BMW announced today its commitment of offering a sustainable hydrogen fuel cell technology in series production vehicles in the near future. According to BMW, the Bavarians are carefully and constructively building a multi-pillar powertrain and mobility strategy. When the market is ready, the hydrogen fuel cell technology could become the fourth pillar of the strategic approach in the long-term. BMW Group is confident that conventional engines will continue to co-exist with electric, plug-in hybrid and, potentially, hydrogen fuel cell alternatives for a long time.
Diversity is the key, as the automotive giant affirms. The road to free-emission mobility is taken on systematically and gradually, by carefully considering the differing market and client requirements as part of the company’s already established “Power of Choice” strategy.
Klaus Fröhlich, Member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, Research and Development, commented: “We are convinced that various alternative powertrain systems will exist alongside one another in future, as there is no single solution that addresses the full spectrum of customers’ mobility requirements worldwide. The hydrogen fuel cell technology could quite feasibly become the fourth pillar of our powertrain portfolio in the long term. The upper-end models in our extremely popular X family would make particularly suitable candidates here.”
With respect to the development of sustainable hydrogen fuel cell technology, efforts have been focusing on this direction already since 2013, when BMW partnered with Toyota Motor Corporation.
Future prospect for hydrogen fuel cell technology
BMW Group sees an adequate potential of the hydrogen fuel cell technology in the long term, but until market conditions are favorable, it will take some time before the first BMW FCEV (fuel cell electric vehicle) will be serially produced.
The hydrogen fuel cell technology depends firstly on having a sufficient amount of hydrogen produced using green energy sources and at competitive prices. Furthermore, the needed refueling infrastructure is currently lacking worldwide.
BMW also says is committed to pushing forward the creation of a Europe-wide network of hydrogen fuel stations with reaffirmed commitment to the further development and refinement of fuel cell technology.
Hydrogen fuel cell technology will become a viable and consistent alternative when the requisite infrastructure is put in place and when hydrogen refueling will be priced comparably with current gas/diesel refueling charges. Moreso, BMW sees primary application of the new technology in sectors where direct, full electrification is not possible, such as heavy-duty transport.
Cooperation with Toyota Motor Corporation continues
In 2013, BMW and Toyota embarked on a successful collaboration aimed primarily at the further development and industrialization of the hydrogen fuel cell technology and the production of scalable parts and modular components to be used in the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
The two companies are also founding parents of the Hydrogen Council, established in 2017, with 80 members having already joined the council since its foundation. The members are leading companies from the energy, transport and industrial sectors.
The hydrogen fuel cell powertrain together with the fuel cell units and modular components developed as part of the BMW-Toyota cooperation will be deployed in the BMW i Hydrogen NEXT beginning with 2022.
BMW Group involvement in the BRYSON research project
To be viable, the hydrogen fuel cell technology must be safe in the first instance. Developing a secure and space-optimal way of storing the liquid hydrogen in a car is a crucial step to make the technology fully compliant with safety standards.
As a consequence, BMW Group is part of the BRYSON research project aiming to develop pioneering high-pressure hydrogen storage tanks which are, as well, space-efficient and can be easily integrated into the future universal vehicle architectures.
Thus, BMW Group collaborates with the Munich University of Applied Sciences, Leichtbauzentrum Sachsen GmbH, the Technical University of Dresden and WELA Handelsgesellschaft mbH for this daring challenge. The ultimate purpose is to create a flat design for the storage tanks.
The BRYSON project is sustained through direct funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy and is set to run for 3.5 years. In the end, it is estimated that BRYSON will help lower the cost of manufacturing hydrogen tanks for fuel cell vehicles, enabling them to compete effectively with battery electric vehicles (BEV).
BMW says the fuel cell should be a long-term solution for cars.
I would say that green electricity is too valuable to convert to H2 and then convert to electricity again. This may make sense in stationary and heavy goods vehicles. But with cars …?
Just reduce the cost of green energy by scaling H² production up. There is a big advantage to this: storing energy becomes a lot easier. Currently Germany produces quite a lot of renewable power but is unable to store a lot of it. H² tanks and fuel cells can help this issue quite a bit.
Yes the renewable energy has to be stored as H2. But anyway the green energy is too valuable to be used as H2 in cars.
H2 production wastes up to 50% of the energy during the conversion in best case (65% electrolyzer efficiency * 90% fuel cell efficiency).
It doesn’t matter when you have plenty and cheap renewable sourced H².
Wash your body with Ethanol and the motor of car too. The Brazilian Flex Motor Invention was the Best Solution
Note the carefully couched wording.”In the near future”, “diversity” “When the market is ready”
This thing is still in the lab where it has been for the last three decades and where it should stay.
Hydrogen for road transportation is too polluting (upstream emissions if by SMR) or too wasteful of electricity and water (if by electrolysis), too expensive for vehicle, fuel and infrastructure and too inefficient.
Anyway BMW cannot afford to provide the capital to build these losers. They have their hands full trying to catch up to Tesla who is eating their lunch.
I don’t think so. Renewables have a big problem: storage. H² has the capability to contribute a part of the solution. Also it requires less mining for rare earth minerals, is easier to recycle and has a longer life time than clunky battery cars. Remember that BEVs outstanding reason was to save the environment which it only does partially.
Also BMW has a bit longer history with H². I’ve seen the Hydrogen 7 fleet running around in Berlin for many years.
Hydrogen has one large problem – storage. It is way too hard to store significant amounts of hydrogen in a limited space, it is just too light. If they were going with methane – yes, you could store a lot of energy in limited space with that and also get quite clean exhaust, but not with hydrogen. You need super-pressurised tanks of hundreds of atmospheres and they will still be huge.
Toyota Mirai has a range of up to 500km with 122.4L H². The 20yo BMW Hydrogen 7 ran 200km on H² plus 500km on gas with a 6.0L V12 engine. Hydrogen is an absolute valid option for passenger cars.
BMW is right to follow this path and the writer misses the issue with batteries. They are not 100% efficient (you have to put more in than you get out) and they need costly materials to make some of which are only available in Countries that blocked for sale of other materials and are war zones. The other issue is the weight issue having to carry 600 KG of batteries against a B58 ICE 187 KG means you need to use a large percentage of the energy to move this mass. Surely charging batteries is the same issue of conversion, changing state of the chemicals to then use the electricity, is this not the same? I read recently read that their is a hydrogen unit at the St Alban’s service area and it is a self contained unit that plugs in and when used recreates the Hydrogen by electrolysis this means Hydrogen and Oxygen. These are easily installed and they refill in 5 minutes. The use of “Green” energy is a myth as it all goes into the national grid and you can’t separate it out. Some of it will be “Green” but not all unless you have your own wind generator at home.
I had a BMW i3 for a week last year for a week as my wife’s Mini decided to upset the service centre with lots of issues and snapped bolts. The i3 is the only true electric car as it was designed to be very light to offset the weight of the batteries (sorry Tesla with your 2.4 ton cars wasting energy moving the mass). It was really very good, the initial takeoff took a little practice to smooth out but as true solution it was excellent. I reset the computer and I managed to get over 5.2 per KW which is outstanding, with short drives, motorway and town driving. Drove well quiet, good handling and ride. The quirky looks are unusual but somehow work.
I feel really sorry for Isaac Newton as he must feel he wasted his time. In his second law, the force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration. This translated for those who did not like physics means a bigger mass need more force (energy) to move it. Its much the same with a bigger car with same engine uses more fuel thus a 730i will use more fuel than a 330i.
Mass is not a big problem, as people have actually learned since after i3 was designed. The acceleration penalty only applies when you try to speed up rapidly and is compensated by better regeneration during slowing down of all that mass. When actually rolling, the rolling resistance difference from added mass is negligible – aerodynamic drag dominates in motion. Even cornering is not that much affected by the increase in mass because the added mass is lower than normal center of gravity in the car, so it actually increases stability while cornering and gives better traction to all wheels due to increased stiffness.
This is true until you start to subtract all energy losses during recuperation charging cycles. The main thing against a tesla is it’s non repair policy. Try to buy parts from Tesla and tell me if that bisiness model is sustainable.
Uh, no. That’s not how physics works. Mass is a big deal. More mass means more energy usage, period. Vehicle dynamics are heavily impacted by mass as well. Saying that cornering isn’t affected is just flat out wrong. Marketing departments and a CEOs that pretend to be scientific genius but actually don’t understand physics and engineering like to throw that whole lower center of gravity bit around to throw off consumers. It’s much more complicated. Large increases in mass can cause a butterfly effect in design, requiring serious amounts of accommodation. There is just so much wrong with everything you wrote.
Making this simple, take two objects, object 1 with mass m and object 2 with mass 2m. Let’s say both do an equal and hard acceleration. All things equal, Object 2 will require approximately double the energy to get to the same velocity as Object 1. Now assume both objects accelerate to the same speed again, but this time slowly. According to you, the penalty should be negated. Well, no, it’s not. Object 1 will again use half the energy of Object 2.
Now consider stopping or changing directions (i.e. cornering). The same applies. While traveling at the same speed, Object 2 will require twice the energy to stop it or change direction than Object 1.
“…the added mass is lower than normal center of gravity in the car, so it actually increases stability while cornering and gives better traction to all wheels due to increased stiffness.”
Uhhh, what? Now you’re just speaking nonsense. Adding mass and lowering center of gravity doesn’t increase stiffness. Lets revisit Objects 1 and 2. Assume everything is the same. Object 1 takes a hard turn, the tires squeal and are barely holding on to complete the turn perfectly. Now Object 2 goes and tries the same thing. It ends up flying off the road and into the ditch. What happened? Having the same tires as Object 1, they weren’t wide enough to overcome the higher forces as a result of the extra mass. To compensate this, Object 2 would need wider tires, and uh oh, that means more mass added to an already heavy object (see butterfly effect). And now we see why the i3 didn’t need fat tires. At roughly the same mass as a MINI, all else equal, the i3 only needed a similar sized contact patch. Any wider and it’s unnecessary unsprung mass… blah blah blah. i’m simplifying here. I would have to write a book to explain everything wrong with all your statements. Fortunately, many people have. I’m not going to go into why some BEVs have stiffer chassis soooo.. yea..
Anyway, the irony of your i3 comment as proof of mass not being a problem actually does the opposite. It’s a great example that shows the problem with mass when it comes to efficiency (and vehicle dynamics of course). Again, simplifying things. The original 60ah was EPA rated 81 mi. so the latest 120ah should be 162 mi, right? Nope. It’s rated 153 mi. BMW supposedly even made updates to improve efficiency yet the 60ah is still more efficient (124 MPGe vs 113 MPGe). What happened? Well, the latest i3 is about 300 lbs heavier. The cars acceleration is slower too, and you can be sure it has a longer stopping distance.
All you are talking about is high school physics – mechanics of spherical cows in vacuum. In real vehicles there are far more, much more complex effects and the end results can be very surprising with just a little bit of tweaking.
For a simple example – driving is not constant acceleration. Most of driving time actually happens to be at sustained speed and at sustained speed aerodynamic drag (where mass does not play any role) dominates over rolling resistance (where it does) and acceleration penalty is zero.
When you oversimplify things you lose a lot of realism.
Cornering is even more fun. See cars are not solid metal blocks sliding around solid surfaces. During hard cornering cars tilt in their suspension setups causing chamfering forces on the tires on all four corners and those forces impact grip a LOT. A tire that is stood on the edge even by just a few degrees has significantly less grip. If the center of gravity in the car is lower, there is less twisting force on the wheels to cause them to be off the vertical and thus tires maintain more contact with the road and get far more grip. Effective cornering grip can be double that of an ICE car with weight penalty being in tens of percent.
i3 did not at all benefit from that because, to further minimise rolling resistance, it was equipped with super skinny tires that squealed even on soft cornering. The tyre compound and shape can easily affect straight line range by up to 15% on their own.