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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

>> Environmental groups have long criticized Toyota for being slow to move toward fully electric vehicles, instead clinging to gas-electric hybrid technology.

When you run a company as large and old as Toyota, you always hedge your bets. There are some other options to battery-powered electric vehicles (hydrogen IC). They are currently not as mature but anyone running something as big as Toyota needs to hedge against that sort of outlier tech. If Toyota abandoned IC, got rid of its IC production lines, they would suffer hugely if hydrogen IC one out as the green tech. All the major car companies do such things. That's why they have survived as long as they have.

Would Tesla survive if a new hydrogen storage killed the market for battery-powered cars? Toyota has seen and survived a few such revolutions.

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Hydrogen as a sole technology is going to keep eating that 2-3x energy penalty versus batteries regardless of storage tech. Hydrogen IC has even worse efficiency than FC. The only exception would be if hydrogen mining yields world-changing amounts of the stuff.

As a hybrid technology, it has a case. If you run 80% of the time on battery and 20% of the time on hydrogen at 50% RTE, you burn 120% of the fuel. But if you weigh 30% less, you could end up saving energy. The up to 60% efficiency of the fuel cell is losing energy as heat, and people like to run the heater, so some of that energy isn't lost in appropriate climates. And of course, refueling is faster for road trips. The best system weight is probably for the experimental direct-ammonia alkaline membrane fuel cells, assuming it's possible to stabilize them, because ammonia fuel systems (about 100 psi) are much simpler than hydrogen systems (about 10000 psi!). So there's a little room left for the hydrogen fans. But it's fundamentally a battery-powered car most of the time.

Bet hedging would’ve meant introducing the BZ4X years ago. Instead, there were 8 years between when Toyota announced their first hydrogen car and their first electric vehicle. This if an example of simply betting wrong.

hydrogen was the right bet for trucks and buses. they are planning hide infrastructure in Asia.

the world is not only southern California and Sweden.

I’m willing to bet hydrogen was the wrong bet for busses too, esp in Asia given the explosion of BEV tech and production coming out of china.

my point is that exporting value added lithium have nothing to do about what is or isn't best. also my comment had a typo. wide not hide

it's as disconnected as building roads and selling aluminum if you have bauxite ore.

Exactly. Toyota's CEO also explained a few weeks ago that they need to build cars for the whole world. Many countries are not ready yet with infrastructure for electric cars.

I would also add since insurance companies don't want to insure the transportation of batteries in container ships, it makes it difficult for Toyota to produce electric cars in all regions, it would mean they would always need to have a battery factory nearby. https://toyotatimes.jp/en/toyota_news/1055_1.html#anchorTitl...

> are not ready yet with infrastructure for electric cars

The same infrastructure they need for everything else in their life. I bet they have way better access to electricity than they do hydrogen. Or even gasoline, frankly. Solar panels are cheap.

> Toyota has seen and survived a few such revolutions.

That sounds really interesting, I'd love to learn more. What such revolutions has Toyota survived?

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