By 2030, internal combustion engines, with a little bit of help from hybrids and plug-in hybrids, will still vastly outnumber battery-only power or fuel cells.
Ghosn, leader of the French-Japanese alliance, famously said 10 per cent of all global car sales would be battery-only by 2020. Not many experts buy that now as buyers see battery cars as hugely expensive and with limited and unpredictable range. Tesla Motors’ Model S battery-only car has been very successful, but on a small scale and doubts remain about its range as the car is exported to Europe and exposed to Germany’s high-speed roads.
Ghosn said any move to mass market fuel cell vehicles would be hampered by the lack of refuelling infrastructure, and although this rings true, it also coincided with news Hyundai of Korea, and Honda and Toyota of Japan, have ambitious and imminent plans for hydrogen powered cars. Musk, using more colorful language to diss fuel cells, said they only made sense in rockets
The case for hydrogen is powerful.
Toyota’s new FCV Concept fuel cell car, unveiled at the Tokyo show last month, is a four-seat sedan and will take passengers at least 300 miles on a tank of hydrogen. This range claim and ease of refuelling is a powerful advantage over battery-only cars.
Fuel-cell powered cars create electricity using a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen in the fuel-cell stack. Fuel-cell cars use electric motors, and batteries to store energy. Only water vapor comes out of the tailpipe. Development is expensive because platinum is used in the stacks and it is complicated to store hydrogen in the car. This requires expensive, carbon fiber storage tanks.
Another big hurdle for the fuel cell is making hydrogen and getting it to the car. Battery-only cars benefit from a ready-made infrastructure – the electric plug in everybody’s home. Making hydrogen, storing it then getting it into the car, has a big negative – it takes about 30 per cent of the energy to put it into storage and this is a major problem in the economics of hydrogen.
But this renewed attack on fuel cells by battery power advocates might mean they are worried.
“If the (fuel cell) technology can eventually be mastered in terms of cost, quality, reliability and perhaps most crucial, with cars that are affordable to the public at large, today’s conventional battery powered cars could be destined to go the same way as the dinosaurs,” said Automotive Industry Data editor Peter Schmidt said.
“The future probably is going to be electric, but probably not a battery-powered one,” Schmidt said.
All the major car manufacturers are investing mammoth sums to replace the internal combustion engine. Companies like BMW though, which have spent big on batteries, are also hedging their bets in alliances to advance fuel cells too. BMW is partnering with Toyota. Honda, which already has a fuel cell car on trial in California, the FCX Clarity, is partnered with
By 2030, internal combustion engines will still be hugely in the majority, bolstered for sure by linking up with electric technology as hybrids, or plug-in hybrids.
“It’s too early to tell who wins. Toyota wants to have about 10 years of field experience before they commit to high volume (fuel cell) production,” said Phil Gott, Senior Director, long-range planning at consultants IHS Automotive.
“The major challenge of hydrogen is that the compression process takes about 30 per cent of the energy value,” Gott said.
One way around this would be for localized hydrogen production plants converting natural gas. If the local output could go straight into the car, this would avoid the compression process.
“If you avoid compressing the hydrogen the net result would be a very efficient system and avoid the cost of a new hydrogen infrastructure,” Gott said.
Satoshi Nagashima, Tokyo-based partner at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, expects both battery and fuel cell powered cars to reach limited audiences at least until 2030.
“I expect by 2020 the percentage of global sales for fuel cells to be very tiny, with still less than one per cent by 2025, and 2030 still less than a few per cent. By 2025, battery-only will still be less than five per cent, although there is a possibility that technology advances might emerge between 2020 and 2025 which improves battery energy density by about three times. If that kind of technology is launched, I think battery-only vehicles might be much stronger in volume terms – more than five per cent,” Nagashima said.
Nagashima said this means that by 2030, internal combustion engines, augmented by hybrids and plug-in hybrids will still be in a massive majority.
Most forecasters agree that fuel cell sales will be very limited for the foreseeable future.
LMC Automotive predicts that 0.1 per cent of global car sales will be fuel cell-powered by 2023. That’s equivalent to 125,000 sales. Frost and Sullivan sees 250,000 fuel cell sales by 2023 to 2024. Some see battery-only cars appealing to city car buyers while fuel cells will be used for longer trips and be dominated by luxury manufacturers.
Ghosn and Musk might yet win, but it’s too early to call.
