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I don't understand how "Japan is betting on Hydrogen" meme survived this long. Toyota sold something like up to 20k total of passenger FCEV in past 10-20 years. That's less than a quarter worth in Prius sales numbers. It always has been a joke and a futurism porn.

Is it coming from some internal Slack channel at Tesla or something? Whoever spreading it don't know what they're talking about.

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Between METI, Toyota & others, they appear to have spent > $40B over multiple decades.

It's a bit silly to downplay their investment based on the sales numbers of Toyota Mirai.

So we should ignore the Mirai sales numbers and conclude, uh, what, that the entire $40B investment is wasted and hasn't produced anything of value?

Or if we want to be charitable, surely the $40B has resulted in some advancement of the scientific knowledge. From which we can conclude that the "hydrogen economy" remains a pipe dream despite all the investment so far?

$40B is also less than a single year's worth of defense budget, of Japan, so... it's just about what's expected of a vaguely forward looking government funded program. It's not really a giant high risk make-or-break bet.

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