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Comment by flurie | Hacker News Reader

Toyota is pretty well known at this point for lobbying against fully electric vehicles. What I can't tell is whether their push for consumer hydrogen fuel cell vehicles was a screen as part of the lobbying effort or a failed marketing/research effort.

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I honestly believe that Toyota and Honda have done their analysis in good faith and believe fully electric isn't the correct solution. They could be wrong or right, but I think they gone by it honestly. You don't push hydrogen this long without reason.

Is storage the primary concern with hydrogen?

Distribution is also a big issue now: EV chargers have a much bigger ecosystem around them than hydrogen fuel stations.

My understanding is that hydrogen has a much brighter future in commercial vehicles where fueling station logistics can be much more deliberately planned. I know Toyota does commercial vehicle sales, but I don't know what their hydrogen fuel cell commercial fleet development looks like.

Storage in the cars? No. But the infrastructure is lacking. Many people who own a Toyota Mirai (hydrogen) refill it at their Toyota dealership (far less convenient than the electrical grid) and are limited to around 80% fuel capacity (since you need 10,000 PSI to fully fill the tanks).

I get the feeling that they want to go the way Airbus is looking like it's going to go with airplanes. Plug in containers that would be like propane tanks in the US. Not sure how practical, but it does cut down on some problems.

It's institutional inertia. They are the kings of the ICE world. They are biased against preserving the status quo.

It also seems to be a common misconception that hybrids are a logical intermediary step between ICE and EV, and this is made more confusing by cars like the original Hyundai Ioniq that came in hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and fully electric versions. So I wouldn't be surprised if Toyota's lack of interest appeared to be contrarian when it was the opposite.

The Japanese quite conservative and usually for good reasons. Move fast and break things and fail often isn't in their playbook.

The problem is that hydrogen makes no sense. Most of the hydrogen that we have is produced from fossil fuels, and we have no hydrogen distribution infrastructure.

You could argue that electric vehicles are the most conservative solution because we already have a national power grid, and there's a fairly clear path towards producing green electricity.

Looking at EVs for personal transport only is short sighted. There are already alternatives, at least in the EU and Asia: trains and e-bikes.

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and...

eBike = how to expose yourself to elements and then get instantly killed because you didn't see red light.

The other option is to sit forever in traffic jams, at least in Paris where they converted parking lanes to bicycle infrastructure.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris...

But Ford decided to build electric F-150s? I don't actually doubt that the research was done in good faith, but I also think internal biases also played into it.

They really tried with the hydrogen vehicles, and I think the Japanese government encouraged it as a matter of environmental policy.

Now they are scrambling to build battery EVs and whatever lobbying they are doing is a stalling tactic, because they know they need time to catch up with their competitors.

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