At the end of last month, a news suddenly came to our attention from the long-silent Haima Motors.
In the announcement, Haima Motors said that its first batch of hydrogen fuel cell cars had been produced offline, and the relevant demonstration operation promotion work was also being implemented.
Since selling 216000 cars a year with the S5 in 2016, the days of Haima have been getting worse year after year.
For the whole of last year, Haima sold only 28000 cars a year, and fell to 1871 in the first quarter of this year.
When other car companies encounter this dilemma, they may want to switch to pure electricity or hybrid new energy, but seahorse has chosen a remote path.
As early as 2020, the seahorse unveiled a 7X hydrogen fuel cell car, which was advertised that it would take only 3-5 minutes to add hydrogen and a range of more than 800 kilometers.
On this basis, the seahorse iterated the current operating 7X-H, which is equipped with Toyota’s stack system and 70MPa high-pressure hydrogen storage tank.
In fact, in addition to the seahorse, BMW and Roewe both unveiled their hydrogen cars at this year’s Beijing Auto Show.
However, compared with the hot debate between pure electricity and hybrid routes, which is the route of new energy technology, hydrogen-fueled cars have always been the minority in the market.
“less” does not mean “poor”.
Let me give you an example of the difference between the two: in 2007, BMW released a particularly interesting hybrid product, the BMW hydrogen 7 Series, which is driven by a hydrogen internal combustion engine.
The fun thing about this car is that it is equipped with a specially built 6.
0-liter V12 engine.
It can burn both gasoline and hydrogen directly.
When driving, you only need to press the “H2” button on the steering wheel to enter hydrogen power mode.
The BMW hydrogen Energy 7 Series consumes an average of 3.
6kg of hydrogen per hundred kilometers, and the 8kg hydrogen tank is enough to support the car to exceed the 200km.
Driven in hydrogen mode, the car is quite environmentally friendly and has almost no pollutant emissions.
However, limited by the technology at that time, mass production was really difficult, and BMW only built 100 units for concept presentation.
This is the earliest hydrogen internal combustion engine car (HICEV).
Today’s hydrogen-powered vehicles are mainly hydrogen-fueled vehicles (FCEV).
Instead of burning hydrogen directly through an internal combustion engine, hydrogen-fueled vehicles generate electricity by combining the hydrogen of the hydrogen storage tank with the oxygen in the fuel cell stack, which is then driven by an electric motor.
It is mainly composed of high pressure gas storage tank, hydrogen fuel cell stack, power battery pack, drive motor and so on.
To put it simply, we can compare a hydrogen-fueled car to an electric car with its own hydrogen-fueled generator, which feels a bit like an incremental program, but the traditional incremental program uses an internal combustion engine to generate electricity.
Hydrogen fuel produces a chemical reaction through the combination of hydrogen and oxygen in the fuel cell stack, in which electric current is generated due to the existence of charge transfer.
During the operation of the whole hydrogen fuel system, it does not produce any other consumption except oxygen and air, and the only by-product is water produced by the combination of two hydrogen ions and one oxygen ion, which is quite environmentally friendly.
In fact, apart from being environmentally friendly, the advantage of hydrogen-fueled cars is that they are more “direct” than other forms of energy.
First of all, the speed of replenishing energy is fast, filling a hydrogen-fueled car with hydrogen takes about the same time as a fuel truck, and it takes a few minutes to solve the endurance anxiety.
Second, it is less affected by temperature.
Pure electric vehicles have a discount on their winter range, but hydrogen-fueled cars do not have “hypothermia”, which has been verified at the Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
What is more important for us is that hydrogen-fueled cars are still cheap.
This “cheap” is calculated in many ways, such as hydrogenation is cheaper than refueling or even recharging.
The price of the domestic hydrogenation station is about 30 yuan after the subsidy of 1 kilogram of hydrogen.
Take the Hyundai NEXO on sale in China as an example, this car can drive 550km under the CLTC standard.
A hydrogen storage tank with a full weight of 3.
99 kilograms costs less than 120 yuan, which is cheaper than some pure electric cars with the same range.
In addition, this “cheap” can also be calculated from the energy density of hydrogen.
The energy density of hydrogen per unit weight is several times that of gasoline and hundreds of times that of lithium batteries.
Lower weight is more conducive to reducing the overall energy consumption of the vehicle, which is very suitable for the heavy trucks we will encounter on the highway.
Pure electric heavy trucks often need to carry a very heavy battery pack, and the larger the battery pack, the higher the energy consumption for the vehicle to “carry” the battery pack.
Using hydrogen fuel system as power drive can obviously reduce energy consumption better.
So, since hydrogen-fueled cars have so many advantages, why aren’t they used on a large scale? The answer is: compared with the technical problems, the current hydrogen fuel vehicle production and market matching costs are the main reasons why it is difficult to achieve large-scale commercialization.
For example, the energy density of hydrogen is high, but the volume density is low, so it is a great challenge in space to install larger hydrogen storage tanks.
In addition, in addition to hydrogen storage tanks and hydrogen fuel cell systems, hydrogen fuel vehicles also need battery packs and drive motors, and the structure of the power system is very complex.
Platinum is the most important raw material in the core stack catalyst of hydrogen fuel cell, and platinum is a precious metal.
A hydrogen energy vehicle uses about 30 grams of platinum, and the cost can be imagined.
Most importantly, although hydrogen is not expensive, the cost of building a hydrogen filling station is more than 10 million yuan.
at the same time, the technical threshold and cost for the transportation and storage of hydrogen are high.
If a technology is difficult to advance for a long time, it naturally has its own limitations of related industries.
How to reduce the cost of hydrogen fuel vehicles to land on a large scale, on the one hand, we need policy support, on the other hand, we also need a better market mechanism.
In 2022, the relevant ministries and commissions issued the medium-and long-term Plan for the Development of hydrogen Energy Industry (2021-2035), which clearly pointed out that “hydrogen energy is an important part of the country’s future energy system”.
The target is to reach about 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2025.
In April this year, hydrogen energy was officially included in the Energy Law of the people’s Republic of China (draft), and as of December 2023, local governments alone have issued a total of 438 hydrogen energy industry policies, according to data from the China hydrogen Energy Alliance.
However, although there are various kinds of policy support, the total number of domestic operating hydrogenation stations is only less than 500.
At present, there are only a handful of hydrogen-fueled vehicles on sale in the market.
If you open the major APP, you can find only five models of hydrogen-fueled vehicles currently on sale.
For us there is little choice for us to experience hydrogen-powered models.
And these modelsIn, Toyota Mirai, SAIC Chase MAXUS, MIFA Hydrogen and Hyundai NEXO are all priced at more than 500,000 yuan, far from reaching the homes of ordinary people.
, Hyundai NEXO will be launched globally in 2018.
However, in 2022, Hyundai NEXO China will officially obtain Beijing’s new energy vehicle license, and it is also the earliest hydrogen-fueled vehicle in China that can legally take the road.
Domestic car companies currently also have many products on hydrogen-fueled vehicles.
In addition to the light passenger products launched by SAIC Chase, Changan Deep Blue SL03 has also launched a hydrogen-powered version, priced at 699,900 yuan.
Its hydrogen-powered version can have a battery life of up to 730 kilometers under the CLTC standard, and the feeding hydrogen consumption is as low as 0.
65 kg/100km.
It can achieve a power generation efficiency of 20.
5 degrees for 1 kilogram of hydrogen power generation.
, However, the output power limited by hydrogen fuel cells is generally not high, so the power of hydrogen-fueled vehicle drive motors is not high.
The power of Changan Deep Blue SL03 drive motor of 160kW is actually a high level.
After all, the maximum output power of the second-generation Toyota Mirai fuel cell stack is only 128kW, and the maximum power of the drive motor is only 134kW, while the drive motor power of the modern NEXO is only 120kW.
So although hydrogen-fueled cars are expensive, they look exciting.
But in terms of performance, it is basically equivalent to the level of an ordinary grocery truck.
If you just want to experience a truly environmentally friendly new energy vehicle that only emits “pure water”, you can try it.
But if you want to experience the acceleration pleasure of pure electric vehicles on hydrogen-fueled vehicles, you will have to wait a little longer.
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