With fuel efficiency standards now just around the corner, Australia's most popular carmaker is pushing vehicles fuelled by hydrogen.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 This might look like a petrol pump but actually it is full of hydrogen.
00:07 It was made here at this facility using power from solar panels that are over there and
00:12 power from the grid, making the hydrogen in this close to so-called green energy.
00:18 It takes around five minutes to fill up a car like this and that will get you around
00:26 650 kilometres.
00:30 So the technology under the hood looks a little bit similar to an internal combustion engine
00:35 that runs on petrol or diesel but technically this is not an engine.
00:42 The hydrogen is going into this fuel cell that then generates electricity which runs
00:49 this motor.
00:51 They run pretty quiet and are actually really similar to a pure electric battery vehicle.
00:57 Just like an EV there is no tailpipe on this car.
01:01 Toyota says that all that's emitted is water vapour which comes out somewhere under here
01:08 and apparently is so clean you could water the garden with it or even as some people
01:13 have done, you could drink it.
01:16 These cars are still really expensive to run and there is not many places in Australia
01:22 to refuel them.
01:24 Just six hydrogen cars were sold into the Australian market last year.
01:29 That compares to 87,000 electric cars and even more hybrids.
01:34 The number is still quite small and that's on the basis that the refuelling infrastructure
01:38 is limited.
01:39 Toyota says that these sorts of cars are still a really good option for people who don't
01:46 want to have to wait to charge up their battery electric cars but there are lots of sceptics
01:52 like the Grattan Institute who says that we shouldn't be wasting our energy on these sorts
01:57 of cars.
01:58 You need to be able to make electricity to make the hydrogen really, really, really cheap
02:04 and the thing is that when electricity gets really cheap it becomes even cheaper to run
02:08 your electric car.
02:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]