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Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

The Japanese car companies have done pretty poorly in the 2010's in supporting the energy transition. Toyota has been extremely slow to adapt after the Prius, which makes sense because of their ridiculously large volume of sales of basic, gas-efficient passenger vehicles.

I give Toyota big props for the Prius, which was the original Green Vehicle 15-20 years ago, and still is a HUGE player in the efficiency space. IIRC, The number one vehicle trade-in for TSLA has been Priuses. Was there even a car before the Prius that used regenerative braking? In many ways, Prius "primed" the market for greener vehicles.

And yet, Toyota had no great BEV follow-up. In a high-tech educated country like Japan, an island nation with extremely large amounts of coastline, I'd assume Toyota and Honda would wise up to climate change earlier.

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Toyota in particular has been quite dirty and backwards facing. They strongly opposed the tightening of vehicle emissions standards in the USA as one of three companies (fiat-Chrysler and GM being the others). They are constantly lobbying against EV tech, whilst pushing hydrogen as a technology which is no viable alternative in the medium or near term future (this can be seen as a big oil ploy as hydrogen is and will be made using “natural gas” / methane). Plug-in electric only became a thing with Toyota very recently, despite them having had hybrids for decades.

All quite a sorry state for one of the largest car companies out there.

At this point, they’re doing more harm then good and I’d call them a dirty company and would avoid buying any of their products. They are wasting all their good will that they gained due to them pushing hybrids.

Yes, I am done with Toyota as well. They can now join Volkswagen....

I know Americans like to hate Nissan but outside the US the Leaf was a pretty reasonable first stab at an electric car, before Tesla and is into its second rev now. It’s by no means the best one but given they were early to the market it’s a little unfair to blame all Japanese car makers.

Carlos Ghosn is an interesting character, and maybe not the best person, but some of the things he said to Nissan's board at the time about EVs were prophetic. He did give Nissan a leg up versus other Japanese brands. It is interesting to wonder if his original plan for Nissan America might have been the best call and Americans would have a very different view of Nissan had it happened. (Nissan America makes entirely different cars from every other division of the company. Ghosn's plan at one point was to rebrand the gas guzzler-focused Nissan America as [back to] Datsun, reintroduce Nissan in America as an EV brand and plan to eventually jettison New Datsun as soon as its profits dropped below a threshold that the board would allow it.)

It's unfair to blame all Japanese car makers, but it is definitely fair to blame all American brands of Japanese car makers (as the weird, highly profitable step-children that they are).

I wasn’t aware of the US specific aspect to Nissan, here in the UK the Qashqai flies off the production line as is pretty much single handedly keeping the North East economy alive with the Sunderland plant kicking out 500,000 cars a year

Agreed that the Nissan Leaf was not a bad introduction to EVs. It sucks that they took so long to get to 200-250 mile EPA range, though, which really ought to be the minimum (along with 100kW DC charging) for a pure electric vehicle. But at least they were doing something.

Sadly it did take them a long time to get up to the higher ranges. I think they wanted to wait for the new rev to come out on the typical 7 year cycle and out their efforts into that model rather than extensively improve the (ugly) first version.

They've got some weird obsession with hydrogen.. even recently I've seen a lot of online advertising for their hydrogen vehicle the Mirai which is wildly impractical in the US and probably anywhere else.

It's extremely practical, they just need a refueling network.

The Mirai is 196 inches long (same as a Model S or BMW 5 series) yet has less than 10 cu ft of trunk space. The volume required to fit all the hydrogen fuel cell components is massive. It's not especially practical as a result. Even if there was a refueling network, it's not like you're going to take it camping or road trip with such a small trunk, and for an around town grocery runner it's on the large side.

It's not like there's a good source of hydrogen that doesn't come from electricity generation anyway. It's "just" a different take on the battery, one that appears to be mostly worse other than charge times.

Most hydrogen isn't from electrolysis of water. It's mostly made commercially from natural gas.

Right, yes, sorry I meant no potential green sources of hydrogen that don't come from electrolysis.

“They just need a refueling network” - case in point, wildly impractical to buy one today.

It’s partly bc it would be much easier for Japan to become fully independent w/ hydrogen whereas with batteries they would be reliant on other countries to produce them. So the Japanese government prefers hydrogen.

I disagree. Hydrogen makes is it not easier to be fully independent. I would argue the opposite is more true.

> I give Toyota big props for the Prius, which was the original Green Vehicle 15-20 years ago, and still is a HUGE player in the efficiency space. IIRC, The number one vehicle trade-in for TSLA has been Priuses. Was there even a car before the Prius that used regenerative braking? In many ways, Prius "primed" the market for greener vehicles.

> And yet, Toyota had no great BEV follow-up

Prius sales trends since debut in 1997 reflect this sentiment in that they were first, executed well, and thus had most of the market. Current Prius sales are dropping off very steadily by year, though.

But to your point on the trade ins, current Tesla Model 3 sales are getting close to Prius' best all time sales of +200K units/year.

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/total-toyota-prius-sales-figur...

https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/tesla-model-3-sales-figures-us...

Automotive writers in Japan has been heavily biased to Japanese car industry (but also like driving German cars despite there is no Autobahn). Now they write how BEV isn't quite good as Tesla says, and next EU decarbonization regulation is a bit conspiracy to make Japanese cars hard to sell.

Those arguments are true in some part but meaningless or misinformation in some part. I agree that LCA CO2 regulation is win for EU/China and lose for Japan car industry, and now EU car manufacturer become able to make BEV in clean energy so EU pushes the regulation, but decarbonization is now obviously justice so blaming it is nonsense. We're stuck in small land/grid and against nuclear for now.

They also hype about hydrogen cars. Hydrogen seems to good to investigate for truck or other industry vehicle, or dedicated storage, but they overly hype about car with fuel cell or even ICE burning hydrogen. Maybe because who read such article loves ICE.

I think Toyota and Honda did well for decarbonization until the solution become making BEV that needs massive amount of Li-ion (material and power intensive battery).

Toyota, Hyundai and Honda have all bet on H2. That's just as green, and electric as a Tesla.

The tech works, refuels 10x faster than any battery based car, but so far no adoption outside of europe and asian countries.

That's a phenomenal achievement. They chose wrong maybe, but they chose, and chose a path they though most viable.

To claim they aren't in the game is beyond unfair.

Tesla invested a significant amount of money into building out a charging network for their cars. Toyota has been selling fuel cell vehicles for longer than Tesla has been in existence and they've made no such effort to create a network of hydrogen fueling stations. Even now with the threat of battery electric vehicles becoming the next platform for personal transportation Toyota continues to sit on it's hands when it comes to supporting it's own technology. Even their lobbying efforts aren't around trying to push hydrogen, it's around protecting their hybrid and gasoline vehicle business. Their actual efforts around hydrogen vehicles tells you everything you need to know: it's not viable and they know it. Toyota could be selling as many Mirais as Tesla sells vehicles, the demand is clearly there and people would pay a hefty price to get them like they do for Teslas. So why don't they?

H2 does not, and cannot offer the end-to-end efficiency of battery electric vehicles. The distribution infrastructure for H2 is inherently less efficient than electricity distribution alone, making BEVs 3x more efficient:

https://electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2016/04/hybri...

The primary advantage is faster refueling. The price is no in-home refueling -- a big win for BEVs, as most trips will not require refueling on the road. There are also real safety concerns about storing and transporting H2 at very high pressure.

> That's just as green

Complete nonsense. Most Hydrogen is produced with natural gas. And the conversion makes and end to end efficiency makes it actually far worse both economically and environmentally.

Maybe in some imaginary future that will not actually happen it is as green.

> refuels 10x faster than any battery based car

Waste overestimation and in reality even if that was true, you are gone spend 100x more times refueling then in an EV. Because EV you simply charge at home and 99% you not gone use any fuel-station.

And Hydrogen charging station still have many problems if you actually attempted to have a high volume of cars using them.

> They chose wrong maybe, but they chose, and chose a path they though most viable.

The path that would give them the most government subsidies and allow them to delay EVs as long as possible.

> To claim they aren't in the game is beyond unfair.

Go look at how many actually FCV have been sold.

What is your source that Hyundai is all in on hydrogen? Hyundai has Kona, and at least according to this press release intends to be the top 3 EV manufacturer by 2025:

https://www.hyundai.news/eu/articles/press-releases/hyundai-...

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