 This truck runs totally on hydrogen. As it goes down the highway, it is producing nothing but water. That is certifiably awesome. But hydrogen technology has gotten quite a bit of hate in the past couple years. Hate, I don't think is warranted. So let's deep dive this thing. Where does hydrogen power make sense? Where does it not? And should you buy a Toyota Mirai? Okay, the answer to the last one is basically no. But it's early days. It's so early I haven't even segued to our sponsor yet. Thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video. For a limited time, you can get one month of Xbox Game Pass for PC when you buy select AMD Ryzen processors or Radeon graphics cards. Learn more today at the link down below. There are two ways you can use hydrogen to make a cargo. Internal combustion and fuel cell electric. On the surface, internal combustion sounds pretty sweet. Literally. You just take a direct injection engine, replace the injectors with hydrogen ones, and with a very non-trivial amount of tuning later, you're off to the races. Toyota did this with the engines from the GR Yaris and entered a 24 hour endurance race. Two middling results. There are quite a few problems with hydrogen internal combustion engines. The biggest being efficiency. Only about a quarter of the energy available is turned into making your cargo. Which brings us to fuel cell electric vehicles, like the truck we saw earlier and this right here. The second generation Toyota Mirai. These work similarly to a battery electric car with normal electric motors providing your acceleration. The difference is though, that when you hit the gas, I really appreciate that I can still say that here, hydrogen is allowed to flow from the storage tank to the fuel cell stack. Inside the fuel cell oxygen, like just from the air around you, is allowed to enter and hydrogen, which is just a single proton electron, really wants to bond with that oxygen to create water. Unfortunately for that hydrogen, Toyota placed a proton exchange membrane between the hydrogen and the oxygen, which only allows the proton to pass through, leaving the electron behind. This causes the electron to have massive FOMO, like you if you don't shop at lttstore.com, so it will happily do the sprint around a conductor to meet up with the hydrogen and oxygen, creating electricity and powering the vehicle in the process. The largest benefit of this is that hydrogen can be put into your car in just a couple of minutes through a process that is very similar to filling your car with gas. But is this actually that easy? There are two ways to store hydrogen, liquid and compressed. Liquid hydrogen is nice because it's super easy to pump and easy to store a bunch of it, no pressure vessel required. Unfortunately, hydrogen becomes liquid at negative 252.8 degrees Celsius. Getting that cold takes a lot of energy, adding to the already high price. Liquid hydrogen is promising for use in planes and some trucks, but for cars it's just too expensive and the general public does not want to deal with cryogenics. Instead what we have here is compressed hydrogen at 10,000 psi, which honestly sounds kind of freaky. How is to fill your car with it? I really hope this works out. The last time we did this we were not very successful and a kind young Mrs. had to come over and show us how to do it. The first thing you'll notice with these is that they're really cold and normally pretty wet. This is a different connector than I used before, maybe this one's easier. Oh wow it is. If we knew what we were doing this was honestly really easy and here we go. We've already pumped five dollars which oh my god this is 16 dollars per kilogram. That's so much more expensive than the last one we had. I guess that's why they give you the Mirai with like 15,000 dollar gas card. Jeez. Connect. Okay this connector's awesome. I like this one. Honestly at that station with that connector it was actually easier than gas really. We have a full tank and we're good to go. Now while I've been filling the Mirai with a highly compressed, highly flammable gas, you've probably been thinking about the other time there was a bunch of hydrogen in one place. Fortunately I don't think that will happen here. The high pressures actually make the whole thing safer. Like think about it, at a normal gas station pump if you want you can just go all Zoolander and spray gasoline everywhere but with compressed hydrogen it's really easy to detect if a leak is there by the pressure drop. Also hydrogen is super light so if the tank is ruptured instead of pooling under the car it just quickly depressurizes and all the gas floats away. Toyota even has footage of one of these tanks getting shot. Like they lit a car on fire, shot the tank, and the footage is really boring. They found that the tank depressurizes so fast the hydrogen doesn't even really have a chance to explode so that's nice. Hydrogen has another problem though and this is the point that critics will really try to hammer home. It can never be as efficient as a battery electric car and on a price per kilometer basis it will always lose. For a battery electric vehicle getting from generated power to your car moving is pretty simple. The electricity is generated, gets sent through the grid, real efficient, and then it goes you know into your car's battery. Some ac to dc conversion there and the whole process is like 70 to 90 efficient depending on a couple of variables. For hydrogen the process is more complex. The cheapest way to produce it is by well burning a bunch of natural gas which kind of defeats the whole purpose. This means electrolysis is preferred which is essentially the same process we use to get the Mirai to go except in reverse using electricity to turn water into oxygen and hydrogen. That hydrogen then needs to be compressed which uses more energy and transported via pipe or truck to its final location. Then the final step taking that hydrogen and turning it back into electricity is only about 50 efficient. With all of those steps you're looking at roughly 25-35 percent efficiency total and since electricity is being used to make the hydrogen in the first place it will always cost more per kilometer than a battery electric car. But battery electric vehicles have a problem. Physics. At the end of the day f equals ma so if you want to accelerate several tons of vehicle or tens of tons in this case you're going to use a lot of energy. Like sure they could fill this area with batteries instead of hydrogen tanks but then you're not only adding mass but also greatly increasing the charge time and sure battery charging rates are going to improve and electric motors will become more efficient but it will never be able to beat this nozzle right here. Let's do some math so each one of these ports can transfer 60 grams of hydrogen per second which works out to about 7.2 megawatts of energy. Since efficiency is less than battery electric we can say it has an effective charging rate of 3.6 megawatts. To achieve that with an 800 volt battery like most electric vehicles use you would need 4400 amps. Unless you build a literal power station you cannot do that. Also the charging cable would have to be like this big. Using hydrogen for a truck has loads of other benefits too although most of these are shared with battery electric vehicles. Instead of 18 gears these only need two and as a Prius shifter wow there's way less vibrations and they create almost no noise. Also at the port of LA truck drivers aren't allowed to idle well in queue to reduce emissions which can result in some very toasty cabins in the summer. In a hydrogen truck though they can just keep it running the whole time AC all day awesome. For whatever reason people seem to think there can only be one winner hydrogen or battery electric but why not both? I alluded that Musk was wrong at the start of this video but Accio Toyota has been just as bad. In the next 10 years battery electric will be the clear winner even if the infrastructure isn't quite there people have electricity in their homes and for shorter computing it just makes sense. If the use case requires going over about 400 kilometers regularly is for heavy vehicles or a vehicle that requires near constant use hydrogen is going to be the winner. For me personally I think hydrogen vehicles are going to happen and the important question isn't if it will happen but how it happens. Here is the environmentalist pie in the sky pitch. In the future almost all electricity is renewable so solar wind water and so on is what we use but the problem with these is that they don't output a consistent amount. This means that there are times like right now where it's really freaking windy and a bunch of these windmills have the brakes on because there's more electricity supply than demand. Instead of just applying the brakes we could convert that into hydrogen some of it can be turned back into electricity and what's left over is used to power our cars. Wicked I love this future. A more cynical take is that currently 90% of the world's hydrogen is produced through steam methane reformation. The process I mentioned earlier that's basically burning a bunch of natural gas creating loads of carbon dioxide in the process. This could be excellent for oil producers since they're still able to make heaps of money off of you while you drive your zero emissions car. Pretty much the only thing that gives me hope this will end well is the Department of Energy's earth shot which is basically the US government putting 400 million dollars a year behind the goal of making renewably sourced hydrogen available for one dollar per kilogram by 2031. If the earth shot and hydrogen trucks happen I think we'll be in pretty good shape. Currently if you're a massive industrial plant or whatever you are buying hydrogen in bulk you are not paying the 16 dollars per kilogram we did. If more hydrogen starts getting bought to power these trucks and cars the price will drop simply because of buying in bulk and the ability to produce hydrogen on location will likely be a huge benefit to many companies also helping bring the price down. This all leaves us with one final question do you want to drive a hydrogen car like is the Mirai any good? Honestly me and Andy both really like it. It's built on the same platform as the Lexus LS and it features ride quality that just does not exist in electric cars anywhere near this price point. It's much lighter which means that they didn't have to really stiffen up the suspension so it can absorb all of the little bumps while not getting too wallowy over the big ones compared to a model 3 night and day. It's also you know basically a Lexus so seats are comfy driving positions good and it's even rear wheel drive to boot so it's kind of fun to huck into corners. My biggest problem with the Mirai though is that it is slow. Let's look here. It trottles from zero to 60 in about nine seconds. Toyota come on if your car is 50 grand it should not be getting chopped by a base Civic. Like it might lead a lot of people to think that hydrogen cars are slow. They don't have to be it's just an electric motor. There's already a battery in here if you can't supply enough energy with the hydrogen you can just make it up with the battery. Toyota says these weak electric motors were to allow them to hit their target price point but frankly I think that's stupid. This is never going to be a practical car you can only use it if you live in LA or San Francisco and why not just make it fun. Please just stick a Lexus badge on it give it 500 horsepower and pray speed am. This car is proof that hydrogen power works and is a genuine marvel of engineering but no youngsters are putting it on their wall and I think that's a sin. Oh and at the start of this video I asked if you should buy one of these no absolutely not. We're down in Orange County not even that far from LA and most of the hydrogen stations don't have hydrogen there's a shortage or something so the couple that do are Mirai car meetups with like a dozen in line. It took us like 40 minutes to get hydrogen last night. Oh it does pee though watch this. Did it do it? Darn it didn't you'll have to trust me. Anyway do you know who also pees a little bit? Our business team when they find out this is my segue to our sponsor. Thanks FreshBooks for sponsoring today's video. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that helps you do your business. You can impress your clients with professional looking invoices that detail the work you've done. You can use automated payment reminders if invoices get past due. You can easily track expenses and use their time tracker to log every minute of billable hours so you don't have to think about it later and you can keep everyone on the same page with their projects feature which makes it easy for clients your team and contractors to collaborate share files and comment. Choose a plan that's right for you and start your free trial of FreshBooks for 30 days today no credit card required at freshbooks.com slash linus. So huge thanks for watching this video we hope to do loads more on location car shoots like this one. Hope you liked it and if you want to watch something else maybe watch our XC40 review. Toyota we saw your BZX4 in camouflage we want to actually try it. Please it looks really cool.