Now that we’ve trained the whole world in american-style corporate criminality, we’re gonna pull the rug out from them and reveal ourselves to be the good guys! Right? Right, guys?
The Japanese car companies put all their eggs in the hydrogen basket, despite their early head start in EV with the Toyota Prius and such, and as hydrogen looks to be more and more of a dead end due to transportation and safety concerns, of course they are going to be sandbagging EV adoption to buy time and catch up.
China being a massive producer of EVs is also a large part of it. Japan and China have a long hatred of one another, but will sometimes set aside differences for simple things.
This shit actually hurts my soul. This is the type of shit as to why we might not make it. We have the technology to mitigate climate change yet we don’t because those in power don’t want to see their power decrease. It’s a serious reason why we might not make it. How do we even begin to take direct action? I really have no clue, this entire planet, life as we know it, is entirely fucked if we don’t do something soon. The US government gave billions to implement charging infrastructure and the corps did jack SHIT with it, the government has become the corps fuck pig, bent over dishing out money while getting fucked.
EVs are garbage anyways. The only way to actually save anything is to migrate most of the commonly occurring transportation to public electric systems like trains.
EVs are made in a non sustainable manner by raping the earth for the last scraps of rare earth materials, they’re hardly the answer
Technology isn’t going to save humanity. Greatly reducing population size by limiting reproduction is the only chance for a long future for humans. Thats the most direct path, but also at odds with all of our forms of government and economics. China couldt afford to keep doing it and they understand this. Its the same with the earths ecology. We would need a massive enlightening and there are far too many material and lifestyle choices and campaigns to sway people away from our staus quo. Humanity is doomed by human greed and jealousy, it always was. But thats fine, once you come to terms with it, and if you caught it before having kids, its a pretty freeing understanding.
you are wrong, nowhere am I advocating for anything. I’m saying human overpopulation will lead to our doom. This response is why I don’t really care about sustainability anymore. I’m not having kids, feel free to keep your head buried in the sand. Asshat
Nah, we’re not powerless, and we don’t all have to collectively agree. We have so many technologies that have been developed over the past several decades that can help solve this problem. Change is constant, this kind of shit is just another bump in the road.
Shit no dawg. We’ve had loads of chances to fix it, but one half of the political divide actually wants to end the world so they can get raptured and shit cuz they only believe lies. Most of the population is just people doing what they’re supposed to and assuming others are doing the same. Apologies for not joining a radical cell and blowing shit up i guess… short of that, i mean, you can’t even talk about killing the people who need killing in any public forum let alone make a plan for it, and actually doing it would require, you know, snipers and shit, so…
I mean, you’re probably American. Y’all the ones with weapons out the wazoo. If that were useful, somebody would have paired up and done something about it by now. Obviously it’s not, which is good news, cuz it means you can put all that gung-ho rhetoric away and join the rest of us, but i mean yeesh, that was a lot of sound and fury just to signify nothing, nawm sayin?
this kind of shit is just another bump in the road.
I assume you are younger.
I am in my 50s. The risk of this shit was known and tought to children in schools in the 1980s.
Yet at every level. Things have gotten worse. We had solar in the 80s. Less efficient but only about 15% rather then the 20% we see now. But tax payer money in all western democracy. Was still funding oil research not batts wind or solar.
Cars became bigger and less efficient as we watched. GM was known to have destroyed its own ev production pack in the 90s.
Nothing at all was invested in building inferstructure to support other fuel types. Again dispite huge public investment in oil.
And at every 0ossible point. What little that was done was aimed at indeviduals who have the least control. While corperations were allowed to keep expanding there use. Without facing any of the costs for replacement.
Its a bump. But a 40plus year bump built intentionally to slow and limit changes in the way wealth is made.
With so much false science and outright lies from corperations its insane.
Exxon the plastics industry and many other. Behaived much worse the the cigarette industry did before them. And have not had to pay anything for there intentional and informed damage to billions of lives. Where as at least in nations with real health care options. Tobbaco companies have lost lawsuits and paid a fortune since discovery.
Is there a number on the break even point where it’s better for the environment to buy a new EV than to keep driving an old ICE vehicle? I bike most days when I don’t need to buy more than a backpack of groceries or go more than 3 miles. Surely when you consider the carbon cost of refining materials and constructing a whole new vehicle, it doesn’t make sense in most situations for people who drive less than 30 minutes a day on average. This is of course assuming you have a current vehicle, new vehicles should have to be hybrid/EV in the modern era.
I know Toyota is still ragging on EVs because they invested a lot into hydrogen tech and want that to be the next big thing instead. But I didn’t know Honda, Mazda and Suzuki also under-invested.
It isn’t about development investment. It’s about engines. Engines have long tail after sales profits from maintenance and parts. It’s why Toyota recently unveiled their ammonia fueled engine and declared electric vehicles are dead. Electric engines remove a ton of after sales profits in the form of servicing, spare parts and upgrades.
It is great tech, but there are serious downsides too.
storage and handling: Hydrogen is a tiny atom, so it leaks like nobody’s business. Even liquid hydrogen is terribly low-density which makes pretty much a hard limit on storage density, unlike battery tech which can at least hypothetically dramatically improve. Pressure vessels suck. They have to be crazy sturdy and roughly spherical which places major design limitations on vehicles that use them.
distribution: EVs can limp by on sparse fast charging stations and home charging while better infrastructure builds out. Electrical supply is already ubiquitous. Who’s going to want a hydrogen vehicle (which you can absolutely already buy, nobody’s stopping you in the US at least) with so few fueling options? The upfront investment to bootstrap a market with hydrogen stations to the point of even competing with crappy EV charging is enormous.
no onboard energy recovery: Regenerative braking is an incredible benefit on its own.
industry synergy: EV manufacture benefits from tons of other industries investing in battery tech. The tide lifts all boats.
There are solutions as with any tech, but the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs. The least worst option tends to win.
I don’t have a good understanding of the storage and handling aspect, other than to say I think most of the leakage is from embrittlement, for which the primary defense is ceramic coatings, or periodically baking the pressure vessel. That is to say it seems like a manageable problem. Design limitations are also manageable IMO. Ok it’s unfortunate it can’t be made into any shape like batteries but it’s also not significantly worse than a fuel tank.
For distribution, of course there’s no network if no one is driving hydrogen cars. It’s not that much of a leap to imagine that gas stations will start selling hydrogen surely.
Regenerative braking is possible for HEVs. The Toyota Mirai has it.
I don’t really follow you with industry synergy. Like people are using batteries so batteries are best? What if we hit peak Lithium (or China puts the squeeze on)? In that case it would be better to have an alternative up your sleeve.
the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs.
That may be your opinion but I’m not convinced. Japan and Australia are going all in on Hydrogen. I don’t know much about this, but it seems like there’s plenty of smart people who believe it’s viable enough to invest entire countries economic futures on.
None of the points you make are wrong, it’s just a lot more uphill for hydrogen looking at the total picture. With almost every issue there is a way forward for hydrogen, but EVs are already significantly farther along the curve. It’s hard to overcome that kind of snowballing. Only time will tell!
It probably has to do with some of the engineering problems with containing hydrogen.
It definitely has a lot to do with influential people bandwagoning onto Elon Musk et al. trashing EVs
“Oh we couldn’t possibly make an electric vehicle because there’s nowhere to recharge it”
There are problems storing hydrogen but we’ve been working on mitigating those problems.
Australia has $230b worth of hydrogen projects on the board. Do you think no one involved in any of those projects has realised that it’s not possible to store hydrogen?
Do you think no one involved in any of those projects has realised that it’s not possible to store hydrogen?
You say that as if it is completely ridiculous but have you seen how many companies jumped onto impractical technologies like the hyperloop or self-driving cars or even replacing half their workforce with LLM-based AIs?
No I’m not thinking about that.
I’m just trying to reason between public sentiment and over here, trying to say that public sentiment has less to do with actual technical viability and more to do with random comments from influential people.
There are actually, many directions in which people are trying to find ways to make the H2 storage viable for specific applications…
I’ll layer on to the other replies which are spot on…
One reason I’ve soured on hydrogen is that it’s overall much less efficient than battery as an energy storage mechanism.
This is a really in depth article about a study that found that “well to wheel” efficiency of battery EVs was 70-80% and with hydrogen it’s 25-30%.
I was initially excited about hydrogen as energy storage for renewable sources, but battery tech has improved and is improving.
Also, one of the major advantages of a BEV for me is the ability to charge at home, possibly from energy generated by my own panels. Even if there were solutions for me to generate my own hydrogen, I’d rather lose 20-30% of that energy with a BEV than lose 70-75% with a FCEV.
I’ve provided a rebuttal for the other replies which you might find interesting.
In a scenario where you’re considering using roof-top solar to produce hydrogen for your car then yes, the inefficiency of cracking hydrogen from water makes it unappealing.
The thing is, I don’t think most of the world has access to roof-top solar and the portion that does will diminish as population and population density increases.
If you consider for example this project in Western Australia covering 15,000km2 it makes a lot more sense. The land (and associated sun light) is practically free. Hydrogen is a far more cost effective method of energy storage to get the energy from middle-of-nowhere-west-aus to market.
I guess one way to look at it is that hydrogen is a better option if the cost of the solar energy is less than a third of what it would be if you produced it nearby.
Counterpoint, most of the world does not have access to “middle of nowhere” regions with lots of sunlight, that is just Australia and a few places near major deserts.
If only there was some way we could transport energy from these areas of the world with cheap land and plentiful sunlight to those areas where the energy was required.
Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, it’s much cheaper than green hydrogen, so you can guess what people would fuel their hydrogen cars with
Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful, you get less than a third the energy than you would if you went electricity to battery to electricity
It’s really difficult to store and transport, it is very very low density. Being the smallest atom hydrogen can leak from practically any container or pipe, but that doesn’t compare to (2) above
I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time. Toyota are really good at internal combustion engines
Presently yes. It’s a by-product of natural gas production. There hasn’t been much of a market for it. In Australia there’s $230b of green hydrogen production projects on the table. Just one of which in Western Australia is going to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen per year.
Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful,
Yes but electricity transport is very wasteful. There’s plenty of sun in Western Australia, falling in desert areas where land for solar arrays is practically free.
It’s really difficult to store and transport,
There’s problems yes, but the industry believes these are solvable problems. Toyota is the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world. Japan has several other very large vehicle manufacturers. They’re all betting on hydrogen. They’ve invested $2.3b in a hydrogen supply chain which is already shipping hydrogen.
I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time.
Hydrogen doesn’t provide power through “internal combustion”. A hydrogen fuel cell produces energy by running hydrogen over a catalyst which produces water and electrical energy.
Toyota may be cranky about EV’s beating out hydrogen, but they’re the company claiming to have invented some new solid state battery that has an 800 mile range and can charge 80% in ten minutes on a fast charger, which would be huge for the EV market.
The good thing about modern batteries is that in a decade after they are new and are down to 80% capacity, if that’s not enough for you and you want to keep the car, a new battery will be cheaper and/or better
Leaf owners got twice the range from new batteries compared to the car when it was new
The margins are thinner. There’s almost no resale value. Someone might buy a 60k car and eat the payments for a few years, knowing that they can sell it any time for a decent price.
Buying a 60k EV is more like setting your money on fire. The car might be fine, great even, but it just won’t hold it’s value.
This is what I’ve done on my last 2 cars. First was a Leaf that I leased dirt cheap. The second was a used Tesla at more than 1/2 off. I’m looking at a truck now and finding amazing deals on the '23 F150 lightnings. I’d prefer a Rivian and I’m not quite ready to let my Tesla go, but soooooon.
Someday, the deals will be harder to find, but for now take advantage!
Not at 60,000 dollars they don’t. But too bad, between the IRA and the Chinese EV tax the administration is making sure we aren’t ever burdened with EVs cheap enough for mass adoption.
why is that? i don’t think lithium batteries degrade THAT fast?
if the used market had these dirt cheap evs here id probably be considering them. scratch that there is no way to charge them in my country unless you live in a house, or unless you can use regular power outlets hahaha
You can use regular power outlets if you drive less than a couple of hundred kilometres a day. I charge mine on a 15 amp 240V plug and it charges from 30% to full in about 10 hours. I charge about weekly
Japanese carmakers were trying to go with hydrogen fuel and did a big grift on their government to get it subsidized. I think the idea was that Japan would have a national disadvantage with EV production as they don’t have the material base for batteries but they could have an advantage with hydrogen.
Those failed, or course. Now they’re a decade behind - there were only two Japanese EVs sold internationally just a few years ago.
Japan doesn’t have enough electricity. After Fukushima, they lost most of their nuclear. The country is densely populated, and the parts that aren’t populated are covered in forested mountains, which all makes building the required amount of renewables very difficult. So today and in the future, Japan runs on coal and natural gas. So they make cars that run on hydrogen (which is more efficient to create out of their imported natural gas than burning the gas for electricity) and then sell those abroad greenwashed as “but you can produce hydrogen from green electricity!”
First of all EVs do not need that much power. We are talking something like 25% more electricity production for a country like Japan. Then Japan has rather a lot of onshore and even more offshore wind potential. Mountains are a problem, but hardly something which can not be overcome. Solar can easily be installed on roofs and mountains are even less of a problem.
Also really important to say it. Combustion engines in cars are massivly inefficent. So an EV is still better for the climate, even if run with coal electricity. The other factor is that Japans population is falling. So they will need less power over the long term.
Here in Australia I busted someone with a locked Facebook profile who apparently worked at a ford reseller lying about Kias EV9.
He did the whole laugh emoji and called me a stalker, but deleted his message a few minutes later (probably got a call from his employer who I tagged who was probably worried about the legal repercussions). I pointed out it was libel to lie like that
car goes vroom vroom and stick shift goes shift shift is honestly a lot of fun in responsible amounts. it will be a battle to undo the carbrain propaganda in people, including myself.
Actually… Just noticed one talking shit about EV’s who works for Land rover.
But yeah, I’ve realised the same people talking shit about EV’s, tend to be the same people causing issues for everyone… They always have a locked profile (because they troll that much), they’re often anti-vax/anti-science and they’re the kind of toxic a-holes who were buttheads in high school, and continue to be.
I guarantee they also stocked meat and toilet paper during the pandemic, and tend to leave trash when 4wd’ing
They’re referring to how Thomas Edison created the first electric vehicles back in the 1800s. They might have had a future until Ford introduced assembly lines. Then the rest is history.
The EV1 was the first commercial development in the US following the World Wars, but even before then you had solar EVs being made for science and eclectic racing before then. Think of those weirdly shaped cars only made for 1 driver that have solar panels covering the entire body of the car.
Funny thing is that we’re now seeing some commercial (or soon to be commercial) manufacturers add solar panels in the same way. Just look to Hyundai and Aptera.
I remember an early Saturn EV that was never sold, only leased so GM could maintain ownership of them. Even with a limited range, the drivers all loved them for commuting and running errands, and many tried to purchase them outright, which GM refused. Eventually, GM issued a mandatory recall for all the Saturn EVs, mothballed the project, and then they released the Hummer… made me sick even at the time.
Seems kind of spurious to call lobbying sabotage as if the politicians being lobbied are machines and not human beings doing what they’ve been elected to do as nominally bourgeois party members.
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