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Electric vehicles had been put on the path of inevitability by the Toyota Prius over a decade before Tesla got anything on the road (well I say this fairly ofte
by Avshalom 10y ago
Electric vehicles had been put on the path of inevitability by the Toyota Prius over a decade before Tesla got anything on the road (well I say this fairly often but: in reality they've always been on the path of inevitability, automakers have been trying the electric car every decade or so since the birth of the car)
- yardie 10y agoAnd yet Toyota sees the future not in electric cars but in hydrogen fuel cells. Toyota does not see the future in electric vehicles. Their hybrids are a good stopgap but they aren't into EVs at the moment. If you look at their history they went from full electric (ie. Rav4 EV) to hybrids to fuel cells.
- ssmoot 10y agoThat really depends on the fuel cell doesn't it?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- hackuser 10y ago> Toyota sees the future not in electric cars but in hydrogen fuel cells. Aren't the fuel cells just an alternative to batteries for storing electricity in an electric car?
- Cshelton 10y agoHydrogen fuel cells are used as a way to generate clean electricity, which then is used to recharge the battery whenever it is needed. Basically eliminating "range fears" to some extent. However I think this period of using fuel cells will be short lived. <10 years. But they will be everywhere in the mean time. 10 years from now I see batteries with capitcities of 4x greater than we have today with at least 2x recharging time. So an EV could go 1,200 miles on a single charge, and recharge fully in roughly an hour or two. That would instantly make all fuel cells pointless
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoI am not as optimistic as you that 4x improvements are possible, but I certainly hope you're right! We'll also need major improvements in electricity generation and distribution. To charge a battery of ~300 kWh in roughly an hour, even over an industrial supply like three-phase 480V AC, would require in excess of 600 amps! That's more than three times the maximum current a large, modern house can draw at 240V, and requires conductors over 1000 kcmil, or more than 1" diameter copper. On an ordinary 15A, 120 VAC circuit, it would take an entire week to charge the car. That might make fuel cells attractive. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, and never underestimate the energy transmission potential of a supertanker or freight train full of oil or hydrogen.
- andromeduck 10y agoAren't Toyota's fuel cell cars basically plug in hybrids that use hydrogen instead of petrol?
- myrryr 10y agoKodak didn't want to do non film cameras.
- bydo 10y agoKodak made more money selling film (and paper, developer, fixer, and so on) than from selling cameras. Toyota doesn't sell gasoline.
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoJapan is betting heavily on hydrogen, presumably because of concerns that they won't be able to generate enough electric power if they went all EV. And importing electricity would be geopolitically very risky (it would have to be from China or Russia), but liquid hydrogen they can ship in from close allies such as Australia.
- lsaferite 10y agoHow on earth would you import electricity to Japan? Honest question. String wires over the Korea Strait? Undersea cables? The shortest distance from Korea to the Japanese island at the mid-point is 50km and from there to the mainland is even more (by eyeball).
- semi-extrinsic 10y agoThat's cakewalk. The NorNed 700 MW HVDC undersea cable, finished in 2008, is 580 km. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed Edit: the engineering would be relatively easy, but the politics are the problem.
- lsaferite 10y agoWow, that's impressive. ~450kV is hard to imagine.