Toyota's 'hydrogen engine' car roars through 24-hour enduro
This looks like a solution in search of a problem. Hydrogen combustion will never reach the efficiency of current off-the-shelf fuel cells, let alone potential future improvements on fuel cells; battery-level efficiency is completely out of the question. There is no use case for choosing combustion instead of fuel cells, period. Hydrogen combustion introduces additional problems like NOx emissions that simply don&#x27;t exist for fuel cells. Aside from maybe material science, there are no further insights to be gained here that would be applicable in any real-world scenario&#x2F;product.<p>&gt; But using a hydrogen engine rather than fuel cells would have certain advantages. Such vehicles would employ conventional engine technology and provide a driving experience similar to gasoline cars. And &quot;it&#x27;s easy to generate torque at low rpms, making it ideal for trucks,&quot; a Toyota executive said.<p>None of these are advantages, it&#x27;s rather the opposite of an advantage. Electric motors provide consistent torque from zero to maximum RPM and don&#x27;t need sophisticated transmissions. On top of that, hydrogen engines don&#x27;t work particularly well with variable loads (the same goes for fuel cells, but this can be mitigated by a buffer battery).<p>Fun fact: Toyota&#x27;s car isn&#x27;t even the first hydrogen-powered car to complete a 24h race. In 2013, a modified Aston Martin Rapide S equipped with a dual-fuel petrol&#x2F;hydrogen system completed the 24 Hours of Nürburgring.