I applaud Toyota’s efforts to actually bring a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle to market. Though I think the technology is a dead end.

Bloomberg reports that Toyota will have a fuel cell vehicle on the market by 2015 with a range of 300 miles and a price tag in the neighborhood of $50,000. Those figures actually aren’t too far off the mark for the beginning of something that could be commercially viable and they make me wonder if Toyota would be taking a loss at that price point.

But economics aside, there are a lot of other issues with fuel cells. For starters, hydrogen fuel is made from natural gas. There is no other cost effective method for producing hydrogen fuel and to be fair, it’s not terribly cost effective which makes me wonder who Toyota will go to to provide hydrogen fueling stations. So hydrogen fuel cell vehicles wind up dumping lots of CO2 into the atmosphere. There are some experimental projects trying to electrolyze water to break off the hydrogen atoms from H2O to produce hydrogen fuel but it’s very early days in that engineering evolution and it’s very expensive.

While Tesla founder Elon Musk definitely has a dog in this fight, I tend to agree with his comment that “fuel cells should be renamed ‘fool cells,’ they are so stupid.” I’d say that’s true in transportation. In power generation Bloom Energy is showing there’s a market for fuel cells, most promisingly in the data center.

My issue is just that with Toyota’s leadership and engineering know how, I wish they’d put their efforts into producing a truly groundbreaking EV, particularly considering the trust the company has built with its Prius following. Yeah, I know there’s the plug-in Prius, but it’s not all that innovative. I’m thinking plug-in with an electric range of  80 miles that’s under 30K. How about it, Toyota?