Hydrogen On The Rise At CES, From Drones And Daimler Trucks To Toyota’s City Of The Future

CES, the sprawling Las Vegas extravaganza that’s now the preeminent showcase for cutting-edge transportation tech, made clear that a wave of eye-catching battery-powered vehicles is coming, including Ford’s Mustang Mach-E muscle car, the Byton M-Byte crossover and Henrik Fisker’s Ocean SUV—even an electric Sony sedan. This year’s show also indicates hydrogen, which has had a negligible impact as a clean fuel for passenger cars, is getting a new shot as a power source for heavy-duty trucks, buses, drones and cities. 

Toyota, which has sold Mirai fuel-cell sedans in a handful of markets for five years, is applying decades of hydrogen R&D to serve as the core power source for “Woven City,” the futuristic neighborhood it plans to construct near Mount Fuji starting next year. Situated on the site of a shuttered Toyota assembly plant, it’s to be a showplace for clean tech, mobility experiments, AI-enabled everything and next-generation architecture that will be home to 2,000 residents.    

“This would be a truly unique opportunity to create an entire community, or city, from the ground up and allow us to build an infrastructure of the future that is connected, digital and sustainable, powered by Toyota's hydrogen fuel cell technology,” Akio Toyoda, company president and grandson of its founder, said in Las Vegas. The 175-acre project is to have a stationary hydrogen-electric system, complemented by extensive rooftop solar installations. 

Like Toyota, Daimler has been working to commercialize fuel cell vehicles since the 1990s, and though it currently offers the F-Cell sport-utility vehicle in a few markets, the parent of Mercedes-Benz is shifting its focus to heavy trucks and buses, says R&D chief Markus Schäfer.

“Trucks have a challenge, long-haul trucks, that they will not greatly operate with a battery, not with the chemistry we have today,” Schäfer said at a CES briefing. “Our first application of fuel cell will be in buses and trucks.”

Daimler late last year said it will ramp up production of electric fuel cell trucks from the late 2020s, joining established rivals and startups including Toyota, which has tested fuel cell semis in Los Angeles for the past few years, Hyundai Motor and Nikola Motor in targeting the commercial vehicle market with zero-emission hydrogen trucks. Ryder, a partner of Nikola, is showing off one of the company’s futuristic Nikola Two big rigs at its CES stand.

Fuel cell and battery-powered vehicles are both electric, sharing the same motors and many other components. The key difference is batteries store electricity and fuel cells produce it onboard as needed, in an electrochemical process that extracts electrons from hydrogen gas forced through fuel-cell membranes. Aside from the electricity, the main by-product is water vapor. Beyond cars and trucks, they’ve been used by NASA for decades, they work as stationary electricity generators and are being developed to power trains and even ships and ferries.

“Fuel cells work great. It's just a cost issue and it's all about scaling. We need volume,” Schäfer said. “We have trucks, we are the biggest truck maker in the world with Freightliner, with Mercedes trucks, our Asian brands we have a big presence around the globe.”

He said the company is designing a modular system that would allow different types of commercial vehicles to use the same hydrogen fuel cell stacks, adding more or less depending on the size and range of the vehicle. 

“Within the next two or three years we would have something in the commercial area;  could be a bus, could be a truck,” Schäfer said. 

But it’s not all big and heavy.

Doosan Mobility Innovation, a unit of a South Korean industrial firm that makes construction equipment, robotics and desalination technology, scored a CES Innovation Award for a long-endurance fuel cell drone on display this week.

Doosan’s DS30 commercial drone, using a compact, lightweight hydrogen fuel cell system the company created in-house, can operate for up to two hours per flight and has at least three times the energy density of battery models, according to CES.