13 ms·

It was flat-out corporate malpractice that he stuck with the hydrogen strategy for as long as he did. What a waste of time and money, and what an excellent way

It was flat-out corporate malpractice that he stuck with the hydrogen strategy for as long as he did. What a waste of time and money, and what an excellent way to fall far behind competitors for absolutely no reason. He should've been fired awhile ago.

nvahalik 4y ago
> fall far behind competitors Toyota is one of the most trusted brands across the world. Their cars have extremely high resale value and are generally known to have long usable lifespans. Hydrogen issue aside, they are (at least currently) not 'far behind' their competitors.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  My speculative hot take on the reason that Toyota did not jump on the EV bandwagon and stuck with PHEV/Hydrogen is that much of it's operations are financed indirectly via low cost Japanese bank loans encouraged by Japanese government. These loans probably have an underlying perhaps unspoken component which nudges them toward business models which employ Japanese workers. The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries. Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over. Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies. VW and Tesla/US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) or had home court advantage and government support (Tesla/US car brands) to finance the US EV networks. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry and had less to lose on ICE than the Japanese incumbents. There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.
  - jaybeavers 4y ago
    While this is a common refrain, as driver on my 3rd EV “charging network needed” a bad, bad misunderstanding propagated by people who dont drive EVs. I charge my EV at home. I’ve charged my EV on someone elses charge (because i needed it, not because I got a better parking space) maybe twice since i moved to an EV with a 180 mile range. Heck, even with my “first gen” EV with a 63 mile range, I charged at home 95ish percent of the time, and those days are behind us now. $2k to run a 240v external outlet, $500 for a charge station, and you’re set. Apartment dwellers still have issues, but thats simply because govmt/demand hasnt insisted yet.
  - Corrado 4y ago
    > The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries. This could be solved today by using Tesla's Supercharging network, or at least their NACS[0] connector in the North American market. I know that auto makers don't want to rely on each other for _reasons_ but siding with Tesla would give them an instant charging network and completely solve the problem in one go. [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-standard https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...
    - somethoughts 4y ago
      Interesting - yes going forward now that they seem committed to EV. That would be a pretty unique partnership - and require a lot of trust on the part of Toyota.
- readonthegoapp 4y ago
  I think of a car company- except tesla - to be like a massive container ship or similar Think Titanic I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric' Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  I'm talking about falling far behind competitors in EVs. Which they have. EVs are the cars of the future, and they're flailing around wasting time on hydrogen instead.
  - tibu 4y ago
    Hydrogen fueled cars are also electric. They are not that far.
    - CydeWeys 4y ago
      No way. Hydrogen cars are chemical. The trickiest part about an EV is the battery pack, and hydrogen cars don't have 'em. Plus all that investment into hydrogen fuel cells is 100% non-transferrable.
      - _hypx 4y ago
        This is totally incorrect. A fuel cell is a type of electrochemical cell. A fuel cell car has an electric motor just like a conventional EV. We often use the terms “BEV” and “FCEV” to differentiate them.
      - bryanlarsen 4y ago
        Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles have a large battery, larger than the ones in a Prius.
        nradov 4y ago
        The Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle has a small battery, only 1.2 kWh. https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023/features/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023/features/
        theshrike79 4y ago
        And story has it the small battery is the reason for the pathetic performance. (9.1 seconds 0-60 speed, which is minivan levels). The fuel cell can't produce electricity fast enough to power the engines for proper acceleration and the battery doesn't have enough buffer.
- dymk 4y ago
  [flagged]
- pokerhobo 4y ago
  Their bz4x shows har far behind they are (not to mention wheels that fall off)
- ElijahLynn 4y ago
  I think Toyota is making a Solid-State Battery too, and putting millions into it. This means it won't ever explode, is what I gathered when I read about it.
_hypx 4y ago
EVs are not a sustainable solution. It is just replacing a dependency on fossil fuels with battery related metals. All car companies will shift away from the EV and towards hydrogen at some point. The dumbest idea is thinking that nothing comes after battery cars.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  You mean like high density LFP/LMFP that is coming into mass production this year at 200-230 wh/kg? (aka the 350-400+ mile car) That require no cobalt/nickel? You mean like sodium ion batteries that are coming into mass production this year at 150 wh/kg? (aka the 200-300 mile car) That don't even require lithium? You mean like Lithium Sulfur batteries that are poised in five years to double or triple battery density? Or you mean like the Sodium Sulfur batteries that will probably come a year or two after that which similarly double/triple NMC capacity but only require sodium and sulfur? Your take is ten years old. High density LFP and good-enough density sodium ion is going to deliver a comprehensively cheaper car drivetrain than ICEs can deliver, and each year will only be worse and worse news for ICEs. I would predict by 2030 there will be 600 mile range EVs (real world, not WLTP) whose drivetrain component cost is 1/2 of an ICE. We'll have to see what comes out of Toyota. They have the DNA of execution, efficiency, and engineering. It's hard to see if it is "too late", because EV transition is such a massive investment in vertically integrated manufacturing at this point, while carmakers outside of Tesla are so OEM focused. We'll see. I had kind of assumed that Toyota would be asleep at the switch and a joke for another 2-3 years, this is a surprising development. The fact they were pushing hydrogen still last year in public and poo-pooing EVs, and given the ossification and malaise of large Japanese corporations, I assumed it would be status quo until substantial market share was lost. Is this activist investors again, like BMW, VW, etc? Is that even a thing in Japanese megacorps?
  - _hypx 4y ago
    You do realize that hydrogen has an effective energy density of ~1,000 Wh/kg? Even with the weight of tanks and fuel cells taken into account. Meanwhile, most of your listed battery chemistries haven’t been invented yet and may never exist.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
While Toyota absolutely should have seen the writing on the wall years ago, it's not a problem that was limited to Toyota. The entire nation of Japan and every major tech company therein leapt headfirst into the idea of a "Hydrogen society" after the Fukushima disaster. It takes a long time to steer the ship towards the solutions everyone else is settling on when your ship is the size of a country.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Japan has no domestic oil, something they have been keenly aware of since WW2. I think they wanted Hydrogen to be the future so badly because it would remove that disadvantage. Now Japan has to import the batteries, and the fossil fuels to charge them.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    Hydrogen has significant geopolitical advantages for Japan, but it was also very unclear which path was better back then. Even in California we had political darlings like Bloom Energy and fleets of fuel cell buses crawling around city streets. It was only around 2016 or so that battery technology and renewables started to clearly win out and it was too late then to change course.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    The Toyota Mirai and the Tesla Model 3 weigh approximately the same amount and so contain approximately the same amount of imported material. Switching to Hydrogen does not reduce the amount of raw material imports compared to switching to battery electric vehicles.
  - midoridensha 4y ago
    What does domestic oil have to do with anything? Japan doesn't have domestic natgas either AFAIK, and you need that to make hydrogen unless you make it from electrolysis of water, which needs lots of electricity, which usually comes from fossil fuels too. Hydrogen had no way of removing any disadvantage for them. It was just something they were ahead in and thought they could push on the world as the replacement for gasoline, and profit in the process.
AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Unbelievable that Toyota had the hybrid, along with Honda in goddamn 1997. Five years later there should have been huge numbers of hybrids, and the first plug-in hybrids. Ten years later their entire lineup should have been plugin hybrid capable. When Tesla released the Model S, they should have been heads down with a competitor. The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me. The fact that Toyota is among the last to do it is breathtakingly dumb. When Tesla released the Model S, Toyota should have had, at a minimum, an effective 40 mile range PHEV with all electric mode, and by 2020, should have had options for 50/100 mile hybrids, which make PHEV hybids effectively full EVs for 95% of consumer driving. The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of. Toyota is full of good engineers still, and are effectively the largest car company in terms of volume production (I know VW may technically be larger, but they seem more balkanized in brands and acquisitions). Toyota likely could close by simply partner-acquiring one of the bigger Chinese EV makers and battery companies (although there is that wee little China-Japan historical hatred).
- legitster 4y ago
  > The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of. The hydrogen was generated from nuclear power. They have a lot more of these sources than they do for a lithium ion supply chain.
- dzhiurgis 4y ago
  > The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me. I think every company did back on the envelope calculation and in about 10seconds realised they won’t ever have the battery supply to satisfy even 10% of their sales for decades. Only Tesla managed to convince Panasonic to build new factories.

nvahalik 4y ago

> fall far behind competitors Toyota is one of the most trusted brands across the world. Their cars have extremely high resale value and are generally known to have long usable lifespans. Hydrogen issue aside, they are (at least currently) not 'far behind' their competitors.

somethoughts 4y ago
My speculative hot take on the reason that Toyota did not jump on the EV bandwagon and stuck with PHEV/Hydrogen is that much of it's operations are financed indirectly via low cost Japanese bank loans encouraged by Japanese government. These loans probably have an underlying perhaps unspoken component which nudges them toward business models which employ Japanese workers. The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries. Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over. Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies. VW and Tesla/US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) or had home court advantage and government support (Tesla/US car brands) to finance the US EV networks. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry and had less to lose on ICE than the Japanese incumbents. There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.
- jaybeavers 4y ago
  While this is a common refrain, as driver on my 3rd EV “charging network needed” a bad, bad misunderstanding propagated by people who dont drive EVs. I charge my EV at home. I’ve charged my EV on someone elses charge (because i needed it, not because I got a better parking space) maybe twice since i moved to an EV with a 180 mile range. Heck, even with my “first gen” EV with a 63 mile range, I charged at home 95ish percent of the time, and those days are behind us now. $2k to run a 240v external outlet, $500 for a charge station, and you’re set. Apartment dwellers still have issues, but thats simply because govmt/demand hasnt insisted yet.
- Corrado 4y ago
  > The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries. This could be solved today by using Tesla's Supercharging network, or at least their NACS[0] connector in the North American market. I know that auto makers don't want to rely on each other for _reasons_ but siding with Tesla would give them an instant charging network and completely solve the problem in one go. [0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-standard https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...
  - somethoughts 4y ago
    Interesting - yes going forward now that they seem committed to EV. That would be a pretty unique partnership - and require a lot of trust on the part of Toyota.
readonthegoapp 4y ago
I think of a car company- except tesla - to be like a massive container ship or similar Think Titanic I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric' Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy
CydeWeys 4y ago
I'm talking about falling far behind competitors in EVs. Which they have. EVs are the cars of the future, and they're flailing around wasting time on hydrogen instead.
- tibu 4y ago
  Hydrogen fueled cars are also electric. They are not that far.
  - CydeWeys 4y ago
    No way. Hydrogen cars are chemical. The trickiest part about an EV is the battery pack, and hydrogen cars don't have 'em. Plus all that investment into hydrogen fuel cells is 100% non-transferrable.
    - _hypx 4y ago
      This is totally incorrect. A fuel cell is a type of electrochemical cell. A fuel cell car has an electric motor just like a conventional EV. We often use the terms “BEV” and “FCEV” to differentiate them.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles have a large battery, larger than the ones in a Prius.
      - nradov 4y ago
        The Toyota Mirai fuel cell vehicle has a small battery, only 1.2 kWh. https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023/features/ https://www.toyota.com/mirai/2023/features/
        theshrike79 4y ago
        And story has it the small battery is the reason for the pathetic performance. (9.1 seconds 0-60 speed, which is minivan levels). The fuel cell can't produce electricity fast enough to power the engines for proper acceleration and the battery doesn't have enough buffer.
dymk 4y ago
[flagged]
pokerhobo 4y ago
Their bz4x shows har far behind they are (not to mention wheels that fall off)
ElijahLynn 4y ago
I think Toyota is making a Solid-State Battery too, and putting millions into it. This means it won't ever explode, is what I gathered when I read about it.

_hypx 4y ago

EVs are not a sustainable solution. It is just replacing a dependency on fossil fuels with battery related metals. All car companies will shift away from the EV and towards hydrogen at some point. The dumbest idea is thinking that nothing comes after battery cars.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
You mean like high density LFP/LMFP that is coming into mass production this year at 200-230 wh/kg? (aka the 350-400+ mile car) That require no cobalt/nickel? You mean like sodium ion batteries that are coming into mass production this year at 150 wh/kg? (aka the 200-300 mile car) That don't even require lithium? You mean like Lithium Sulfur batteries that are poised in five years to double or triple battery density? Or you mean like the Sodium Sulfur batteries that will probably come a year or two after that which similarly double/triple NMC capacity but only require sodium and sulfur? Your take is ten years old. High density LFP and good-enough density sodium ion is going to deliver a comprehensively cheaper car drivetrain than ICEs can deliver, and each year will only be worse and worse news for ICEs. I would predict by 2030 there will be 600 mile range EVs (real world, not WLTP) whose drivetrain component cost is 1/2 of an ICE. We'll have to see what comes out of Toyota. They have the DNA of execution, efficiency, and engineering. It's hard to see if it is "too late", because EV transition is such a massive investment in vertically integrated manufacturing at this point, while carmakers outside of Tesla are so OEM focused. We'll see. I had kind of assumed that Toyota would be asleep at the switch and a joke for another 2-3 years, this is a surprising development. The fact they were pushing hydrogen still last year in public and poo-pooing EVs, and given the ossification and malaise of large Japanese corporations, I assumed it would be status quo until substantial market share was lost. Is this activist investors again, like BMW, VW, etc? Is that even a thing in Japanese megacorps?
- _hypx 4y ago
  You do realize that hydrogen has an effective energy density of ~1,000 Wh/kg? Even with the weight of tanks and fuel cells taken into account. Meanwhile, most of your listed battery chemistries haven’t been invented yet and may never exist.

AlotOfReading 4y ago

While Toyota absolutely should have seen the writing on the wall years ago, it's not a problem that was limited to Toyota. The entire nation of Japan and every major tech company therein leapt headfirst into the idea of a "Hydrogen society" after the Fukushima disaster. It takes a long time to steer the ship towards the solutions everyone else is settling on when your ship is the size of a country.

dahfizz 4y ago
Japan has no domestic oil, something they have been keenly aware of since WW2. I think they wanted Hydrogen to be the future so badly because it would remove that disadvantage. Now Japan has to import the batteries, and the fossil fuels to charge them.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  Hydrogen has significant geopolitical advantages for Japan, but it was also very unclear which path was better back then. Even in California we had political darlings like Bloom Energy and fleets of fuel cell buses crawling around city streets. It was only around 2016 or so that battery technology and renewables started to clearly win out and it was too late then to change course.
- bryanlarsen 4y ago
  The Toyota Mirai and the Tesla Model 3 weigh approximately the same amount and so contain approximately the same amount of imported material. Switching to Hydrogen does not reduce the amount of raw material imports compared to switching to battery electric vehicles.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  What does domestic oil have to do with anything? Japan doesn't have domestic natgas either AFAIK, and you need that to make hydrogen unless you make it from electrolysis of water, which needs lots of electricity, which usually comes from fossil fuels too. Hydrogen had no way of removing any disadvantage for them. It was just something they were ahead in and thought they could push on the world as the replacement for gasoline, and profit in the process.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago

Unbelievable that Toyota had the hybrid, along with Honda in goddamn 1997. Five years later there should have been huge numbers of hybrids, and the first plug-in hybrids. Ten years later their entire lineup should have been plugin hybrid capable. When Tesla released the Model S, they should have been heads down with a competitor. The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me. The fact that Toyota is among the last to do it is breathtakingly dumb. When Tesla released the Model S, Toyota should have had, at a minimum, an effective 40 mile range PHEV with all electric mode, and by 2020, should have had options for 50/100 mile hybrids, which make PHEV hybids effectively full EVs for 95% of consumer driving. The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of. Toyota is full of good engineers still, and are effectively the largest car company in terms of volume production (I know VW may technically be larger, but they seem more balkanized in brands and acquisitions). Toyota likely could close by simply partner-acquiring one of the bigger Chinese EV makers and battery companies (although there is that wee little China-Japan historical hatred).

legitster 4y ago
> The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of. The hydrogen was generated from nuclear power. They have a lot more of these sources than they do for a lithium ion supply chain.
dzhiurgis 4y ago
> The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me. I think every company did back on the envelope calculation and in about 10seconds realised they won’t ever have the battery supply to satisfy even 10% of their sales for decades. Only Tesla managed to convince Panasonic to build new factories.