Toyota's new commercial response to Elon: "Fueled by BS"

[mspohr]

Sleazy marketing to make people think that H2 comes from manure when it's all really made from fossil fuel methane.
However, assume we did want to power our Teslas from biogas...
It would be much more efficient to just turn the manure gas (biogas) into electricity and put it in a Tesla.
Biogas to electricity 60%, transmission 90%, ac to dc charging 85%, battery to vehicle 90% = 45% efficient
Biogas to hydrogen 75%, compression 90%, delivery 80%, fuel cell 50%, vehicle 90% = 24% efficient
About twice as efficient to skip the H2 bull*t and just make electricity.

 

[yobigd20]

Yey! CleanTechnica called them out on it with their response 'Toyota Mirai “Fueled by BS” Ad Is Total BS' Toyota Mirai Fueled by BS Ad Is Total BS | CleanTechnica

 

[Discoducky]

Yey! CleanTechnica called them out on it with their response 'Toyota Mirai “Fueled by BS” Ad Is Total BS' Toyota Mirai Fueled by BS￾ Ad Is Total BS | CleanTechnica

Great read, thanks for pointing out that article!

 

[gg_got_a_tesla]

Great read, thanks for pointing out that article!

Hi Discoducky, how has your first year been at Tesla? Hope you are having a good time!

 

[ggies07]

Yey! CleanTechnica called them out on it with their response 'Toyota Mirai “Fueled by BS” Ad Is Total BS' Toyota Mirai Fueled by BS￾ Ad Is Total BS | CleanTechnica

nice. thanks for sharing!

 

[benjiejr]

I'm Japanese and I thought this was an appropriate plate for the "future" of automobiles...

 

[Doug_G]

The powers that be have declared that the proper term for this is BS. So I have gone through and edited all the posts appropriately.

Please stick to BS in the future.

There's a joke in here somewhere.

- mod

 

[yobigd20]

The powers that be have declared that the proper term for this is BS. So I have gone through and edited all the posts appropriately.

Please stick to BS in the future.

There's a joke in here somewhere.

- mod

well, I was quoting the article's title. now the thread title doesn't accurately reflect the articles title.

 

[brianman]

Please stick to BS in the future.

Will do.

 

[dhanson865]

Toyota's got a new commercial out as a direct response to Elon Musk's comments that fuel cell cars are BS.

more details: http://www.inc.com/ananya-bhattacharya/morgan-spurlock-calls-BS-elon-musk.html

- - - Updated - - -

what they conveniently forgot to mention though is how much wasted energy was spent to convert the BS to purified gas and converted again using a steam methane reformer to convert to hydrogen to power the vehicle. all that wasted energy. it's worth pointing out this chart which clearly shows how inefficient hydrogen powered cars are when compared to battery powered electric vehicles:

It's more than just a video. I got an email on my home account touting this.

1. I tried to unsubscribe to news about this product but my only options were to unsubscribe to all email from Toyota or none. I still own a Toyota and would love for them to make a proper PHEV or BEV so I left it on.

2. I tried to email toyota but:
a. the outgoing email address doesn't accept replies (no surprise there)
b. the form on the toyota website doesn't accept a category that even comes close to why I'm trying to contact them so I'm concerned anything I write there would just get tossed in a bit bucket and ignored

3. I posted a rant on facebook to let my family and friends know what I thought of the BS.

4. I had to explain to my wife why fool cells upset me after she said "wow, you really don't like that car?" from across the hall.

Everying thing about hydrogen fuel cell cars from Toyota frustrates me as

A. waste of taxpayer money for infrastructure rollout
B. waste of car buyers money for the car and hydrogen fuel (cost per mile after purchase)
C. opportunity cost of what I used to think of as the most advance hybrid car company on the planet not making the final transition to BEVs.

Toyota is so going the wrong way...

 

[Doug_G]

well, I was quoting the article's title. now the thread title doesn't accurately reflect the articles title.

I understand that. Unfortunately the article doesn't meet TMC's family-friendly guidelines.

 

[derekt75]

I wonder how much electricity could be produced from the methane from that cow manure .. would be funny to see a side by side comparison of how many miles the cow manure would push a hydrogen car and how many it would push a BEV, especially when you balanced the wasted energy from the hydrogen process to the EV side.

Seems like we can figure this out...

For an HFCV,
Let's say .35 kWh of electricity per mile.
That means we need .7 kWh of H2 on the vehicle.
That means we need 1 kWh of H2 at the plant.
That means you need about 1.35 kWh of biogas (assuming they use their own biogas to power the conversion).
That's about 0.25 m3 of biogas.
That's about 1.1 kg of BS per mile of range.

If you drive 50 miles a day, then you need 55 kg of BS per day. well, 55 kg of "volatile solids", and I'm guessing means that you need a lot more steaming wet manure. My source says that it takes 8 cows to make 55 kg of volatile solids, but other sources say that a single cow poops 90 pounds per day (holy crap!)
You also need about 1/8th of a $20k digester.
I don't know what the operating costs would be to convert the BS to compressed Hydrogen.

For a BEV, I don't think it's really that much better.
.35 kWh used
.41 kWh from your meter
.46 kWh of electricity at the power plant
.9 kWh worth of biogas (biogas -> electricity isn't the most efficient process)
That's about 0.72 kg of BS per mile of range.

BEVs are far more efficient (~70%) than HFCVs at using electricity, but only 35% better at using methane.
(which is why it's ridiculous to talk about using electricity to generate Hydrogen)

In related news, I still feel like if there's some miracle that makes it easy and cheap to efficiently convert Hydrogen to electricity in a moving vehicle, that miracle is going to make it easy and cheap to efficiently convert natural gas to electricity at a large stationary power plant (even if it means converting to Hydrogen first), so BEVs will still be substantially more efficient than HFCVs.