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Comment by modeless | Hacker News Reader

Hydrogen for cars was an obvious boondoggle for a decade or more. There's making guesses and then there's ignoring obvious trends. Toyota did the latter.

Edit: And to prove that I thought it was obvious a decade ago, here's my opinion from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3070004

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I'm not sold that this has been established yet: technology moves in mysterious ways.

For example EVs don't have an answer to long distance transportation yet (it should be trains, that are easily automated, but I'm not god emperor). You could imagine a future where greening that industry necessitates a storable, pumpable fuel and suddenly hydrogen infrastructure is a thing that personal vehicles could be built against.

EV range will continue to increase and so will charging speeds and number of stations. Cybertruck and Tesla Semi may have 600+ miles of range. Combined with faster charging, human fatigue will start to become the bigger limiting factor. Driving more than 12 hours per day is a very niche activity. Even truckers are forbidden from doing that by law.

Even in the cases where it absolutely makes sense to distance/time shift some of the grid's output to hydrogen to ship it physically somewhere (such as a festival in the woods, perhaps, that today would rely on diesel generators for power), it's still going to be way more efficient to use a bank of larger than would fit in a car fuel cells in a shipping container creating a "mini-grid" of electricity that things like battery electric cars and other appliances could plug into than to have cars carry around fuel cells "just in case" of events like that.

The problem is that hydrogen has radically improved in the last decade, but batteries have not overcome it’s fundamental weaknesses. For instance, we are now see hydrogen drop to below $2/kg even with entirely green hydrogen. Fuel cells have also gotten cheaper and more reliable.

The efficiency argument might end up being the same argument made against ray-tracing in the 3D rendering world. In that instance, the upside of have correct lighting with a simple algorithm eliminated whatever upside you could get out of a faster but more complex rasterization system. Hydrogen could easily be the way to have a single simple technology that works in all transportation cases.

To engineers it was, but to politics things are more complex. If the politics of the world demand hydrogen it doesn't matter how stupid the idea is you have to do it. Politics can shut your company down completely overnight, bad engineering can do it, but only after decades of bad decisions.

Politically the powers were pushing hydrogen not long ago and nobody should be surprised if they do again.

Nobody was going to shut down Toyota for stopping hydrogen car development 10 years ago.

Don't bet on that. Countries do such things all the time. Japan probably wouldn't, but the US has plenty of manufactures that would love to shut down a competitor, or maybe Germany decides to shut one down. Even California could decide hydrogen is the only way to meet their emissions.

Such things have happened, though it is rare.

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