Why Toyota’s Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car is Futuristic

Let’s take a look at hydrogen fuel cell engines…how hydrogen cars work…how they differ from cars with internal combustion engines and from battery powered electric vehicles.

 

There are two ways to power a modern car:

  1. Internal combustion engine (ICE) = most cars today. ICEs burn petroleum-based fuel…generate heat and push pistons up and down to drive the transmission and the wheels
  2. Electric Vehicle (EV) – many people tend to think of the battery powered EV or BEV… like Tesla Model S, Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Bolt.  Battery-powered electric cars have already achieved a certain popularity more than two million of these cars are on the planet’s roads right now and networks of charging stations have been created for them in europe and the u.s.  Typically a battery EV doesn’t have an internal combustion engine fuel tank or exhaust pipe but relies on an electric motor.

Hydrogen cars are a type of electric car but with an entirely different electrical technology.  That’s right. It’s not about electricity consumption… but electricity production. Hydrogen car is a type of fuel cell vehicle or fcev fuel cells are like a cross between an internal combustion engine and battery power like an internal combustion engine they make power by using fuel from a tank but unlike an engine a fuel cell doesn’t burn the hydrogen instead it’s fused chemically with oxygen from the air to make water. The process somewhat resembles what happens in a battery. Electricity gets released and then used to power an electric motor to drive the car you can think of fuel cells like batteries that never run flat…but instead of slowly depleting the chemicals as in a normal battery fuel cells can run on a steady supply of hydrogen and keep making electricity as long as there’s hydrogen in the tank what are some of the practical differences between a battery-powered electric vehicle versus a hydrogen one

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