At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
$15,000 worth of fuel card sounds generous until you find that hydrogen stations have jacked up prices to $36/kg.
still means nothing, what is the mileage or $/mi there?
Apparently 1kg of hydrogen is about 60 miles range, which seems like a lot, but apparently fuel cells are that good.
Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.
By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.
> This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric
Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.
According to [1] it breaks down like this:
EV at rapid/ultra-rapid chargers: 25p/mile
Petrol, diesel: 15p/mile
EV charging at home: 8p/mile
This is because there's a government price cap on home electricity, but not on commercial electricity - and rapid chargers are all commercial (and of course for-profit).
[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-...
If you can get a cheap electric overnight home charging tariff in the UK, then the electric cost is lower. Mid week, I charged 43kWh for the cost of £3.04 (7p per kWh). My home charger does 7kwh in a hour. Usual mileage is about 4 miles per kWh (typical rush hour drive into Edinburgh). That should give me about 170 miles of range.
Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).
I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.
Full tank capacity of a Mirai is ~5 kg / (120 liters in volume).
I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.