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Comment by entropicgravity | Hacker News Reader

Toyota and its fellow Japanese car makers were betting the bank on hydrogen based green cars. This was wishful thinking but they had a reason. A regular ICE car produces several post sales revenue streams. For example, regular oil changes, brake replacements, engine issues and etc. EV's produce almost none of these ongoing revenue streams and therefor the ongoing value for Toyota would drop significantly.

With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance. It would require complex 'hydrogen stations' to refuel. If there's no battery then brakes will continue to wear out on schedule. In short, everything a ICE car offers except the CO2.

It's not surprising that this is the future that Toyota had its eyes on for way too long. Group think. Now they're playing catch up and they're far behind.

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I don't believe this maintenance argument, maintenance on EVs is insanely more expensive when it comes to battery replacements. Replacing an entire engine on the average sedan is an insanely cheaper option. Even the Nissan Leaf's engine replacement is like 14k $, that's the cost of a new car ffs.

By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today. Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.

There has been no evidence of this, not to mention people just get cars with even bigger batteries. It is likely to always be an expensive replacement problem.

How many times an ICE has its engine replaced on average?

The capacity retention of a Tesla battery from a decade ago plateau at 88% after 200,000 miles. That's for nickel-based battery, and most OEMs are switching to iron-based (LFP) which degrade even less.

I bet that zero EV will have to replace their battery in the near future.

ICEs can be fixed. It's pretty rare to have a truly dead ICE. For non-luxury cars, even a replacement is no big deal.

Zero is a pretty low number. A lot of them will have to be replaced. Especially for commercial vehicles where they often drive 100k miles every year.

This has already happened with Nissan Leaf. It debuted with 24kWh, and now you get 40kWh for the same price, and there's 60kWh option.

>> By the time your battery needs replacement it will cost a fraction of what it costs today<<

There is absolutely no guarantee that it would be the case. The cost of batteries is largely determined by raw materials such as lithium, nickel, etc, and the demand for those minerals will exceed that of supply for some foreseeable time -- at least not until 2030.

>> Battery prices have been falling fast as the volume production of these batteries have scaled up.<<

Yeah, that's only if you get a brand different battery with improved energy density and chemistry. Your EV is stuck with the same old efficient and expensive batteries from the date/year of purchase.

> With hydrogen based car though it's an almost exact copy of the ICE car. It's got a big, hot finicky fuel cell under the hood that requires ongoing highly qualified maintenance.

That's utter bullshit. A fuel cell is literally an electrochemical system no different than a battery.

A fuel cell is not a closed system, a battery is. A fuel cell need a supply of hydrogen (obvious) and oxygen from the air and in return it produces heat, water, and some electricity (with pretty terrible efficiency). A battery produces electricity and heat (depending on load).

That's widely inaccurate. The fundamental advantage of an electrochemical system is that you are no longer limited by Carnot's theorem in the same way as heat engines. As a result, the efficiency of both systems can be the same. Not to mention you don't have to deal with all that heat either, making operation much simpler.

In the end, a fuel cell is basically a metal-air battery, and has the same level of efficiency.

Except it does not have the same efficiency when you compare how many kWh you have to feed into an electrolyzer so that you make 1 kWh of electricity out of the fuel cell in a car.

You cannot get every kWh from renewable energy into a BEV no matter what. The intermittency problem guarantees that a lot of it will be lost or never captured. An idea like hydrogen that lets you store energy for long periods lets you utilize energy that otherwise would be lost. As a result, the full cycle efficiency of a hydrogen car can exceed that of a battery car.

'... lets you store store hydrogen for long periods of time' is not as easy as you suggest. It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time. Hydrogen also leaks easily through metals because the atoms are so small. Consequently very expensive tanks are require to '..store hydrogen for long periods of time...'. It's a near certainty that storing energy for long periods is more effectively done with Megapacks of batteries. A little googling will show that Tesla (and others) are now making a booming business in this technology whereas, to my knowledge, not one substantive hydrogen storage plant has been built to date, because of the problems stated above.

> It's well known that hydrogen makes most (possibly all) metals become brittle over time.

It's not "well known." In fact, this is bullshit. Only some metals have this problem. Even then there are ways of preventing the problem via coatings and the like. Nor is it even necessary, as geological formations can be used to store hydrogen in the same way we store natural gas.

You are simply reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. These are solved or are easily solvable problems.

> As a result, the full cycle efficiency of a hydrogen car can exceed that of a battery car.

No it does not. Efficiency is about energy in at the source versus energy out energy out at the wheels.

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