Toyota Says Hydrogen Fuel Cell SUV Has 431-Mile Range at Equivalent of 68 MPG

Toyota Says Hydrogen Fuel Cell SUV Has 431-Mile Range at Equivalent of 68 MPG

By John O'Dell August 6, 2009

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

Let the rest of the world talk about batteries, Toyota Motor Co. wants us to know its got fuel-cell electric vehicles and that it believes they're a viable technology.

The automaker said this morning that in a real-world driving test of a pair of  its second-generation Toyota Highlander fuel cell vehicles, they averaged 431 miles on Southern California roads on their approximately 6-kilogram tanks of compressed hydrogen gas .

Average fuel economy was 68.3 miles per kilogram - the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline. That's more than 2.5 times the fuel economy of the 2010 Toyota Highlander gas-electric hybrid.

Toyota previously had estimated the second-generation Highlander fuel cell SUV's range at 516 miles. But that was based on an estimate derived from a Japanese fuel economy test cycle that has much lower top speeds and acceleration rates than used in the U.S. test, said Toyota spokeswoman Jana Hartline.

The automaker didn't comment on the timing of the announcement but the numbers apparently have been released to respond to Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's recent comment that hydrogen fuel cell cars won't be a viable transportation alternative in the next 20 years - and to help keep us thinking about Toyota's previously announced intent to launch a retail fuel cell vehicle in the U.S. by 2015.

The company has been reminding of us of its fuel cell technology and progress for years - one of the first articles posted in Green Car Advisor was about a Toyota fuel cell advance.

Battery-electric fans say the range of "plug in" electric cars' - usually less than 150 miles for a full-service car large enough for four or five occupants - is good enough for the daily driving needs of 80 percent of the population.

Toyota's 431 miles would make the Highlander fuel cell vehicle pretty usable even for most of the other 20 percent - the long-range drivers.
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Highlander FCHEV crosses bridge on its coastal Southern California test drive.
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Add a working hydrogen fuel infrastructure - a multi-billion-dollar system that doesn't yet exist except on paper - and a car or truck with the Highlander's make-its-own-electricity system could go just about anywhere.

Toyota first disclosed its new system - which stores fuel compressed to at 10,000 psi, or 70 bar, for more density (the first generation system stored the fuel at 5,000 psi, or 35 bar, and had a range of 205 miles) - in September, 2007.

Viable Technology

The new evaluation, by engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Savannah River National Laboratory, shows that the Highlander "FCHV-Adv (Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle-Advanced) demonstrates not only the rapid advances in fuel cell technology, but also the viability of this technology in the future," Toyota Technical Center advanced powertrain engineer Jared Farnsworth said.

A fuel cell vehicle is driven by an electric motor that gets its power from a fuel cell assembly that coverts hydrogen and oxygen to electricity in a thermo-chemical reaction on board the vehicle.

It uses a battery pack to store some of the electricity, but it is a much smaller and lighter bundle than a conventional hybrid or a battery-electric vehicle would use. Its battery is charged with juice from the fuel cell and the regenerative braking system.

While most fuel cell-electric vehicles are called just that - FCEVs - Toyota has decided to differentiate itself,  and to play off its prowess with gas-electric hybrids, by call its its vehicles fuel cell hybrid-electrics, or FCHEVs,  although they don't use two powertrains or two fuel systems.

The test of the Highlander FCHEVs was almost a year in the making (it took that long to get the contracts and timing sorted out, said Hartline).

It was conducted on June 30, when Toyota engineers driving two or the vehicles  - one with a Renewable Energy Lab engineer on board, the other with the Savannah River engineer  -  completed a 331.5-mile drive from Toyota's national sales and marketing headquarters in Torrance, California, north to Santa Monica, Calif., then south to San Diego and back again on the same route.

The route, which took 11 hours of continuous driving, covered city streets and freeways and a variety of high and moderate speeds and stop-and-go driving, Toyota said.

The national lab engineers calculated the driving ranges and fuel economy for each vehicle and averaged the results to come up with the estimated full-tank range of 431 miles and fuel economy of 68.3 miles per kilogram.

Fuel Conundrum

The Toyota test, combined with fuel-cell electric vehicle tests being conducted by General Motors and Honda Motor Co., show that the vehicles and their on-board fuel-making technology are pretty much ready for market and that the main bar now - aside from lack of mass-produced components to lower the fuel cell systems' extremely high cost - is lack of a reliable hydrogen fueling infrastructure.

It's a high bar, tough to climb over, but the Highlander's mileage figures help show that it might only take thousands rather than tens of thousands of hydrogen stations nationally to provide a basic workable fueling system.

There is also a second bar - on the environmental side of the equation - that can't be ignored.

Battery, or Fuel Cell?

Hydrogen typically is produced from natural gas and the process of extracting the hydrogen molecules and compressing them into a fuel-grade gas is energy-intensive.

Fuel cell proponents claim it is less intensive, and less polluting, than the present process of generating electricity from coal - which accounts for about half the nation's electrical power. Using wind- and hyrdro-generated electricity would make hydrogen one of the cleanest and most energy-efficient fuels, they maintain.

Opponents say hydrogen production uses more energy than the fuel conserves and that it is inefficient to use electricity to make and compress hydrogen gas, which then is used to make electricity - with efficiency losses in every step. Why not, they argue, just use the power to charge a battery-electric car and skip the entire hydrogen-making process.

Try Both

Toyota is on record as favoring continued development of both systems. Both will help reduce use of petroleum - a dwindling resource - but battery-electric systems work best in smaller, lighter vehicles like the pre-production IQ-EV concept pictured at left, and for shorter distances while fuel cells can power larger cars and trucks with good performance over longer distances.

We agree, and wish the feuding between battery and hydrogen advocates would end and both camps would work toward their common goal of developing cars and tucks that don't use oil.

Toyota seems to be on that path: In addition to its plan for a retail fuel-cell car in 2015, Toyota has said it will have a plug-in hybrid in test fleets in the U.S. market next year (we suspect that retail leasing or sales will follow in 2011) and has said it will launch a small, battery-electric city car like the IQ concept in 2012.

Hartline said Toyota has 20 of the second-generation Highlander FCHEV-Adv models in the U.S. andplns to double the number over the next years. The vehicles are being used by colleges and universities, governent agencies and public utilities, enabling Toyota to    to compile substantial real-world driivng data on everyting form passenger comfort to fuel cell sstem dependability. 

She said the vehicles's interiors are indistinguishable from standard gasoline Highlanders with no loss of passenger of cargo space due to the lare, cylindrical fuel tank or other parts of the fuel cell powertrain system.

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.