- There was so much security
they had to put covers over the cameras on our phones.
(air whooshing)
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 Dianna.
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 we survived. (laughs)
So to start off the series, here's hydrogen fuel cells,
'cause that's what powered our entire road trip.
(inspiring music)
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 it still burned the hydrogen.
That was a big misconception
and kind of an embarrassing one, but...
Wow. So there's like a whole display going on.
(gasps) Look at the steering wheel.
People are gonna watch this video and be like,
she's never been in a car before. (laughs)
What does the H2O button do?
Is it peeing? It said F C V system purge in progress.
(gentle music)
Then our first stop was the Toyota Technical Center.
Often we'll come to a place
and we'll film the entrance and exit,
but we couldn't do that here
because there was 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 were like, you can only face this way
'cause 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 gear head. I was a mechanic.
One of my first classes talked about at the time
petroleum dependency.
I'd never thought of 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 refueling 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. (laughs)
And oxygen comes in on the cathode side,
just like a battery there's an anode and a cathode.
Oxygen comes in on the 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.
- A platinum catalyst? What is that, and what does that do?
- Platinum is a highly active noble metal.
Really what it does is it just activates the hydrogen
and it causes the proton and electron to break off
and it immediately tries to bond with the oxygen.
It really wants to form water.
And so what we've done in this 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 can not get through that.
It's non-conductive.
- [Dianna] 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's 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 can put your hand under the exhaust of the Mirai
and actually feel the water.
Whereas in 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 compressor that just blows through
and blows all the water out of the fuel cell stacks.
The question from our patrons 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 with hydrogen,
'cause it's a tiny, tiny molecule
so it gets through some materials.
So I was like, okay dad, I'll ask about that.
And I asked her, she was like,
oh, there are regulations that we can't have that.
- 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's 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 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, and how they made it.
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 getting 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,
we use a saw and cut into the tank and then we cycle
pressure, depressurize, pressure, depressurize
to make sure that 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, the hydrogen tanks?
- Set it on a bonfire 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.
We actually have a crane and we'll bring it up, drop it.
- 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 armor-piercing rounds
that we can actually only get in the US.
Thank you, US military, right?
- And the reason that they had to pierce it
with these armor-piercing rounds
was because all these extreme crash tests,
they could never puncture the tank.
- We say it's like if you have a soda can
and you put a rock in it and 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
is you hear that whir.
(car whirring)
- The quietness of the fuel cell itself is
when you're sitting at a light or something.
If you have a passenger,
you literally can converse with them.
- I mean, it's great.
I had been driving a 2010 Prius. It was an upgrade.
I had to look up reviews of cars
'cause I was like, yeah, it turns really well,
which I guess they call handling?
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 a thing?
- The 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.
'Cause 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?
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 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.
Now it's just second nature to me.
- Thank goodness someone's here to help me
and I'm not left to my own devices.
We did get to a station one night that didn't have any fuel.
Going back to my apps. We're at the Campbell one.
The station is low on fuel.
See, there we go. Offline.
It was refilled by the next morning.
Ooh, that is cold.
The other thing that happened
is that the nozzle froze to the receptacle.
A-ha!
When the gas is coming out, it's decreasing in pressure,
so it gets cold and 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 gonna very much get into that in the next video.
People are paying attention right now.
A lot of people wanna see us turning to this all electric.
We want all electric vehicles
'cause 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 higher rates of asthma,
all these things that are attributed to poor air quality,
the electrified portfolio is part of
our environmental challenge 2050 was 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 a Mirai 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'm 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.
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 Daimler, with GM, with Ford, with Honda, with Hyundai.
- You were there?
- Yeah, I was,
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 mashing 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 sciencey.
Oh yeah, you definitely feel like you're at the cusp
on what's next.
- 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 physics-ing. Good job guys!
We made it back. Woo!
(upbeat music)