this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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I know about 7y ago everyone was salivating at the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles.
I'll be very interested to see how well it works in practice...
with refill stations every 50-100Km, this could work extremely well. the current mirai has 700Km of range. you could even power standard combustion engines with very little modification. mike copeland built 2 muscle cars that run perfectly on hydrogen.
The us has 57 hydrogen fueling stations. By contrast, there are 59,340 public electric charging stations in the us.
If there were stations you could drive a hydrogen car. But there just aren't. And there doesn't seem to be anyone planning to build tens of thousands of these stations any time soon.
Maybe they won't start with the US then. There are countries with highest population density and smaller surface closer to home for Toyota.
Do you mean countries like Indonesia?
How about Japan? 😊
I dunno, man. Indonesia is pretty close to Toyota's HQ.
i heard toyota might have plans for that. at least they understand that someone needs to build them.
If they had plans to invest in hydrogen infrastructure on the scale needed to make hydrogen cars viable, they would have made an announcement about it. There are over 100,00 gas stations in the US. To make hydrogen vehicles viable toyota would need to be investing in hydrogen infrastructure at that scale. And they would be building these stations alone. No other company is investing in hydrogen infrastructure. Shell is pulling out of the hydrogen fuel station market entirely, and even so there are only stations in two states specifically because of government incentives.
Hydrogen cars are going nowhere. Toyota's continued fluff about the Mirai is PR to distract from the fact that Toyota is doing everything they can to avoid making zero emission cars.
What's to stop them just having a bowser for it in a traditional station like they already do with LPG powered cars today?
Yep, I have no clue why so many seem to hate hydrogen ICE motors. They're the future, not batteries that take hours to charge, and have terrible distance under load and need to be replaced every 5ish years. They're fine for the city, but any other distance/hauling they're terrible
Most new EVs have almost as much range as a typical gasoline equivalent, and some can get hundreds of miles of range out of 20 minutes on a DC fast changer. Plus the batteries get an estimated 15-20 years of service, or somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 miles. That’s around as many miles as a gasoline engine will get before the problems begin piling up.
The issue in my eyes, and my number one complaint with this massive E.V. push (for many years now) is the insane environmental impact of lithium mining and the very short termed planning of just going hard on batteries (without spending more time and money on better battery tech [Toyota actually has that new solid state battery I'm very hopeful for, and we've been working on polymer batteries for decades]) we will waste a very precious earth material we WILL NEED in the future, and you never ever hear any of the politicians or CEOs talk about how dirty lithium mining and processing is because almost all of it happens outside the countries leading this push (thus, not their problem).
Not saying we shouldn't be moving away from ICE, it's that I feel our current approach is incredibly short sighted, and will have far reaching impacts into future generations and I feel as though we may even cause more damage than help in our current approach
we need to move away from fossil fuels, thats the important part. if we can produce the fuel without using up any (immediately) finite resource, that'd be awesome. i'm okay with electric cars existing, but we're still in the "figuring it out" stage of CO2-neutral vehicles.
Is there any proof of this? Most are rated for x miles but in reality get half of that, and fast charging right now unless you're in the city is non existent for the majority of the USA.