This deliberately misguiding title is as myopic as the news talking about Bitcoin “crashes”.
Ten years ago, the EV auto market share was under 1% and Bitcoin was worth 320 bucks.
Ten years later, 10% of cars are EVs, 30% of the car market will be pure EVs, more will be hybrids, bitcoin is worth 62,000 dollars.
2024 headlines: Bitcoin crashes again and Toyota won’t waste money on EVs.
They literally call their hydrogen car the future. Toyota has been trying, and is still avoiding making purely electric vehicles.
Of all their models, Toyota only sells one EV in the US. Your aspirational assumptions about Toyota are nothing more than that.
Hydrogen is ‘pure’ electric.
The issue with hydrogen is that it can be colours other than green. Green hydrogen is used to store the excess from renewables, and is more like a battery than a fuel. Other colours use fossil fuel, sometimes with a desperate plea to believe that they will actually capture the CO2 produced in making it.
Green hydrogen is (potentially) a fantastic solution for transit, especially heavy transit… The jury is still out for cars but Toyota is one of the few taking that route and it’s important. Hydrogen is much lighter than batteries and refuelling is similar to petrol cars (ie quick).
The problem to be solved is leaks. More than about 5% leakage cancels out the benefits because hydrogen makes methane hang around for longer.
Do you think 2030 is 10 years away? In 10 years, it will be 2034 when most countries will require 100% of new vehicles to not have fossil fuel ICEs.
They are still stupidly pushing for hydrogen electric vehicles. That is just a BEV with an additional step.
Why are you upset about fcevs? If hydrogen works out, great, it’s a sustainable vehicle with tremendous potential.
If not and Toyota switches to a larger BEV catalogue, great, they’re sustainable vehicles with tremendous potential.
the problem most car manufacturers have is they focus too much on the car and not enough on the infrastructure. theres a big reason why Tesla became popular and one of its major reasons was its charging network, and why its NACS standard is going to eventually be the standard for car chargers overtime, despite all other conpanies initially supporting the open standard. None of them wanted to bite the bullet and equally invest into the infrastructure to charge. Hydrogen has the same exact problem, but even fewer players so there’s even less players to take a shot at that investment.
The numbers do not work for FCEVs unless fossil fuels are used which is what 100% of the hydrogen in the current supply line depends on. I know people like to think that we can just use the excess energy from wind farms or solar but that is nowhere near a viable solution.
Research into hydrogen vehicles is fine but it is a vast waste of resources for consumer vehicles. They have promise in other types of vehicles but it is silly to slow down investment in consumer BEVs to push for consumer FCEVs.
Let’s turn clean water — something already getting difficult to come by — into fuel! What could go wrong?
