Toyota, Honda, Nissan and other Japanese automakers are serious about rolling out battery electric vehicles to catch up with the world’s frontrunners like Tesla and BYD
“We love battery EVs.”
Takero Kato, the executive in charge of electric vehicles at Toyota, said that not once, but twice, to emphasize what he considers the message at this year’s Tokyo auto show.
It’s a message ringing clear at the Tokyo Mobility Show, which will run through Nov. 5 at Tokyo Big Sight hall and where battery-powered electric vehicles are the star at practically every booth.
having fuel truck networks, fueling stations, etc. continue to exist, would make hydrogen likely less disruptive to the existing model
That’s crazy:
— US gas 140,000 EV chargers and it’s nowhere near enough, even with most charging fine at home
— US had 57 places to fuel hydrogen, all in California
— we don’t even have a cost effective way to produce green hydrogen yet, most will continue to come from fossil fuels for decades
And you think it’s cheaper and easier to build entire industries across the US and worldwide, for a fuel source still dependent on fossil fuels, at a cost probably in the trillions of dollars? And it’s desirable to save large oil companies trying to hold desperately to their existing business?
Millions of people will never have the option to charge at home. The problem with BEVs is that you need tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of charging stations. That is really expensive and likely unfeasible.
Hydrogen stations will basically replace gas stations, sometimes on the very same piece of property. That makes a replacement infrastructure very straightforward to deploy. It makes more sense than having charging stations everywhere. People are just angry that their favored idea isn’t working out, so they attack this idea.
At home charging will replace entire toxic polluting industries, including tens of thousands of gas stations, distributors, storage , transportation, refining, etc, beyond all the mining related activities. I will be very happy to never have to visit a local gas station again: just like my phone, plug it in at night and it lasts me a normal days activities. Just like my phone, I’ll occasionally need to top off during a road trip
There’s no reason people in apartments and condos can’t do the same, it’s just more complex to align competing interests on who pays vs who benefits
Its only people who park on the street who don’t yet have a good answer, and there are several possibilities we need to develop, but level 1 or 2 chargers are cheap, so no big deal if we need millions of destination chargers
FYI - I guess mine is a level 2 charger and uses similar power to my stove or air conditioner. It can be configured as a set of up to 6 to intelligently share limited power plus can be configured to bill whoever uses it, to pay for my electricity, although I’ll probably just whitelist only my vehicle so no one else can run up my power bill. It is on order for about $500 and wiring costs. It may be expensive but this is not the huge deal you’re making it out to be
While we do need hydrogen for things batteries can’t scale to, the many fewer, more industrial uses mean we don’t have to recreate those entire industries. Good riddance
Then how do you travel long distances? You still need some kind of public charging station, which basically recreates the gas station experience.
The solution just to power everything with hydrogen. It solves all use cases with a single solution. And it also replaces the need to have giant mining and manufacturing industries for the batteries. It is the fundamentally better solution.
