http://www.techradar.com/news/car-tech/ ... ee-1279400

Anything that gets us away from the Middle East...

Fuel cells are the future. Battery cars are crap.

Haven't we tried packing vehicles full of hydrogen before and decided that it was a very bad idea?

Good on them, I hope that this spurs development.

Oh, the humanity!

Let's hope the technology has moved on from huge bags of gas, or else parking could soon be an issue.


Indeed. They stand to make more money by removing the barriers preventing other people from entering the market.

The biggest barrier is getting H2 provided at petrol stations.

Hydrogen is a terrible fuel from the point of view of transport and storage with the technology we have at the moment. One of the main issues is embrittlement (spelling?) - basically becuase hydrogen molecules are soooo small the can insinuate themselves through just about anything (including solid metal) and in doing so they tend to degrade the material in the process meaning that it becomes brittle in a relatively short space of time. You really don't want the structural integrity of your hydrogen storage tanks and/or pipework becoming a bit iffy.

But good on Toyota anyway.

Better to change out the H2 tank than the batteries in the current electric cars.

Can it not be stored in a compound that can then be broken down easily? I know that "easily" doesn't really go hand in hand with hydrogen but surely something could be synthesised?

Absolutely. Unfortunately the materials that are easy to handle and store are also hydrocarbon based (methanol for example) so they don't help with CO2 emissions.
Not surprisingly there is a lot of research into other alternatives but I'm not aware of any that currently do better than hydrocarbons as hydrogen transport (I would be delighted to be wrong on that). Just after I left uni I did some work n hydrogen storage in metal hydride matrices - they do work but still aren't great compared to hydrocarbons and are also too fragile (at the time) to be used in vehicles.

I'd imagine an awful lot of clever expel are trying to figure the various engineering problems out, because whoever figures those problems out first is going end up be absolutely swimming in money.

Very much so, yes.

I suspect there will be something of a race between fuel cell technology and all electric. If we could crack electricity storage or wireless distribution (without cooking people in the process) the problems with using hydrogen could be kept at the power station end of the equation which would simplify things enourmously.