New energy vehicles have a variety of technical routes from the beginning, such as pure electric, hybrid, hydrogen and so on. Japanese car companies have actually laid out pure electric and hybrid vehicles very early. For example, Toyota introduced the Prius hybrid car in 1997, and Nissan introduced the first economical pure electric car in 2009. But later, the boss Toyota led Japanese car companies to turn collectively and devoted themselves to another technical route, namely hydrogen fuel cells.
Japanese car companies get up early and catch up late to gather on the track of new energy vehicles.
On may 20 18, when premier Li Keqiang visited Japan, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and Toyota president Akio Toyoda personally introduced the MIRAI, which means "future" in Japanese. This shows that until the middle of 2065438+2008, the Japanese automobile industry still firmly believes that hydrogen fuel cells are the future of new energy vehicles.
However, at the end of 20 18, a big event happened, and Tesla's Model 3 finally solved the mass production problem. Some experts in the industry made a judgment at that time, and the situation was clear. Pure electric vehicles are the future. In retrospect, this judgment is very accurate. Two years later, in 2020, the global sales of electric vehicles exceeded 3 million, an increase of about 40% year-on-year, including less than 654.38+00000 hydrogen energy vehicles. Toyota MIRAI, known as the most mature and leading hydrogen fuel cell vehicle at present, has a global sales volume of only 65,438+0,770 vehicles, down nearly 30% from last year. In 2020, only 240 Honda hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were sold worldwide, and only 65,438+0,900 vehicles were sold in total.
In 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 poured into the field of car making, all in the direction of pure electric. At this time, the global internet capital is concentrated in the All in pure electric track, which indicates that the overall technical direction of new energy vehicles has been set in the future.
At present, only Japanese and Korean car companies are still insisting on hydrogen fuel cells. As a result of persistence, the presence of Japanese and Korean car companies in the field of new energy vehicles is getting lower and lower. For example, Nissan, which first introduced pure electric vehicles, saw its sales of new energy vehicles drop from the global champion in 20 14 to 14 in 2020, while Toyota dropped to 17.
The question is: Why is the hydrogen fuel cell lost to pure electricity? 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; Supporting facilities, lack of hydrogen refueling stations, and so on. But to be honest, these problems are the same as pure electric vehicles. People in the industry told me that there is a very important factor behind the failure of hydrogen energy technology, which is the monopoly of Japanese companies on hydrogen energy technology.
As of 20 19, 83% of the global hydrogen energy patents belong to Japanese companies, of which Toyota alone holds 48% of the global hydrogen energy patents. How horrible is this? In contrast, Huawei, which is ahead of 5G technology, owns about 20% of 5G patents. In this case, if Chinese, American and European car companies have other technical routes to choose from, they will definitely not choose hydrogen energy, which will obviously get stuck. However, Japan's domestic market is too small to support the whole industrial chain of hydrogen energy vehicles alone, and the distance from pure electric vehicles in industrial ecology is getting bigger and bigger. This is one of the important reasons for the failure of hydrogen energy.
Remember the dispute between LCD and plasma in flat-panel TV?
Technically, there is no absolute competition between liquid crystal and plasma, but the core technology of plasma was mainly in the hands of a few companies such as Panasonic and Hitachi. Panasonic, in particular, monopolized most of the patents on plasma. In this case, Samsung, LG, Sharp, Sony and other companies can only choose the relatively weak LCD technology at that time to try their luck. As a result, a large number of talents, technology and funds poured into the field of LCD, which made the performance of LCD products improve rapidly and the price dropped rapidly. LCD eventually replaced plasma as the mainstream of flat-panel TV.
100 Historical Cycle of Electric Vehicles
100 years ago, that is, at the beginning of the 20th century, 40% of passenger cars registered in the United States were steam-powered, 38% were electric vehicles, and only 22% were fuel vehicles. At that time, people thought that electric vehicles should be the future direction. For example, the big news at the beginning of 19 14 is "Henry Ford and Edison cooperated to build cars". Henry Ford said that he and Edison have been studying together for many years and have been developing more reliable, smaller and longer battery life. Edison said, "I believe that all trucks in new york will be electric soon." However, history suddenly took a sharp turn. 19 14 At the end of the year, a strange fire destroyed Edison's electric car studio. By 1920, electric vehicles began to be completely replaced by fuel vehicles. From then on, it happened to be 100.