Akio Toyoda, Toyota Motor’s chairman, has never been a huge fan of battery electric vehicles. Last October, as global sales of EVs started to slow down amid macroeconomic uncertainty, Toyoda crowed that people are “finally seeing reality” on EVs. Now, the auto executive is doubling down on his bearish forecast, boldly predicting that just three in 10 cars on the road will be powered by a battery.
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“The enemy is CO2,” Toyoda said, proposing a “multi-pathway approach” that doesn’t rely on any one type of vehicle. “Customers, not regulations or politics” should make the decision on what path to rely on, he said.
The auto executive estimated that around a billion people still live in areas without electricity, which limits the appeal of a battery electric vehicle. Toyoda estimated that fully electric cars will only capture 30% of the market, with the remainder taken up by hybrids or vehicles that use hydrogen technology.
No it isn’t. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s much harder to wire up millions of charging stations with the necessary amount of power, than to deal with high pressure gas. We’ve just normalized the danger of high-voltage electricity. In reality, this is just as safe if not more so, and a lot easier to pull off.
You can plug an EV into an outlet in your garage. No way could hydrogen be easier than that.
You have to have a garage to begin with. People have created a distorted grasp of what infrastructure even is.
Two thirds of Americans have a garage. Roughly zero can refuel hydrogen cells at home.
Erm, no buddy. Everyone’s entitled to their incorrect opinion, and this one’s a doozy.
How much big of a tank of H2 do you need to effectively equal the energy capacity of a lithium ion pack? If the tank needs to be reasonably sized, how high is the pressure? How do you ensure hydrogen embrittlement isn’t a problem on both the tanks and the transport pipes/storage tanks? How does pressure correlate with exfiltration?
Flying wires is a walk in the park, especially competitively.
A 700 bar tank will store more than energy than a similarly sized li-ion battery.
As an energy storage system for cars, the problem is already solved. People are just repeating the same anti-progress rhetoric that was used against battery cars.
