Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.
It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel).
And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule.
Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car.
Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible?
If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen.
As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose.
Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
This adds up to: 0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency.
With an electric battery car. Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up.
So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.
You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.
It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.
Meanwhile, no one is looking at compromise solutions. Something like a PHEV or even a plug-in FCEV would solve a lot of these complaints right away. There are ways around these issues even in the real world.
Finally, it's not like 10 years is that long in the car industry. If FCEVs end up matching BEVs in efficiency in 10 years, that's means we're pretty much at the verge of FCEVs taking over.
Now this is propaganda.
You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should focus on what will make sense.
It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity.
Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame.
Or, you just use electricity.
In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually.
And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.
How is that different from charging a battery at a super charger? Because it can be delivered via more expensive pipeline or trucks rather than cheaper wires? Heck, it doesn't even store well, you need to keep those tanks cold so the hydrogen stays compressed, you are going to be using more electricity for that.
A pipeline is cheaper than a wire at moving energy around. About 10x cheaper in fact. This is just another example of BEV FUD. BEV companies just make shit up to demonization the competition, and often times the exact opposite is true.
Again, whether or not your dead doesn’t change the fact that the tank will explode, not just burn.
The system as a whole is not leak-proof. All you need is a leak in a contained area, like a garage.
[0]: https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/exclusive-hydrogen...
In the latter case I sympathize; I feel the same about the failure of swappable-battery tech, which would have given us the best of both worlds. Charge at the point of generation or at least at a point of efficient distribution, deploy instantly at the point of use.
And either way, I envy your ability to generate an enormous quantity of posts without getting rate-limited.
And FYI, the anti-hydrogen argument is a generic anti-green, anti—progress viewpoint. It is easily described as outright Ludditism. It’s pretty obvious the critics are totally wrong, and likely just Tesla fanboys or investors.
Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and eventually has to be abandoned.
Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it.
Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers.
But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.
Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time.
The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble.
Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.