- What's the fuel of the future?
It's the most plentiful stuff in the universe.
(electronic music)
Hey guys, here I am, CES 2015.
I'm at the Toyota press conference and my mind
has been blown once again by fuel cell vehicle technology.
Now you remember I was crazy about this stuff a year ago.
I'm still crazy now.
I know, Toyota is our sponsor, but I love this technology.
I'd be talking about this no matter what,
because this is what the future is all about.
It is forward thinking.
Now some of us might not be familiar with how
a fuel cell vehicle works.
That's why I talked to Matt McClory,
an engineer with Toyota who is here today at CES.
- Well, at a very high level,
it's an electro-chemical engine where you can
directly convert energy into electricity, right?
In this case, we use hydrogen as a fuel
combined with oxygen from air, and we directly convert that
in an electro-chemical cell into electricity
that allows us to drive the electric motor for the wheels.
- Alright, now correct me if I've got this wrong,
but as I recall, when you combine hydrogen and oxygen,
besides the generation of electricity,
you end up with water.
- Exactly, so the way a membrane works
is that you get hydrogen from one side onto the fuel side
and that gets split up on the side of the membrane
into a proton and an electron.
But the membrane is an electron barrier,
but a proton carrier.
And so the proton can go through the membrane
to the other side, but the electron has to take
an external path.
When it takes that external path, it goes through
the traction motor that allows you to drive the car.
When the electron comes back the other side on the air side,
it combines with a proton and the oxygen from air,
and it makes water.
- So that's it.
You've got hydrogen on one side, oxygen on the other,
and you end up with electricity and water vapor.
No carbon emissions like gasoline
or diesel-powered vehicles.
That's pretty phenomenal.
But that's not the biggest news of all.
Toyota is going to share its intellectual property.
It holds more than 5,000 patents worldwide
on fuel cell technology.
Everything from fuel cell stacks to the way that hydrogen
power stations can be built.
And now they're sharing that information for free.
Why?
Well, I asked Craig Scott of Toyota that same question.
He had an interesting answer.
- Well, I mean, imagine you're changing everything, right?
From soup to nuts, right?
We're completely revolutionizing an entire energy system.
From the car to the station to consumer's mindsets,
all of these things need to be, I don't say changed,
but they need to be altered, and we need to find ways
to educate people.
A big part of what today is about sharing what we've learned
over the last 22 years of building this technology,
but also finding a way to come together
and build new things.
- While this may seem like a revolutionary idea to people,
there's something about sharing intellectual property,
which often we view as being so important.
That's the biggest revolution, I think.
- Many of our careers we've spent developing this car
and this technology, and now we want to see what others
can bring to it.
And it's a great time to be part of the hydrogen world.
- It's the sharing of this information that allows
for collaboration as well as competition
and ultimately can bring about a hydrogen-based economy.
Now this is a big idea, and some pretty big thinkers
have weighed in on it,
including some right at the Toyota press conference.
I gotta show you a couple of highlights.
- We're talking about a game changer,
game changer that's gonna change the landscape.
Not just of our lives, but perhaps the world of politics,
the world of energy, and energy is at the very basis
of all of modern society.
What I'm saying today is we are present at the creation.
- Today's announcements on our patents has less to do
with hydrogen fuel cell cars than it does about
the cultural growth of a hydrogen society.
It's obvious that there can be a higher societal value
in openly sharing our I.P.
We can speed the metabolism of everyone's
research and development and move into a future of mobility
quicker, more effectively, and more economically.
- You're talking about changing a century-old paradigm
with a brand new infrastructure, a hydrogen economy.
We've been talking about it since 1970 and today
may be the day we point back and say
that's when it really started.
I can't think of anything more forward thinking than that,
but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
What do you think about fuel cells?
What do you think is the future of cars?
Let me know in the comments below.
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