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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Toyota bet on the wrong horse, they just haven't publicly admitted yet and for now the marketing engine is still running on (hydrogen) vapors.

There is also Hyzon, a fuel cell manufacturer that hopes to massively convert trucks to Hydrogen.

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When I was working in a warehouse as a poor college student we drove electric forklifts inside for obvious reasons.

When the forklift went flat, you got another forklift to remove the battery and replace it with a fresh one.

Tesla tried this once and it wasn't a great success however, if you have a depo with a stack of batteries, you run a fleet of trucks, this makes a lot more sense.

It's something I'm suprised hasn't been floated as a lot of the customers for the electric trucks are fleet customers

Hydrogen and LNG are used for forklifts the world over. That's exactly what got Toyota into this:

https://toyota-forklifts.eu/solutions/energy-solutions/what-...

Battery cars are being disrupted by hydrogen cars. In a decade the shift will be almost entirely towards hydrogen and BEVs will be seen as obsolete.

Oh ok. Well thank you for making this prediction, that's got to be why out of all the companies that fielded Hydrogen cars all but two have now switched entirely to BEVs. We must have a different definition of disrupted.

If you know the history of disruption, you'd know that very few companies survive them. "All but two" could the list of dead companies from this, not the survivors.

I'm sure Elon is quaking in his boots. But hey, I've been wrong before so time will tell, I've bookmarked your comment.

He's a fool to not realize the threat. Tesla is almost certain to collapse unless they start making hydrogen cars themselves.

I'll be sure to let him know. Once again, thank you.

Just for added advice: Toyota also makes battery powered cars alongside their hydrogen cars. Tesla however does not make hydrogen powered cars at all. So without getting into details, it's clear that Toyota knows more about how each technology stack up against each other. So for Tesla to be right on this, it means that without having any knowledge of hydrogen cars they still know that it can't work, even over a company that knows something about both.

It can be described as Toyota having both eyes open whereas Tesla is blind in one eye, but still claiming that the latter sees better.

Thank you.

My current gasoline car has a 500km range. If I can get 400km range on an electric car then I will just pick the car with the cheapest "fuel" costs and that's not going to be hydrogen.

It's going to be hydrogen.

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