Posted by iancmceachern 11 hours ago
- The Mirai made financial sense AS A LEASE for folks in Southern California back in 2022 (possibly 2023) because:
- Car prices in general (including EVs) were fairly highly priced at the time due to demand, the chip shortage, etc.
- There were clean vehicle incentives to get a Toyota Mirai, including things like a hydrogen fuel fill up card to cover expenses.
- At the time there was some assumptions that hydrogen fuel costs would go down over time, but they actually went up.
The article does talk about the lack of investment in hydrogen infrastructure, this is true and theres been a huge split between announced infrastructure investments and what has actually happened (see https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3labfzi... for a chart going through 2021-2024). The current US political situation and its impact on clean energy probably doesn't help either.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...
I highly doubt that hydrogen heating was ever considered. It's usually pushed by the gas lobby (since most hydrogen comes from gas), and Sweden doesn't have a strong gas lobby.
If you've already got the electricity for electrolysis, would it not be more efficient and mechanically simpler to store it in a battery and power an electric motor?
What is a battery? A chemical cell to store hydrogen and oxygen(true, it does not "have" to be hydrogen and oxygen but it usually is) to later get energy out of. For example lead-acid(stores the oxygen in the lead-sulfate plates and the hydrogen the the sulfuric acid liquid) or nickle-metal(charges into separate oxygen and hydrogen compounds, discharges into water) the lithium cell replaces hydrogen with lithium. Consider a pure hydrogen, oxygen fuel-cell, it could be run in reverse(charged) to get the hydrogen and oxygen and run forward(discharged) to get electricity out of it. So it is a sort of battery, a gas battery. Gas batteries are generally a bad idea, mainly because they have to be so big. Much time and effort is spent finding liquids that can undergo the oxidation/reduction reactions at a reasonable temperature. But now consider that there is quite a bit of oxygen in the air, if we did not have to store the oxygen our battery could be much more efficient, This is the theory behind free-air batteries. But what if our battery did not have to run at a reasonable temperature. We could then use a heat engine to get the energy out. And thus the Mirai. They are shipping half of the charged fluid to run in a high temperature reaction with the other half(atmospheric oxygen) to drive a heat engine that provides motive power.
As opposed to having the customer run the full chemical plant to charge and store the charged fluids to run in a fuel cell to turn a electric motor for motive power. Honestly they are both insane in their own way. But shipping high energy fluids tend to have better energy density. Perhaps the greatest problem in this case is that it is in gaseous form(not very dense) so has no real advantage. Unfortunately one of the best ways to retain hydrogen in a liquid form is carbon.
I do remember there being some news about the steel manf.
I wonder if further advancements in rocketry are adding H2 tech that could help us manage the difficulties of dealing with the stuff. It still only makes sense in very specific circumstances. Like when you need energy in tank form.
But I think battery / biofuel is the future.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Electricity comes out the wall.
You can run electrolysis from a cup.
I also have a gas bbq, yet couldn't fill up a LNG car at my house. Maybe there's something more to it than just making small amounts of room temperature / pressure H2.
I’m willing to give it a go.
I’ve got the excess solar from the rooftop solar panels, the electrical and electronic knowledge, and the gas fitter and metal fabrication experience.
I have an oil free air compressor, and anyone can by a helium based cryo-cooler. I have an account with an industrial gas supplier.
Just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
If Nile Red hasn’t blown his lab up by the time I publish this comment, I reckon I stand a chance.
Efficiency pumping your excess solar into the EV itself is more like 80-85%, most of which is loss in the electronics, not the battery - those typically have a coulombic efficiency of over 95%.
Hydrogen a boondoggle. It's not nearly as stupid as making ethanol from corn (which is an energy-negative process) but it's close.
Also, "gas fitter and metal fabrication" experience isn't worth anything unless it was hydrogen-specific. It is far leakier than natural gas/propane. One of the biggest hassles of a hydrogen fuel chain is that the stuff leaks through everything.
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
If the oceans die, its very likely that many or even most humans will also. As a human I am pretty strongly opposed to dying, but thats just, like, my opinion man.
If, theoretically, you could produce hydrocarbons from the carbon dioxide that is currently in our atmosphere, then it could be a substantial reduction in net carbon dioxide being added; and it would be compatible with the fuel infrastructure of today.
The bind moggles.
2.5 billion years ago the earth would have been uninhabitable to most modern life. Single celled life evolved in those conditions and began creating glucose and oxygen from CO2 and water. When those primitive lifeforms died some of them became oil and the CO2 was sequestered.
Over time the CO2 levels dropped until about 20 million years ago the CO2 levels fell to about 300ppm. That's when life as we know it really took off. Yes, it took BILLIONS of years to get there.
Humans have only existed for about 200k years. During that time our CO2 levels have mostly been below about 280ppm. The are now at 429ppm and are rising exponentially. [0]
Fischer-Tropsch and Sabatier process can both operate with scavenged CO2. There's been some work since the 1990s utilising seawater as a CO2 source, with CO2 capture being far more efficient than from atmospheric sources.
Whilst hydrocarbons have numerous downsides (whether sourced from fossil or renewable sources), they are also quite convenient, exceedingly well-proven, and tremendously useful. In some applications, particularly marine and aviation transport, there are few if any viable alternatives.
I've commented on this numerous times at HN over the years: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>.
There’s more of it now than in the reefs recorded history.
Well, 2022 data:
https://www.aims.gov.au/information-centre/news-and-stories/...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/13/coral-re...
All the more reason to give our ounce great nation away to fuck wits who think shooting up Jews is a reasonable idea, making electricity expensive chasing a target that will have approximately no impact on global carbon emissions and further drive manufacturing out of the country, all the while making even my generation (Xillenials) worse off now than we were ten years ago.
Young people and the working poor? They can freeze in the dark on the streets, fuck them.
Turn up unannounced and utter the shibboleth asylum seeker and we roll out the red carpet. Low interest loans so they can start businesses, and priory social housing. Fuck the locals.
And you cum guzzlers keep voting for more of it.
There’s only so much ideology we can take. Check One Nations recently polling.
I’m encouraging young people to get in to the trades, especially brick laying and masonry because if things keep going they way they are…
We’re going to need more walls.
Know what I’m sayin’.
My comment you responded to didn’t happen overnight.
You’re welcome to go through my comment history and address my concerns as detailed over the previous thirteen years, many of which are much more level headed and many contain references to thinkers much more intelligent and way more eloquent than anything I’ll ever write.
Time for a top-up!
I do, and if I were you I would stop to think about your priors. You have stacked an awful lot of ideas on top of each other to build a world view that has lies, misinformation, and unsound science at the base of it. Worse, a lot of it is selfish, but in a way that only works if the entire global economy is a zero sum game. Enlightened self-interest can be right, and even noble, but only if you know the game well enough to comprehend why altruism is still important, and you don't. The world is NOT a zero sum game, and this kind of self-interest is the bad kind.
Some of the logic at the top of your pyramid would be sound, if the bottom wasn't a pile of mush. A few minor points:
1) Solar is (far) cheaper than fossil fuel's now (for net new electricity). It's been that way for awhile now, but one particular bubble tries really hard to stop people from learning that. If cost is your concern you should be pushing for more solar, and less of the fuel you literally set fire to and have to keep digging up forever until it runs out.
2) Giving money to hostile Arab nations who hate you is not going to stop anyone from "took 'er jorbs"ing you. In fact, you would have more money if your car didn't literally burn your money constantly and also require expensive oil changes and other maintenance constantly.
3) Pretty much everything you said about loans and housing is based on absolute fabrications, or extreme exaggerations. Even if it weren't, other people receiving assistance doesn't actually cost you anything. The national debt has INCREASED at a record pace under Trump, exactly as it does during every Republican presidency, and it's not because Trump loves helping people so much.
Republican presidents have added about $1.4 trillion per four-year term, compared to $1.2 trillion added by Democrats since 1913. During my lifetime there has never been a Republican president who was fiscally conservative in the slightest. Trump is somehow making it worse while also letting children starve thanks to cutting USAID.
4) There's nothing wrong with the trades, if your body can physically handle it for 40-50 years. It's good and honest work, and we need more folks to go into them. It's also likely to be more stable and less demanding than the kind of work most of us here do.
5) Why in the hell would anyone WANT the manufacturing jobs? The only reasons humans have them is that humans (in some places) are cheaper than robots. Robots are getting cheaper every day. Moving them here will get us a few (even richer) billionaires. Not more jobs (at least not the kind you're probably thinking of). It will also increase the cost of ALL THE THINGS.
The worst part of this mistake is that while normal people spend most of their money billionaires spend only a miniscule fraction of their income. Billionaire money just idles non-productively most of the time, or is engaged in parasitic interest gathering via obscure financial instruments. Giving money to billionaires is kind of like throwing it in the garbage. Giving it to the middle class is good for everyone, because they buy things and drive demand.
Lastly, I'm also a Xennial, and I have to say that I'm better off now than 10 years ago. Maybe I just made better choices?
Either way, drink plenty of water before bed. It will help with the hangover in the morning.
While the recovery we reported last year was welcome news, there are challenges ahead. The spectre of global annual coral bleaching will soon become a reality."
This article also mentions that a recent large recovery was due to el nino conditions
"Great Barrier Reef was reeling from successive disturbances, ranging from marine heatwaves and coral bleaching to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks and cyclone damage, with widespread death of many corals especially during the heatwaves of 2016 and 2017.
Since then, the Reef has rebounded. Generally cooler La Niña conditions mean hard corals have recovered significant ground, regrowing from very low levels after a decade of cumulative disturbances to record high levels in 2022 across two-thirds of the reef."
Not sure if you were trying to imply some long term recovery or that global warming didn't hurt it because the article says heatwaves were part of a many other conditions that caused massive damage
Don’t Panic.
Everything is O.K.
—-
Edited to add: Rate limited so can’t reply without creating more alt accounts than I’m willing to, so:
@Timon3 - that’s actually a really good point, and I follow at least a few folk that could be categorised as such at least some of the time.
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
You could say the same about EVs. Most people in the US who bought an EV decided to go back to ICE for their next vehicle.
This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
How is that going to work? Cryogenic liquid hydrogen? High pressure tanks? Those don't seem practical for an airplane.
What does work for airplanes is to use carbon atoms that hydrogen atoms can attach to. Then, it becomes a liquid that can easily be stored at room temperature in lightweight tanks. Very high energy density, and energy per weight!
(I think it's called kerosene.)
It’s not a coincidence that where easy of handling, storage safety, and high energy density are needed everything seems to converge on compression ignition medium to long chain liquid hydrocarbons.
The strategy clearly stated by Akio Toyoda is multiple power train technology. You can listen to his interviews on the subject, some are in Japanese, but as you have stated a clear and unambiguous interpretation of Toyota's policy I will assume you have that fluency.
(Automotive OEMs are assemblers, the parts come from the supply chain starting with Tier 1 suppliers. In that sense TMC does not do "making engines", but possibly the nuance and consequences here of whether not it "wraps it's head" to "makes things", vs if it has the capability to specify, manufacture distribute something at scale with a globally localized supply chain AND adjust to consumer demand/resource availability changes 5 years after the design start - in this context i ask you, can you "wrap your head" around the latest models that are coming out in every power train technology fcev, (p)hev to bev)
What's that old meme?
Stop trying to make ____ happen, it's not going to happen.
Last time I checked it needs to be stored in cryo / pressure vessel and it also leaks through steel and ruins its structural properties in the process.
No. Not for using Hydrogen for transportation. People have been trying to use Hydrogen for transportation for more than 50 years. These people are trying to bend the laws of physics. And there are a lot of con artists in the mix who prey on the gullible. See the convicted fraudster Trevor Milton of Nikola fame.
I’ve worked mostly in or adjacent to manufacturing and primary industry.
As far as I’m aware, the majority of hydrogen production is use on site, and mostly for ammonia production.
There isn’t really much in the way of hydrogen storage and transportation, it’s mostly used where it’s generated.
And if we use expensive as a proxy for heavy / energy intensive, which it is in the case of hydrogen, that goes a long way to preclude it from anything like being useful for transportation.
When you are specifying valving or piping in a refinery one of the big things you have to find out is how much hydrogen is in the process because a lot of stuff in a refinery has at least some hydrogen and it will destroy common alloys.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
https://electrek.co/2026/01/09/toyota-electric-pickup-images...
Toyota is in the game of selling cars. Toyota has been the best selling automaker for the last six years straight.
Toyota had record sales last year:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/toyota...
It's possible that Toyota understands the car business better than you do.
Here in Norway Toyota was invited to include the bZ4X in this years winter range test[1], but they declined. Suzuki entered with their eVitara model, which is a "technological twin" of the Toyota Urban Cruiser.
The Urban Cruiser really disappointed in a regular test performed in cold weather[2]. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the Suzuki eVitara was by far the worst in the winter range test, with the least range overall and more than 40% reduction compared to its WLTP range, among the worst in the test.
[1]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/d4mMkA/verdens-stoerste-r...
The 2026 bZ Woodland [1] looks pretty nice in my opinion.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...
Dodge's Charger EV has been a sales flop [1] and pretty much universally panned by critics as something that nobody asked for.
The Camry and Corolla were the best-selling sedan and compact sedan of 2025 [2]. I think this shows that Toyota is listening to what Corolla and Camry drivers want - something inexpensive and reliable to get them to and from work every day without issue.
Some day Toyota will make an EV sedan. I think their 2026 bZ Woodland [3] shows that they are starting to figure out how make compelling EVs. And Toyota's EV strategy seems pretty reasonable to me overall - their delays to develop a decent EV don't seem to put them under threat from any legacy automakers. They are being threatened by Chinese EV makers, but so is Tesla - so even a huge head start likely wouldn't have benefited Toyota much either in that regard.
[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69927938/dodge-charger-da...
[2] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g64457986/bestselling-cars...
[3] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/looks-a-lot-like-an-ele...
I want an appliance that just works. The Corolla and Camry were this for petrol.
I love my Leaf but it isn’t a Carolla.
What’s with the turning circle on the Leaf?
https://electrek.co/2025/10/13/toyotas-best-selling-car-elec...
Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement.
That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards definitely will.
Jet engines work better. Boeing's next major plane will have jet engines, just like their previous major planes.
Synthetic, carbon neutral jet fuel will be the future for commercial jets.
The math leads out an important factor. As the liquid fuel burns, the airplane gets lighter. A lot lighter. Less weight => more range. More like 6x-8x.
Batteries don't get lighter when they discharge.
Batteries are inherently more aerodynamic, because they don't need to suck in oxygen for combustion, and because they need less cooling than an engine that heats itself up by constantly burning fuel. You can getvincredible gains just by improving motor efficiency - the difference between a 98%-efficient motor and a 99%-efficient motor is the latter requires half the cooling. That's more important than the ~1% increase in mileage.
Also, the batteries are static weight, which isn't as nightmarish as liquid fuel that wants to slosh around in the exact directions you want it not to. Static weight means that batteries can be potentially load-bearing structural parts (and in fact already are, in some EV cars).
The math leaves out a lot of important factors.
However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.
Given the great energy densities and stability in transport of hydrocarbons, there's already some plants out there synthesising them directly from green sources, so that could be a solution if we don't manage to increase battery densities by another order of magnitude.
I didn't realize that a "green" carbon atom is different from a regular carbon atom. They both result in CO2 when burned.
You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.
You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just be dumping bamboo chips into landfills?
Literally essential plant nutrients, essential for life.
Tangentially related, the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption ejected so much water vapour in to the upper atmosphere, it was estimated to have ongoing climate forcing effects for up to 10 years.
Water vapour is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
And we heard precisely nothing about that in the media other than some science specific sources at the time and nothing on an ongoing basis.
From Wikipedia:
The underwater explosion also sent 146 million tons of water from the South Pacific Ocean into the stratosphere. The amount of water vapor ejected was 10 percent of the stratosphere's typical stock. It was enough to temporarily warm the surface of Earth. It is estimated that an excess of water vapour should remain for 5–10 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Hunga_Tonga%E2%80%93Hunga...
Global warming is not fake, there's tons and tons of evidence it is real and the weather is getting more and more extreme as humans continue to burn petrol.
We should be moving towards being able to terraform Earth not because of anthropogenic climate forcing, but because one volcano or one space rock could render our atmosphere overnight rather uncomfortable.
You won’t find the Swedish Doom Goblin saying anything about that.
> burn petrol.
Well yeah, so making electricity unreliable and expensive, and the end-user’s problem (residential roof-top solar) is somehow supposed help?
Let’s ship all our raw minerals and move all our manufacturing overseas to counties that care less about environmental impacts and have dirtier electricity, then ship the final products back, all using the dirties bunker fuel there is.
How is that supposed to help?
I mean, I used to work for The Wilderness Society in South Australia, now I live in Tasmania and am a card carrying One Nation member.
Because I’m not a complete fucking idiot.
Wait till you learn about the nepotism going on with the proposed Bell Bay Windfarm and Cimitiere Plains Solar projects.
I’m all for sensible energy project development, but there’s only so much corruption I’m willing to sit back and watch.
With the amount of gas, coal, and uraniam Australia has, it should be a manufacturing powerhouse, and host a huge itinerant worker population with pathways to residency / citizenship, drawn from the handful of countries that built this country. And citizens could receive a monthly stipend as their share of the enormous wealth the country should be generating.
Japan resells our LNG at a profit. Our government is an embarrassment.
What's needed are free markets. Any country that wants to become a powerhouse has it within their grasp. Free markets.
The Antipodes have such a problem with successful people we even invented a term for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
On the subject of free markets, Australia excels. We even let foreign entities extract and sell our LNG and pay no royalties and no tax.
https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/zero-royalties-charge...
Doesn’t get any freer than that!
"As a consequence of the negative TOA RF, the Hunga eruption is estimated to have decreased global surface air temperature by about 0.05 K during 2022-2023; due to larger interannual variability, this temperature change cannot be observed."
https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1049154/files/Hunga_APARC...
Commercial aviation’s profitability hinges on being able to carry only as much fuel as strictly[1] required.
How can batteries compete with that constraint?
Also, commercial aviation aircraft aren’t time-restricted by refuelling requirements. How are batteries going to compete with that? Realistically, a busy airport would need something like a closely located gigawatt scale power plant with multi-gigawatt peaking capacity to recharge multiple 737 / A320 type aircraft simultaneously.
I don’t believe energy density parity with jet fuel is sufficient. My back of the neocortex estimate is that battery energy density would need to 10x jet fuel to be of much practical use in the case of narrow-body-and-up airliner usefulness.
So indeed, an airport serving dozens or hundreds of electric aircrafts a day will need obscene amounts of electric energy.
Electric motors can be pretty close, 98% is realistic. Of course other parts of the system will lose energy, like conversion losses.
Of course that doesn't mean batteries are currently a viable replacement. One should still take efficiency into account in quick back of the envelope calculations.
Electric aviation is interesting but as someone who knows a bit about the industry, biofuels make more sense here.
Turbofans and supercritical airfoils are done to the point of engine manufacturers looking to propfans and alternative materials (carbon fibre) to eke out further efficiencies.
Although carbon fibre has significant down sides.
If we want easier to produce biofuels then LNG aviation makes sense. We are flying LNG rockets already. You could go ahead and design LNG planes now and they’d emit less carbon even on fossil natural gas. Existing turbofan jet engines could be retrofitted to burn methane.
Biogas is incredibly easy to make to the point that there are pretty easy designs online for off grid biogas digesters you can use to run a generator. You can literally just turn a barrel upside down in a slightly larger barrel full of water, shit, and food waste, attach a hose to it, and as the inner barrel floats up it fills with biogas under mild pressure that you can plug right into things. May need to dry it for some applications since it might contain some water vapor but that’s not hard.
Industrial scale biogas is basically the same principle. Just large scale, usually using sewage and farm waste.
LNG rockets also mean “green” space launch is entirely possible.
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
Trains is an easy one, over head lines.
Aircraft, I think short distance trips <1hr maybe otherwise biofuel. Likely we’ll see biofuels widely used by 2040. Electric motors on a 777, I’m not sure.
Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.
But yea, subsidies. I've been on many a call where "there's govt funding available if we shape this like x" is one of the major selling points.
There will always be a strong belief in artificially changing market behaviour by simply throwing money at it and hoping it sticks. When the money dries up the public tends to go back to "what's practical and affordable?".
See: the Hindenburg disaster
afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.
wait...
The only real downsides are slow travel speed and vulnerability to extreme storms since there arent many places to put it with a large enough hanger even with days of warning beforehand.
But hydrogen itself is SCARY. It has an extremely wide range of ignitable concentrations, and it has very low ignition energy. It also tends to leak through ~everything.
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
Also, compressing and cooling a gas takes another huge hit at the efficiency. Electrolysis comes out at atmospheric pressures.
Oh and the platinum electrodes you need…
I’m also just now visualising a hydrogen pipeline fire… terrible terrible idea.
1: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoa...
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...
(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)
(Separate to whether the idea made sense back in the 2000s.)
It's hard to work with because of this, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is already everywhere.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
Depreciation is based on real-world qualities of a vehicle that determine how desireable it is to own over time. Toyotas tend to depreciate slower than Mercedes-Benz, for example, because maintenance and repair costs tend to be lower. For someone looking to buy a car new and drive it for 10+ years, they are probably going to be drawn to car models that have a reputation for reliability and thus hold their value. Even if you don't care about the resale value of a car, you probably do care about the underlying factors driving that resale price.
With EVs the factors driving depreciation are concerns about rapid tech obsolescence, battery degredation and replacement costs, incentives and new price cuts, and charging infrastructure. You also hear stories about Tesla drivers waiting 6+ months for a replacement part, Rivians being totaled because of a dent in a rear quarter panel, etc. These are all reasonable things for a buyer to be concerned with, in my opinion.
But I agree that if you are ok with all of the above in a used EV (range and charging speed may not matter if you have a place to charge at home, for example), there are good deals to be found.
Battery degradation is extremely overrepresented in the minds of the public for example and based mostly on the performance of early entrants like the original Nissan Leaf. Since then, chemistries and management systems have progressed dramatically and rendered it a moot point — most EVs made in the past several years will have their batteries outlast the useful life of the vehicle. In the case the Ariya, Nissan appears to have overcorrected for the Leaf's reputation to such an extreme that they can be fast charged to 100% for many dozens of cycles and still show no capacity loss.
This is a gap in knowledge that smart buyers who are willing to do a little bit of research can exploit and get much more car for their money than would otherwise be possible.
The MSRP doesn’t matter. The S stands for suggested.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.
By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.
Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.
EV at rapid/ultra-rapid chargers: 25p/mile
Petrol, diesel: 15p/mile
EV charging at home: 8p/mile
This is because there's a government price cap on home electricity, but not on commercial electricity - and rapid chargers are all commercial (and of course for-profit).
[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-...
Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).
I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
Irrelevant. It seems like everyone who argues against H2 is stuck on "now". Had that been the case with battery powered cars, they'd have never got off of the ground.
Batteries were terrible, wildly expensive, extremely unreliable. It's only been the immense research poured into them, that has brought their costs down.
Meanwhile, the cost of storage on an H2 car is nothing, compared to the immense and exorbitant cost of all those batteries. Batteries which make a car extremely heavy. Batteries which cannot be charged below -20C, and require heaters. Batteries which are incredibly dangerous in car accidents. Batteries which are costly, and damaging to the environment to create, difficult to recycle, and damaging to the environment to recycle.
Compared to battery tech of any type, H2 is a dream from the gods.
Yet because there hasn't been 17 trillion dollars of cash thrown into h2 generation tech, people prattle on about how expensive h2 generation is.
And it doesn't matter where h2 comes from now. It matters where it can and will come from. The goal isn't to make sources of power to generate h2 clean, the goal is to get end-polluters, cars, clean.
If the only goal was "clean", then most electric batteries charging right now, would fail that very goal. After all, there are still coal and gas power plants this very moment, and if we pulled all electric cars off the road, those would close.
No, the goal is to work towards more and more solar power, wind, etc. And in parallel, get cars ready for the day when power they're charged from isn't polluting.
The myopic view of what I deem hyper-environmentalists, is disturbing to me. It is paramount that we don't let short sighted views fog the reality around us.
Anyone arguing 1000lbs of batteries, all environmentally damaging in their construction, recycling cost, and disposal, is superior to h2, is arguing from a pedestal of sandy, earthquake prone, unstable support.
Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.
And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".
If that was the case, we'd still have electric cars with 50km range, and 1000lbs of batteries.
you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")
if transport switches to electric, what's your role?
answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant
but what if hydrogen took off instead?
if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel
but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business
at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas
... and that's exactly what they're trying to do
If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.
Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.
No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.
EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.
Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.
Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Smart phones were subsidised, just less obviously. Much of the fundamental research into the radio systems was done by government labs, for example.
Not to mention that governments provide maaaaasssive subsidies to the entire fossil fuel industry, including multi-trillion dollar wars in the middle east to control the oil!
Look at it from the perspective of pollution control in cities. China just invested tens of billions - maybe hundreds — into clearing out the smog they were notorious for. Electric vehicles are a part of the solution.
The alternative is everyone living a decade less because… the market forces will it.
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Bigger cable, upgraded delivery infrastructure to support that cable (think more or stronger poles), transformer upgrades, and finally the charging stations which unlike the home ones aren't just a complicated switch because DC fast charging.
H2 is a stupid fuel, but the idea that high power vehicle charging stations are a cheap or simple upgrade to a gas station is ridiculous.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.
Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.
Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.
Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.
But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].
The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.
On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.
Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/idemitsu-build-pi...
[1] - https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-pric...
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Edit: typo
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...
Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224...
As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.
If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.
Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.