Gadgetory

what I believe I'm gonna tell you about today is really gonna change our world and sooner rather than later for years the use of hydrogen gas to power automobiles has been seen by many smart people as a foolish quest the point of view is reminiscent of the opinions 20 years ago of how the Prius hybrid was called by many as a science project that would never be economically feasible the point is as change takes persistence instead of turning out clever phrases we at Toyota have been turning wheels with electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen in an inboard fuel cell system hydrogen as we know works beautifully with oxygen to create water and electricity and absolutely nothing more hydrogen is plentiful and there are many ways to produce it and many of those are sustainable and as we all know a fuel cell is more efficient to operate than a gasoline engine which means it requires less fuel to travel the same distance and again produces zero emissions in 2015 we will bring this technology to market now that's not to say our work is done and there are challenges ahead - in particular the first is building the vehicle and an affordable price and the second is what are we doing to help build that critical hydrogen refueling infrastructure this project has been fully in-house from the start we needed to invent the tools which to develop build and safety test a truly brand new exotic powertrain by far the biggest advance is coming to market with a reasonably priced car have been related to the materials the design in the manufacturing the beauty is is we have seen considerable improvement in all three of those areas which is why we're so bullish on fuel cells Toyota has been in the dry battery business for a long time we love batteries we're the world leader in hybrid electronics the dedication to battery technology continues but compared to battery electrics the rate of cost reduction that we have seen in fuel cell electric technology has been staggering that's why our hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles will be in our future sooner than many people believe and in much greater numbers than anyone expected the state has recently approved more than 200 million dollars in fueling for as many as 100 new stations 20 by 2015 and 40 by 2016 now those numbers may sound small but one thing we believe is that the issue for the infrastructure isn't about how many there are but rather location location and location now Toyota and the University of California the advanced energy program collaborated on a spatial model that maps out specific distribution of stations the locations considered a variety of data including hybrid and electric ownership patterns traffic patterns population density and so on the model was based on the assumption that owners would want to reach a refueling station within six minutes of their home or work what this model produced was an initial cluster map that identified only 68 station sites in the San Francisco Bay Area Silicon Valley Los Angeles Orange and San Diego counties now if implemented this them could handle a fuel-cell population conservatively estimated at about 10,000 vehicles and the study went further by using this model if every vehicle in the state of California ran on hydrogen we could meet refueling logistics with only 15% of the nearly 10,000 gas stations that are currently operating in the state we don't need a station on every corner it's not about how many it's about their location