toyota Motor, who has repeatedly shelled electric vehicles, announced his entry into the field of electric vehicles and launched fifteen new cars in his Odaiba showroom. In this regard, many media have carried out relevant reports with the title prefix of "Toyota Akio hit the face". In fact, for Toyota Akio's repeated shelling of electric vehicles, the author believes that its main purpose is to win more time before toyota's key research and development of hydrogen energy vehicles achieve large-scale mass production, so as to achieve a direct leap between hybrid vehicles and hydrogen energy vehicles.

According to the study, hydrogen fuel cells have three major disadvantages in commercialization, and at the end of the report, the conclusion that "hydrogen fuel cells have completely lost opportunities in commercialization" is put forward. Perhaps many readers will wonder when they see this conclusion, what are the disadvantages of hydrogen fuel cells, so that the authors set this conclusion?

Specifically, the three major disadvantages mentioned in the report are as follows:

First, the accelerated development of power batteries has directly squeezed the living space of hydrogen fuel cells.

As we all know, since entering 2022, the subsidy policy for new energy vehicles has declined again, for example, pure electric vehicles with a pure electric mileage of more than 400km have been subsidized by 5400 yuan after the decline. Judging from the increasingly stringent subsidy requirements for new energy vehicles, pure electric vehicles with a cruising range of more than 400km have become the norm in the market, and even pure electric vehicles with a range of 1000km have begun to appear on the market. At the same time, 800V supercharge has also begun to be installed on the vehicle, which can realize 15 minutes of charging and 200km. In this context, the advantages of hydrogen energy batteries that originally had long endurance and fast energy replenishment began to weaken.

Second, the popularity of hydrogen energy vehicles is slow.

Compared with the popularity of pure electric vehicles, hydrogen energy vehicles can almost be called "turtle speed". According to the data released by the Association of Passenger Vehicles, the retail sales of new energy passenger vehicles reached 2.989 million units in 2021, an increase of 169.1% year-on-year, and the market penetration rate was 14.8%. By the beginning of 2022, the number of pure electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid models in the world has reached 15 million. In contrast, the number of hydrogen energy vehicles in early 2021 was only 25,000. It can be seen that there is not much time left for the development of hydrogen energy vehicles, which may be why Toyota motor will choose to join the electrification sequence.

Third, the hydrogen energy vehicle energy replenishment network needs to be improved。

Compared with pure electric vehicles with simple energy replenishment, the development of hydrogen energy vehicle infrastructure not only has the characteristics of high construction costs, but also has technical problems in the transportation and storage of hydrogen fuel.

Hydrogen internal combustion engines and hydrogen fuel cells

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles rely on the electrochemical reaction of hydrogen and oxygen in hydrogen fuel cell stacks to generate electrical energy. Compared with pure electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have the advantages of fast energy replenishment efficiency, long driving range, and superior low temperature performance. As an important breakthrough in the application of hydrogen energy in the field of transportation, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are considered to be an important direction for commercial vehicles to accelerate the decarbonization process and achieve electrification transformation. Since 2020, the policies at the national level to encourage the development of hydrogen energy and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have continued to increase, and local governments have also successively introduced support policies. Thanks to this, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have developed rapidly, and have achieved significant improvements from industrial scale to cost effectiveness.

According to public data, by the end of 2020, the cumulative number of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in mainland China has reached more than 7,000, distributed in 36 cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for demonstration operation. In December 2021, the Ministry of Finance and other five departments issued the "Notice on Launching a New Batch of Fuel Cell Vehicle Demonstration Application Work", including Hebei, Henan, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Shanghai and Guangdong, including five major urban agglomerations, officially launched the demonstration application of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

At a time when the heat of fuel cell technology is not decreasing, many companies have begun to unlock another form of hydrogen energy application - hydrogen internal combustion engine. Hydrogen internal combustion engines are similar to fuel vehicles, except that the fuel is turned into hydrogen, and the engine has commonalities with the previous gasoline engines and natural gas engines. Hydrogen internal combustion engines have more cost and promotion advantages. The internal combustion engine will take hydrogen as fuel, on the one hand, it has a variety of fuel adaptability, pure hydrogen can be used as fuel, and methanol can be mixed, effectively reducing the dependence on oil; on the other hand, it can maximize the utilization of internal combustion engine resources and extend the life cycle of production equipment, hydrogen internal combustion engine retains the main architecture and system of the traditional internal combustion engine, does not need to rebuild the industrial chain, and the difficulty and cost of its technical realization are much smaller than fuel cells.

From the perspective of use, fuel cells need to eat 'fine grains', requiring the purity of hydrogen to reach 99.99%. The hydrogen internal combustion engine is not so 'delicate', there is no special requirement for the purity of hydrogen, and it has a high overall efficiency in the high load zone. For medium and heavy-duty trucks that undertake the transport of goods, hydrogen internal combustion engines are a more economical and efficient option.

Our choice

In the use of hydrogen energy, our industrial level is still far behind other developed countries. Taking the German BMW Group as an example, BMW believes that hydrogen fuel cells will also be an important supplement to pure electric vehicles, and it is also another focus of BMW's new energy vehicle technology. So far, the BMW Group has accumulated more than 40 years of experience in the research and development of hydrogen energy power systems, and has more than 20 years of experience in the research and development of hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Julgen Guldner, Head of the HYDROGEN Fuel Cell Technology and Automotive Project at the BMW Group, said: "Hydrogen fuel cell drive systems combine the advantages of both drive systems and are not affected by seasonal variations and outdoor temperatures. It can not only achieve zero-emission travel of pure electric models, but also feel the same as fuel vehicles in terms of use, and long-distance driving only needs a short stay to be full of fuel. ”

Recently, the BMW iX5 Hydrogen hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has made the latest progress, it has been in the Winter Test Center of the BMW Group in Arjeplug, Sweden, it has carried out a rigorous extreme cold endurance test, has now entered the post-research and development stage before mass production, and is expected to be put into small-scale production in the second half of this year.