Toyota is really going all in with this hydrogen stuff, huh? Don't get me wrong, it's all very cool, but I'm not totally convinced it's the future–at least not yet.
At any rate, I'm interested to see what other teams might bring to the table.
Photography Courtesy Toyota
Toyota has been racing a GR Corolla in Japan to experiment with hydrogen as a fuel for its internal combustion engines. Now, it’s taking it a step further, revealing its GR H2 Concept at Le Mans.
[Hydrogen as a fuel? Inside the technology Toyota is developing]
The ACO, the organizer of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, announced that they will allow hydrogen-engine vehicles to compete–in addition to fuel cell electric vehicles–in a new Hydrogen class.
Toyota recently ran its hydrogen-engine Corolla in the Fuji 24 Hours race. The company continues to develop the technology to use the fuel, and racing provides it with the platform to test their engineering.
“We are grateful to the ACO and Le Mans for providing this unique opportunity to share our efforts with the world,” said Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda. “My goal is to achieve carbon neutrality in motorsports without sacrificing anything in terms of performance or excitement. We look forward to our new GR H2 race car in view of the new Le Mans H2 class in the future. The sound, the torque, the dynamics, it’s all there. Not only are we reimagining the race car, we’re doing it with zero emissions.”
Toyota is really going all in with this hydrogen stuff, huh? Don't get me wrong, it's all very cool, but I'm not totally convinced it's the future–at least not yet.
At any rate, I'm interested to see what other teams might bring to the table.
The front end treatment is similar to the GT3 Concept and the new Prius. If this is the design language Toyota is moving towards I like it.
Manufactures are apparently hoping that no one cares about the inefficiencies of producing the fuel. As James May (Top Gear) once said, "The problem with hydrogen is that it's attached to other things." Indeed, it takes more energy to split it off than what you get out of it. Those saying "a hydrogen car's exhaust is water", are blind to everything upstream of that. Every time energy changes form it loses efficiency. The electricity used to split hydrogen could have been used to run an EV directly, bypassing the efficiency loss, but I guess it's just something new for people to get excited about, so there's that...
In reply to kb58 :
And also (to put on my firefighter helmet) Toyota has already learned with the Hydrogen powered GR Concept a month or two ago, that it burns with no flame and leaks out of goddamn everything. If you work with burning hydrogen you still have to use the NASA "broom test" where you hold something flammable to look for flames.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
Found the use for Orido's cowboy driver suit
In reply to kb58 :
Toyota is hedging their bets. The required betterment of battery systems isn't happening, yet. So instead of those for energy storage, an alternate is to use hydrogen. Which is easy to adapt to with ice's.
I can't fault them on that.
alfadriver said:In reply to kb58 :
So instead of those for energy storage, an alternate is to use hydrogen. Which is easy to adapt to with ice's.
Only if they've solved the embrittlement issues. Link if interested. Seems they can't prevent it, only mitigate it with high tensile steel.
In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :
That's not an impossible problem. And it's just a different one to EVs. Again, hedging their bets. Toyota is a big company and can do both battery and h2 development at the same time.
In reply to alfadriver :
I'd like to see more 'hedging' done with biofuels.
In reply to Driven5 :
That's really, really easy for ices. So much so, it doesn't need to even be displayed. Unless you are talking diesel, which just reverts to the standard diesel emissons problems.
LeMans can be run on e100 next year if the ico wants.
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