Driving 1800 Miles in a Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car

there's so much security they had to put covers over the cameras on our phones we're back from our road trip i'm here with my production crew these wonderful people i've been saying that i care about renewable energy and the environment and i want a sustainable future but how do you show that you care about something step number one is you learn about it and i've been putting that off because it's so daunting to learn about all of renewable energy but then toyota came along and they offered to lend us a mirai the new 2021. they just gave me the keys it smells new i just want to drive it i was hesitant because i didn't feel like i knew enough because if you're new here hi i'm diana i am an mit physics alum and i don't usually

do cars although i did do that one video where you get out of the car and i taught you how to not shock yourself but i was excited about the idea of getting to drive a hydrogen car and i thought yes this is how i learn meeting experts getting to ask all the questions so we took the car on a two-week road trip and made four episodes each a deep dive on a subject in renewable energy that we didn't normally see featured you'll have to wait and see whether willis survived so to start off the series here's hydrogen fuel cells because that's what powered our entire road trip

i had never thought about hydrogen fuel cell cars i don't think most people even know they exist no i didn't did you guys know before the trip enthusiastic head shakes no i knew already that it was an electric car but for like the two months prior or longer working with toyota i thought i still burned the hydrogen yeah that was a big misconception and kind of an embarrassing one but there's like a whole display going on oh look at the steering wheel people are gonna watch this video and be like she's never been in a car before what does the h2o button do is it pee it said fcv system purge in progress and then our first stop was the toyota technical center often we'll come to a place and we'll film the entrance and the exit but we

couldn't do that here because there's so much security they had to put covers over the cameras on our phones we weren't allowed to film one side of the room they're like you can only face this way because everything else is incredibly confidential it is the most secure location in north america for toyota it's by design that this is a black box right we are the north american hub for research and development for fuel cell electric technology my dreams were actually to work on just really fast cars i was total gearhead i was a mechanic one of my first classes talked about at the time petroleum dependency i never thought of like the negative impact that the industry i loved so much was having on the planet so let's talk about how hydrogen fuel cells work

let's open the hood if we can they're producing electricity through this magical process it is an all-electric vehicle first and foremost the difference between this electric vehicle and the battery electric vehicle that we hear so often is that instead of plugging it in and recharging it we refill it with hydrogen which takes about five minutes so it's just a quicker refeeling time and then the energy is stored in the hydrogen instead of in the battery a fuel cell works very similarly to a battery so what happens when you push on the accelerator is you're opening a valve and allowing the hydrogen to come in from the tank and then oxygen is just coming in from the intake system from the air and oxygen in the air i hope

and the oxygen comes in on the cathode side just like a battery there's another cathode oxygen comes in on cathode hydrogen comes in on the anode hydrogen in the atmosphere is never alone it's always bonded to something as soon as the hydrogen enters on the anode side it hits a platinum catalyst and ionizes platinum catalyst what is what is that and what does that do platinum is a highly active noble metal really what it does is it just it activates the hydrogen and it causes the the proton and an electron to break off and it immediately tries to bond with oxygen it really wants to form water and so what we've done in this you know anode cathode between the two we have what's called a proton exchange membrane it's a porous material

that can hold the water molecules and the proton can kind of like hop across that but the electron cannot get through that it's non-conductive so then what happens going through the proton exchange membrane just the proton travels across and then meets up with the oxygen there's also a bit of a platinum catalyst on that side to also ionize to get the oxygen excited too so the two are all excited right and they really want to form water right so the electron stuck on the other side and it's like i really want to get to the oxygen well we've provided a conductive path around the membrane and so the electron finds that it travels around the membrane meets up with the oxygen and with the proton it forms water and goes out the tailpipe

what happens when you have that reaction happening quick enough you get a lot of electrons flowing around that path that creates an electric current that then goes to the electric motor and then that's what actually drives the vehicle so yeah that's the cool part to me which is that you're just bringing in the hydrogen touching the platinum and that chemical reaction happening there is what splits apart the electron from the hydrogen and that's all you need flowing electrons and that is electricity that's it that is a fuel cell and i don't know if i made this clear this is an electric car there's battery electric and there's fuel cell electric but that's why when you're driving down the road you know you can

put your hand under the exhaust of the mirror and actually feel the water whereas an internal combustion engine vehicle you would never touch the exhaust right it's super hot we finally figured out what the h2o button was which was you press it and it has this compressed air that just blows through and blows all the water out of the fuel cell stacks the question from our patreons on patreon is how is the hydrogen stored inside the car the hydrogen is stored as a compressed gas in preparing for this video my dad was like i heard that there's some storage problems hydrogen because it's a tiny molecule so it gets through some materials so i was like okay devil asked about that and i asked her and she was like oh

there are regulations that we can't have there's a very minute amount of hydrogen that can be leaked that's a global regulation for the tanks themselves the tanks are made up of three layers so the inner layer is like a plastic liner around that's carbon fiber and that's what gives the tank strength and on top of that's glass fiber and all of those are meant to first of all contain the hydrogen right so the hydrogen can't just like leak out of the tank you can leave it in a garage for its entire life and you'll still have a full tank to wrap up this section i thought it was so fun hearing jackie talking about how the car works and how it was all designed how they made it yeah and it probably looks way different than when you were

working on prototype pieces of it yeah there was a lot more zip ties and duct tapes and actually our windshield washer fluid came in a plastic baggie that we just kind of schlepped on there you're going to see how the sausage is made so that brings us to the next point which is donuts how they test this car it's really pretty aggressive and it does include things like you know we use a saw and cut into the tank and then we cycle pressure depressurized pressure depressurized to make sure that one flaw doesn't become a weak point in the tank how do you test the fuel cell stacks and the storage of the hydrogen tanks set it on a bonfire and you know at like 800 degrees c flames right and ensure that the tank

doesn't reach a pressure that causes it to rupture we drop it you know we actually have a crane and we'll bring it up and drop it didn't immediately make sense to me but i remember us talking about why they pierce it with armor rounds they're so strong that actually to get through one wall of the tank when it's pressurized requires a armor-piercing round that we can actually only get in the u.s thank you u.s military right and the reason that they had to pierce it with armor-piercing round was because all these extreme crash tests they could never puncture the tank we say it's like you know if you have like a soda can and you put like a pebble in it and like a rock in it you crush it that rock is going to be

still in the soda can that's like what these are in a crash test all right moving on what is it like driving a hydrogen car what was the experience like get in here and you're driving a car powered by hydrogen i had never driven an electric car before so that was i think the significant experience of actually driving it as you hear that work the quietness of the fuel cell itself is when you're sitting in a light or something if you have a passenger you literally can converse with them i mean it was great i had been driving a 2010 prius it was an upgrade i had to look up reviews of cars because i was like yeah it turns really well which i guess they call handling some car fanatic is just like why didn't they give me the key

so i asked jackie what she thought because she actually raced cars on like tracks and stuff once you drive an electric motor and it's silent and there's no shifting and it's continuous torque you're like why is conventional vehicles still thing that sticks with me the most about driving a hydrogen car that's the most different from driving a gas powered car is how much you have to plan around refueling plan around where your hydrogen stations are and how far you're going because sometimes the stations run out sometimes there's an issue with the hardware or something there's a site that you can go to the california fuel cell partnership and it tells you where all the refuel stations are and the status of them

this is so cool shall we pressurize this tank it makes it easier that you've got the fuel credit everyone that has bought a hydrogen car so far has gotten a 15 000 fuel credit because the price of hydrogen is still pretty high relative to the same energy density of gas i don't know how to better say that i talked to three different drivers but what struck me was that they all felt like nerdy about it i wasn't sure if you could drive it to palm springs but i'm kind of a nerd and i like doing math before i drive somewhere so that part of it's really fun but i really hope that they get a station in palm springs i had a little bit of a hard time the first couple of times i learned how to refuel so now it's just second nature to me

thank goodness someone's here to help me and i'm not lost in my own devices we did get to a station one night that didn't have any fuel going back to my app so we're at the kembo one the station's low on fuel see there we go offline it was refilled by the next morning oh that is cold the other thing that happened is that the nozzle froze to the receptacle when the gas is coming out it's decreasing in pressure so it gets cold in that nozzle it freezes the receptacle one of the biggest questions i had was why is toyota doing this everyone wants to know there's battery electric vehicles out there why is toyota working on fuel cell electric vehicles we're going to very much get into that in the next video people are paying attention right

now a lot of people want to see us turning to this all-electric we want all electric vehicles because we want to bring the emissions down to zero so people are like well why fuel cells if you've already got batteries i wondered that too you know even here in la we have a huge health issue around places like the port of los angeles ports of long beach where you know higher rates of asthma all these things that are attributed to poor air quality the electrified portfolio is part of our environmental challenge 2050 just to try to really reduce our negative impact on the environment the target is a 90 reduction in co2 emissions by 2050 and the only way to get there is through electrification that's why i drive on me right now

because i'm a proponent of all electrified powertrains but i think that we can't get there with battery electrics alone i was so curious about the competition between automakers and so i asked what that's been like working on this technology together we don't talk about anything we don't share anything all of our vehicles our prototypes are camouflaged normally in the automotive industry it's very competitive in the hydrogen and fuel cell space it's pretty different because we can't do it alone you know when it comes to the development of all the regulations and the codes and standards which isn't really like the sexy engineering but it's critical every nozzle can hook onto every receptacle of every fuel cell vehicle

because we sat in a room with you know with daimler with gm with ford with honda with hyundai we were there and yeah we all sat around a table and all agreed on a standard there is still a lot of competition but it's that shared mission and everybody kind of putting aside the competition for the greater good you know at least for the things that matter so toyota has some pretty ambitious goals for lowering their emissions and also for matching up with some of the emission regulations of some of the us states a lot of countries around the world but their argument is that we cannot get there with battery electric vehicles alone the fact that you're a trailblazer the fact that it's all sciency oh yeah you definitely feel like you're

the cusp on what's next i didn't feel like we were experiencing hydrogen it felt like no we're experiencing this change in technology i'm not a car person but i drive a car every single day and i have to think about where to get gas and how much i'm emitting where the energy is coming from that's why a lot of people are turning to electric cars thank you so much to toyota for giving us the car the keys for bringing us into the technical center talking to jackie yeah leave some questions in the comments if you have them about fuel cells i will hopefully be able to answer maybe even by the next video bye happy physicsing good job guys we made it back you