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> Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteri

> Actually, not really. For one, no serious manufacturer currently even proposes a battery technology if it doesn't meet the most basic of the mentioned criteria. Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose.

CamperBob2 3y ago
Hydrogen could have made sense in an alternate timeline where government and industry cooperated on standardizing form factors for fast tank-swapping... but then, that would have made even more sense for batteries, and it didn't happen. People would whine about not "owning" their hydrogen tanks, just as they do when someone brings up the advantages of swappable batteries.
- _hypx 3y ago
  Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. It probably will just happen via natural progress without any external desire for CO₂ emissions reduction.
  - _aavaa_ 3y ago
    It is not the most logical replacement. It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel). And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule. Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car. Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible? If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Biofuels aren't really a solution. The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen. As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose. Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
      - pineaux 3y ago
        This sounds logical, until you find out that the only viable way (make H2 from electrolysis) is wildly inefficient (75% efficiënt), then compressing/chilling it for transport is only (90%) efficiënt, then converting it to electricity with a fuel cell (max 60% efficiënt), followed by powering an electric motor (95% efficiency). This adds up to: 0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency. With an electric battery car. Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up. So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.
        _hypx 3y ago
        Electrolysis is theoretically up to 100% efficient. So are fuel cells. The whole process is an electrochemical system not much different than what batteries are. You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.
        _aavaa_ 3y ago
        That’s great, but in the real world we care about the actual efficiency. It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    > Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should focus on what will make sense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960
- DoesntMatter22 3y ago
  There is no world where hydrogen would ever work for cars. It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity. Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame. Or, you just use electricity.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    You are repeating pure FUD. This is pretty much what BEV companies want people to believe so that they never consider any alternatives. In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually. And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Car makers like BEVs because (a) no new infrastructure other than electricity which is available almost anywhere already and (b) none of that energy lost to compression or fancy cryogenic compression tanks to keep the hydrogen in the car or at the gas station. Lastly, most people don't want to go from $5/gallon gas to $10/gallon hydrogen.
      - _hypx 3y ago
        Car makers are just following the subsidies and the hype. It is not even a sustainable idea and it will eventually die. Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
_hypx 3y ago
> Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose. Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and eventually has to be abandoned.
- panick21_ 3y ago
  It makes 'sense' according to you and not 99.9% of actual costumers. But you do you.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Then the future is ICE cars because it makes sense to "actual costumers." But that isn't the topic at hand. It is what will make sense, and that can only be hydrogen cars in the long run.
    - panick21_ 3y ago
      ICE market is getting smaller fast and EV market is growing fast. This is a reality. Of course it doesn't happen in a year, but the trend is clear. Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it. Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers. But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.
      - _hypx 3y ago
        EVs are still a tiny niche. The resource requirements will mean it will be a long time before than can grow beyond that. Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time. The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble. Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.

CamperBob2 3y ago

Hydrogen could have made sense in an alternate timeline where government and industry cooperated on standardizing form factors for fast tank-swapping... but then, that would have made even more sense for batteries, and it didn't happen. People would whine about not "owning" their hydrogen tanks, just as they do when someone brings up the advantages of swappable batteries.

_hypx 3y ago
Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. It probably will just happen via natural progress without any external desire for CO₂ emissions reduction.
- _aavaa_ 3y ago
  It is not the most logical replacement. It isn’t the the one with fewest infrastructure changes (that would be biodiesel). And it is the result of stuck about things in terms of the past: we used to power cars by pumping molecules into it, therefore we need another molecule. Most of our green electricity will start as electricity. So it makes more sense to keep it as that and pump it directly into the car. Given the choice, why would people still want to have to take their car to a pump when they can simply charge it at home or at work as much as possible? If my cellphone lasted 5 days without a charge but needed me to go to a special charging station, I would never buy it. I just charge it overnight, or at work, and forget about it.
  - _hypx 3y ago
    Biofuels aren't really a solution. The problem with electricity is that you can't easily store it. And the only way to do so at large scale will be converting it to molecules. That implies hydrogen. As a result, green electricity just means a nearly infinite supply of green hydrogen at the same level of cost. That implies nearly free hydrogen for any purpose. Economically, that all leads to the hydrogen car as the future. You avoid both the weaknesses of ICE cars and BEVs.
    - pineaux 3y ago
      This sounds logical, until you find out that the only viable way (make H2 from electrolysis) is wildly inefficient (75% efficiënt), then compressing/chilling it for transport is only (90%) efficiënt, then converting it to electricity with a fuel cell (max 60% efficiënt), followed by powering an electric motor (95% efficiency). This adds up to: 0.750.90.6*0.95=38% efficiency. With an electric battery car. Its about 75-80% efficiënt in the whole chain. That means you need twice as many wind turbines to run the same amount of vehicle miles. The math just doesnt hold up. So unless we cannot produce enough batteries or cannot make the grid stronger. Which both are possibilities. Hydrogen cars will probably be a dream. At this point it just doesnt make sense.
      - _hypx 3y ago
        Electrolysis is theoretically up to 100% efficient. So are fuel cells. The whole process is an electrochemical system not much different than what batteries are. You're reading too much pro-BEV propaganda. They're just spreading FUD and trying to stop people from realizing there are alternatives.
        _aavaa_ 3y ago
        That’s great, but in the real world we care about the actual efficiency. It is not FUD or propaganda to say that the fuel cell cars you can buy today (or in the next 10 years) are not even close to 100% efficient. Nor is their round trip efficiency better than BEV. Nor or either of those numbers likely to change over that period.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  > Hydrogen refuels just like gasoline cars. It is the most logical replacement for current cars. You should talk to this other guy who's currently arguing that the current paradigm doesn't matter and we should focus on what will make sense. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36839960
DoesntMatter22 3y ago
There is no world where hydrogen would ever work for cars. It takes 50% more energy to generate hydrogen than to just use electricity itself. It takes million dollar facilities to generate that hydrogen and turn it into electricity. Then, it has to be stored at a very high pressure in your car, which has a number of risks. Then, if you have an accident and it doesn't completely blow you up, there can be a fire, in which case you are now on fire but people just think you are a crazy person running around because hydrogen has an invisible flame. Or, you just use electricity.
- _hypx 3y ago
  You are repeating pure FUD. This is pretty much what BEV companies want people to believe so that they never consider any alternatives. In reality, fuel cell cars are literally just EVs, no different than BEVs. There are no fundamental downsides. But since FCEVs don't have the huge need for raw materials that BEVs do, they will be a far cheaper solution. Once you understand the unsustainable nature of BEVs, you'll realize that nearly all cars will have to switch to hydrogen eventually. And hydrogen is safer than gasoline. This is just more FUD, and is of the fearmongering variety.
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    Car makers like BEVs because (a) no new infrastructure other than electricity which is available almost anywhere already and (b) none of that energy lost to compression or fancy cryogenic compression tanks to keep the hydrogen in the car or at the gas station. Lastly, most people don't want to go from $5/gallon gas to $10/gallon hydrogen.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      Car makers are just following the subsidies and the hype. It is not even a sustainable idea and it will eventually die. Hydrogen will eventually be nearly free. It is just going to be made from excess wind and solar energy and will follow the same cost reduction curve.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

_hypx 3y ago

> Until you realize that Toyota is peddling hydrogen as the future which makes about the least sense of anything you could choose. Wrong. It is the only technology in current existence that actually makes sense. Everything else is unsustainable and eventually has to be abandoned.

panick21_ 3y ago
It makes 'sense' according to you and not 99.9% of actual costumers. But you do you.
- _hypx 3y ago
  Then the future is ICE cars because it makes sense to "actual costumers." But that isn't the topic at hand. It is what will make sense, and that can only be hydrogen cars in the long run.
  - panick21_ 3y ago
    ICE market is getting smaller fast and EV market is growing fast. This is a reality. Of course it doesn't happen in a year, but the trend is clear. Just like the trend with hydrogen, where things are going absolutely no where and the waste majority of car makers who just 5 years ago were still betting on hydrogen have systematically dropped it. Even the most hydrogen crazy Toyota expects its global hydrogen sales to be about Tesla production in a month in 2030. And those are optimistic numbers. But don't let the real world prevent you from believing in easy to produce 100% efficient cars that can be fueled for free. Just keep living in a fantasy world, just stop spreading the lies in HN.
    - _hypx 3y ago
      EVs are still a tiny niche. The resource requirements will mean it will be a long time before than can grow beyond that. Note that BEVs were selling in the thousands only about a decade ago. FCEVs could easily reach the level of sales of BEVs in a short period of time. The other point is that FCEVs don’t have the resource limitations of BEVs. They can easily exceed current levels of BEVs without serious trouble. Your problem is that you are closed-minded and stuck in the past. You think that EVs are the future, but that it can only be one type of it. That the world will shift towards a 100% BEV monopoly and that no other type of EV can sell in any number. You can’t even make a coherent argument why this even is. If you want see an example of a person brainwashed by propaganda, that is it.