Move over Toyota Miria, Honda's plug-in hydrogen fuel cell electric CR-V is set to begin delivery to customers starting in early July.
Officially called the "CR-V e:FCEV," the new CR-V gets an estimated 92.2kW (approximately 123 horsepower) from its fuel cell plus 174 horsepower and 229 lb.-ft. of torque from the electric motor.
Rated at 61 city MPGe, 52 highway MPGe and 57 MPGe combined, the CR-V e:FCEV–the "only fuel cell electric passenger vehicle made in America," says Honda–gets 270 miles of range as well as 29 miles of electric-only range.
The CR-V e:FCEV is only available to lease through "12 approved Honda dealerships in select California markets, including six dealerships in Southern California (Los Angeles and Orange County areas), five in the San Francisco Bay Area, and one in the Sacramento area."
Honda offers three leasing options that also include Hydrogen fuel credits for refueling:
And, for your viewing pleasure, the spec sheet for the 2025 Honda CR-V e:FCEV:
And, for reference, the CR-V is rated at 190 horsepower and 179 lb.-ft. of torque with the CR-V Hybrid rated at 145 horsepower and 138 lb.-ft. of torque.
They key question: Where do you fuel it?
I've driven a couple of fuel cell cars, including the Mirai. The good news, they don't feel much different than an EV.
Oooooof. Imagine being the team that planned this launch months or years ago, and waking up this morning, buckling in, and just waiting for it to happen. Like walking into a test you didn't study for or going into battle with a defective rifle.
Backstory: A huge number of hydrogen stations don't exist anymore.
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/shell-is-immediately-closing-all-ca-hydrogen-stations/262175/page1/
It seems like there's a great documentary somewhere in finding out how hydrogen cars actually came to market. I mean, it's a cool technology and totally worth developing and exploring, but still just absolutely screams "not ready for prime time" when it comes to being a commercially viable product. Producing fuel at consumer scale has always basically been a net loser, and the infrastructure makes the current EV charging landscape look like McDonald's.
So I'm really not sure what Toyota's motivation is here. They may as well be releasing a Betamax at this point.
Seems like a Rube-Goldburg solution to a fictional problem.
In reply to JG Pasterjak :
BMW and Toyota are pushing the technology hard. In fact, BMWs with hydrogen fuel cells use Toyota parts.
From what I was told by BMW, in Europe there's a initiative to install hydrogen filling stations, with a focus on commercial vehicles. They feel if commercial entities adopt it, then regular folks like you and me will follow.
Additionally, they also feel people are more comfortable "filling up" a car than plugging one in. I'm not sure what market research told them that, but I don't know if I'd disagree.
And, as far as leasing, that'd seem like a hard sell for some. I'm curious what others think.
No way in heck if the only way I can own it is to live in Kalifornia. Give their marketing people credit: Loony product? Sell it in a loony market!
STM317
PowerDork
6/26/24 4:33 p.m.
As a nation, Japan has a pretty in depth Hydrogen strategy, and is a global leader in hydrogen investment and advancement.. It's a big reason why Toyota, Honda, etc haven't invested as heavily into BEVs in recent years.
the new CR-V gets an estimated 92.2kW (approximately 123 horsepower) from its fuel cell plus 174 horsepower and 229 lb.-ft. of torque from the electric motor.
How does that work? The fuel cell output is electrical power, not mechanical. So it has to drive the electric motor. Or does that mean that the battery can only deliver enough electrical power to deliver 174 hp, while the fuel cell is required to develop 300 hp (nice round number there) from the motor? Or can the fuel cell generate electricity at a high enough rate to support 124 sustained hp? I suspect it might be the latter.
But you can't road trip with it because there just aren't any H2 stations in the wild other than in SF and LA. Oh, and SF and LA are nearly 400 miles apart. Good thing there's a single H2 station in Harris Ranch halfway between them that can fuel one car at a time. Harris Ranch also has 98 Superchargers and is expanding to 164. So there's your road trip option, slogging up and down I5. You simply have no other options other than hopping 28 miles between chargers. A friend's parents did that to bring a very sick Leaf EV down to SF from Oregon, it's not a casual drive :)
So, it's an EV with 29 miles of range. If you plug it in at night, you'll rarely use the fuel cell. If you do want to go further and use the fuel cell, you either have to stay within 135 miles of home (assuming you have a full tank to start with) or you have one route you can drive. Sign me up!
Additionally, they also feel people are more comfortable "filling up" a car than plugging one in. I'm not sure what market research told them that, but I don't know if I'd disagree.
I doubt that it's the function of actually refueling that generates the comfort, but the idea that there is no planning required and it takes just a couple of minutes to "fill up". Of course, that's a fiction in a hydrogen car as a fast fill requires a full high pressure H2 tank, and if you're not the first car in line you have to stand and wait for the tank to refill. That's assuming you live somewhere that H2 stations actually exist and that they've been refilled lately.
Hydrogen fuel is basically a poor way of transporting electricity. We already have better options.
I agree with Keith, this is an electric car with extra steps. The energy used to separate the hydrogen could just go into the car's battery as electric and save a step. It seems like a waste of time meant to cater to the anti EV crowd.
Quoting myself from the old thread about hydrogen vehicles:
Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is completely and utterly daft. It's an absolute dead end as a method of propelling vehicles. I'm calling it now, and I'll look back on this comment in a decade and I'll still be right then. :-) *
*N.B. I thought the internet was "just a fad, the CB Radio of the '90s" so that's at least once I was very, very wrong.
Wind powered electrolysis hydrogen generation at spot locations is totally doable. A wind tower in each town. But, where do the towns in the dry west come up with the water to split into oxygen and hydrogen?
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
Hydrogen is often taken from natural gas instead of water, so there's still drilling and extracting gas but then it's split instead of burned.
In reply to VolvoHeretic :
Why not just store the generated electricity in batteries instead of electrolysis?
I can't help it, but when someone says hydrogen my mind sees Hindenburg.
J.A. Ackley said:
They key question: Where do you fuel it?
They mention it's only for sale in certain California locations, because they're the only places in the US where you can refuel them.
there would be more filling stations if the hydrogen buses , delivery trucks , etc would allow the public to fill up ,
the local hydrogen filling station is just at a regular gas station , at least its at a freeway offramp and not in some industrial area......
And then what about filling at the shop that fills your welding tanks?
Just not ready for prime time yet :(
Your welding tanks are filled to what, 1800 psi? H2 cars tend to run more like 10,000. The welding shop doesn't have the infrastructure for H2 refueling, and if you're going to build it why not build it where there are gas stations designed and located for vehicles to refuel?
I don't think there are hydrogen buses in service anywhere in the US. There aren't a bunch of hidden outlets around the country. For example, there's only one commercial fill station for big rigs in the US, and it's in Oakland. It supports 30 trucks. California is building a 1.2 billion dollar hydrogen hub that will support another 5000 trucks and 1000 buses.
The math is just bad. Hydrogen contains the equivalent of 33 kWh of energy per kg, ideally. Let's just say you manage to build a hydrogen manufacturing plant that runs on some sort of renewable - solar, wind, wave power, hydroelectric, whatever. The process of electrolysis is about 75% efficient if we're being charitable, so there's a quarter of your power gone.
Now you have to get that hydrogen to the actual refueling location, which usually involves a truck. But let's say we're manufacturing it on-site, this is an idealized example. You have to do a bunch of work to compress that hydrogen to 10,000 psi. Okay, that's more electricity use - roughly 3 kWh per kg of H2 in actual testing. But we've finally got ourselves a tank of 10,000 psi "green" hydrogen at a total efficiency of about 66%, assuming we don't have to transport it.
We've managed to fill a car. Now the fuel cell converts the hydrogen into electricity. But fuel cells are only slightly more efficient than the most efficient ICE engines, coming in about 60%. In the end, we've managed to net about 13 kWh per kg out of our hydrogen production/delivery/consumption. We've lost about 60% of the electricity we produced.
Meanwhile, if we'd put that energy into a battery, we'd have lost maybe 25-30%. Local storage is in the high 80's for efficiency, high speed charging is in the high 90s. Transportation costs (if required) are minimal because we can send it through wires instead of on trucks and the grid is roughly 95% efficient.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Yep. Right now hydrogen for vehicles is essentially useless. These seem like proof of concepts and even for that it doesn't make sense to me. Are there hydrogen plants where employees use these vehicles to get around?
I think the initial use will be at the California ports where they want to go to zero emissions and they may want the longer run times of hydrogen. There must be some private H2 sources somewhere, because there's a Mirai in a junkyard near Denver and IIRC someone on this forum was buying Mirais cheap in California and shipping them to Texas.
