Japan's Honda Motor announced that it will terminate the production of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles starting in August this year. Will this be a major signal that Japanese car companies will give up the hydrogen fuel cell car track as a whole?
New energy vehicles have had a variety of technical routes from the beginning, such as pure electric, hybrid, hydrogen energy, etc. Japanese car companies have actually been laying out pure electric and hybrid power very early. For example, Toyota launched the gasoline-electric hybrid model Prius in 1997, and Nissan launched its first economical pure electric car in 2009. But later, the boss Toyota led the Japanese car companies to collectively turn and devote all their energy to another technology route, that is, hydrogen fuel cells.
On the new energy vehicle track, Japanese car companies get up early and work late.
When Premier Li Keqiang visited Japan in May 2018, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Toyota President Akio Toyoda personally introduced MIRAI, a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle from Toyota, to Premier Li. MIRAI means " future". This shows that until mid-2018, the Japanese automobile industry still firmly believed that hydrogen fuel cells were the future of new energy vehicles.
However, at the end of 2018, a big thing happened. Tesla’s Model 3 finally solved the mass production problem. Some experts in the industry made a judgment at that time, believing that the situation was clear and pure electric vehicles were the future. Looking back to test it now, this judgment is very accurate. Two years later in 2020, global electric vehicle sales exceeded 3 million, a year-on-year increase of about 40%, of which there were less than 10,000 hydrogen energy vehicles. The Toyota MIRAI, which is said to be the most technologically mature and leading hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, has only sold 1,770 units globally, down nearly 30% from last year. Honda's hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, which announced the discontinuation of production this time, sold only 240 units globally in 2020, and only 1,900 units in total.
Under this situation, traditional European and American car companies such as Mercedes-Benz and General Motors have stopped the research and development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Since the beginning of this year, Internet companies have gathered together to enter the field of car manufacturing, and without exception they are all working in the direction of pure electric vehicles. Global Internet capital is concentrated on the All in pure electric track at this time, indicating that the overall direction of new energy vehicle technology in the future has been determined.
Currently, almost only Japanese and Korean car companies are still insisting on hydrogen fuel cells. The result of persistence is that the presence of Japanese and Korean car companies in the field of new energy vehicles is getting smaller and smaller. For example, Nissan, which was the first to launch pure electric vehicles, saw its sales of new energy vehicles fall from the global championship in 2014 to 14th in 2020, while Toyota fell to 17th.
Here comes the question: Why do hydrogen fuel cells lose to pure electric vehicles? There are many reasons:
Technically, the energy efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is not high; in terms of cost, hydrogen energy vehicles are very expensive; in terms of supporting facilities, there are insufficient hydrogen refueling stations, etc. But to be honest, pure electric vehicles also have these problems. Industry insiders told me that a very important factor behind the failure of hydrogen energy technology is the monopoly of hydrogen energy technology by Japanese companies.
As of 2019, 83% of the world’s hydrogen energy patents belong to Japanese companies, of which Toyota alone holds 48% of the world’s hydrogen energy patents. How scary is this? By comparison, Huawei, which leads 5G technology, only owns about 20% of 5G patents. Under this circumstance, if Chinese, American and European car companies have other technical routes to choose from, they will definitely not choose hydrogen energy. It is obvious that they will be stuck. The domestic market in Japan is too small, and it cannot support the entire industrial chain of hydrogen energy vehicles on its own. The distance between the industrial ecology and pure electric vehicles is getting wider and wider. This is one of the important reasons for the failure of hydrogen energy.
Do you still remember the battle between LCD and plasma flat-panel TVs?
Technically speaking, there is no absolute superiority between LCD and plasma, but at that time the core technology of plasma was mainly in the hands of a few companies such as Panasonic and Hitachi. Panasonic, in particular, monopolizes most of the plasma patents. In this case, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony and other companies could only choose the relatively weak LCD technology at the time to give it a try.
As a result, a large amount of talent, technology, and funds poured into the LCD field, which rapidly improved the performance of LCD products and dropped prices rapidly. LCD eventually replaced plasma and became the mainstream of flat-panel TVs.
The 100-year history of electric vehicles
100 years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, 40% of registered passenger cars in the United States were powered by steam, and 38% were powered by steam. are electric vehicles, and only 22% are fuel vehicles. At that time, people believed that electric vehicles should be the direction of the future. For example, a big news story in early 1914 was "Henry Ford and Edison cooperated to build cars." Henry Ford said that he and Edison had been working together for many years to develop more reliable, smaller, and longer-lasting car batteries. Edison said, "I believe that before long all the trucks in New York City will be electric." But then, history took a sudden turn. At the end of 1914, a strange fire destroyed Edison's electric car studio. By 1920, electric vehicles began to be completely replaced by fuel vehicles. It has been exactly 100 years since then.