What will fuel the cars of the future? The same stuff that
makes the stars shine. Hey there guys, it's Jonathan Strickland with Fw:
Thinking. I'm still here at CES
2014. I’ve been invited into the Toyota
booth. Now Toyota's one of our partners, and they've been showing off some
really incredible stuff here, including some concept vehicles that frankly blow
my mind. But I really want to talk to you about fuel cell technology. Now this
isn't a new technology, we've known about it for more than a century.
But it’s a really cool one. Imagine that
you've got a
chamber. On one side of that chamber you
have hydrogen. On the other side of the
chamber you have oxygen. And in between
the two you've got a membrane. Now this membrane only allows positively charged
ions to flow through, so the hydrogen normally can’t get through there. But
when it comes into contact, a catalyst causes the hydrogen to lose an
electron. It becomes a positively
charged ion. Passes through the
membrane. Now all those electrons don't like each other and they want to get
back with their hydrogen buddies.
So you open up a
pathway, a circuit that these electrons can flow through, thus creating
electricity. They go through the circuit, and on the other side they rejoin
with the hydrogen and oxygen and then you get water - good old H2O!In fact, a
fuel cell only generates three things: water, heat, and electricity. So, why
has this technology not spanned the globe? Well, we've had some big challenges
to face.
Two of them were cost, and building out an infrastructure
where we could actually fuel up a vehicle that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. We
were lucky enough to catch up with the people behind the scenes of Toyota's
fuel cell technology. This is a very exciting time where I get to be involved
in developing the future. You know, and I don't know if a lot of people get to
say that. I feel very lucky and
fortunate for that. And it's a time
where we can be very creative in solving these problems. Because this is an
engineering problem, I'm an engineer, but it's fun to be creative in solving
these problems and finding solutions for sustainable technology for the future.
And we're not talking about the distant future. Toyota, and the State of California, and
several other organizations are working together to build out fueling stations,
to support a fleet of up to 10,000 cars. So this "future" technology
we've been talking about for years.
We're going to see it happen. And it's not five years from now. It's not ten years from now. They're going to
be launching this concept vehicle in 2015!The best part about fuel cells, from
my point of view, is that they transcend all sorts of classes of vehicles, and
they do other kinds of things as well too. So you can imagine having a fuel
cell powering your home.
