Fuel cell vehicles are a type of electric vehicle. An electric vehicle is a vehicle that is powered by an on-board power supply and drives the wheels with an electric motor. A fuel cell vehicle is an electric vehicle that uses a fuel cell as a power source, which converts the chemical energy of the fuel (usually hydrogen) into electrical energy through a fuel cell, which drives the motor to drive the vehicle.
The working principle of fuel cell vehicles: Hydrogen as fuel in the fuel cell of the car, redox chemical reaction with oxygen in the atmosphere, produces electrical energy to drive the motor to work, and the motor drives the mechanical transmission structure in the car, and then drives the front axle (or rear axle) and other walking structures of the car to work, thereby driving the electric vehicle forward.
At present, the direction of China's new energy vehicles is mainly electric vehicles, and the development direction of Japan's new energy vehicles is fuel cell vehicles (hydrogen energy).
Some people say that China's new energy vehicles use thermal power generation, not real new energy, which is a bit one-sided.
In recent years, with the vigorous development of clean energy such as wind energy and photovoltaics, clean energy accounts for an increasing proportion of total electricity;
Secondly, even if it is thermal power generation, the energy utilization efficiency of new energy vehicles is higher than that of traditional fuel vehicles, because the thermal efficiency of thermal power plants is generally more than 40%, while the thermal efficiency of fuel vehicles is generally less than 20%; For example, coal-fired power plants can be built in sparsely populated mountainous areas and transported to cities through ultra-high voltage transmission lines, which reduce the pollution of cities with concentrated populations.
Japan's fuel cell vehicles are mainly hydrogen energy vehicles, and Japan currently has the world's largest hydrogen refueling stations and the world's largest fuel cell vehicle market, but its absolute market size is still small, accounting for only 2% of the world's total.
The main challenge facing Japan's hydrogen energy vehicles is the problem of hydrogen, which is mainly liquefied natural gas (LNG) or liquefied hydrogen imported from Australia, Saudi Arabia and other countries, where the hydrogen production process still relies on fossil fuels, so it cannot be considered a truly clean energy.
Japan is trying to develop its own hydrogen production capacity, mainly using renewable energy for water electrolysis, but this approach is costly. This is mainly due to the high cost of key components such as catalysts and proton exchange membranes in fuel cell systems. Moreover, compared with traditional internal combustion engines and lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells have a lower energy density, resulting in relatively low cruising range and load capacity of fuel cell vehicles, which limit the development of fuel cell vehicles. With the continuous advancement of technology and industrialization, these shortcomings of fuel cell vehicles are gradually being improved.
Many cities in China have also taken hydrogen-based fuel cell vehicles as one of the future development directions, such as Shanghai, which is one of the main promotion cities. In July 2023, Shanghai issued the "Plan for the Promotion and Application of Hydrogen Energy in Shanghai's Transportation Field (2023-2025)", proposing to focus on the development of application scenarios such as heavy trucks, public transportation, cold chain, and non-road mobile machinery, and strive to achieve a total of more than 10,000 fuel cell vehicles by 2025. It is believed that in the future, fuel cell vehicles will become more and more popular like other electric vehicles.