> are now showing that they had no plans to embrace cleaner vehicles as an overall company strategy.
If you read the NYT article that is the source for this, though, that's not the whole story. The real issue is that Toyota placed a big bet on hydrogen, which turned out to be the wrong clean energy bet, and now they are caught flat-footed.
It's like people who bet on Mesos and then later had to try to catch up because the world chose Kubernetes. It's not like those people were against "container orchestration", they just bet on the wrong tech.
I dont think hydrogen is the wrong bet, it just the mature evolution of the electric economy. Batteries cant hold enough power per pound/size or charge as fast as hydrogen and we will need hydrogen for those applications that batteries cant handle, like driving across the country or powering trains on our current rail network. Furthermore, electricity cant be piped through our existing gas infrastructure. Hydrogen complements solar and batteries but I think solar and battery will get into consumer hands first. Consumers don't require the high density energy storage that hydrogen/oil allows.
A 500 mile Tesla has a lot more internal space than a similarly sized ICE vehicle, which has more internal space than an similarly sized Hydrogen vehicle. Volume is a bigger constraint than weight for land vehicles. Hydrogen might be the better option for airplanes, though.
Hydrogen has massive losses when piped and causes embrittlement. Electricity is much easier to transport.
Can you explain why would one power trains by hydrogen, when there are already electricty lines running over tracks ? I cannot imagine a case, Unless we dont trust the grid reliability.
I didn't know, so your comment prompted me to do some reading. Apparently diesel-electric is what has been in use more or less from the start. It's too hard to make clutches usable for trains.
Most freight in the world is diesel (that is diesel electric). For passenger trains, only tourist trains run on non-electric lines - many steam engines, but there are some diesel as well. (Amtrak should take this as an insult)
Most (maybe all?) of metrolink in southern california is not yet electrified or even entirely double tracked. 12m boardings a year before the pandemic so it still gets used.
Fast Charging of current fast charger is already plenty fast. And next generation that is already being deployed is even faster. Before Hydrogen vehicles could reach even 0.1% market share that advantage will be gone.
And it totally ignores the massive issues with hydrogen charging. Charger frozen to the car, constantly broken, incredibly difficult, huge issues handling high volume, require a lot of power and so on.
> Batteries cant hold enough power per pound/size
A comparable Tesla is lighter then a Mirai. Batteries still have massive amounts of improvements to make. Structural batteries is gone make it even lighter and battery density is improving every single year.
FCV on the other hand have far less ways to be lighter then they currently are.
EV will beat FCV on weight and efficiency by far and the lead is increasing.
> like driving across the country
That already works great with EV.
> or powering trains
Why not just use methanol? Almost the same as current tech for diesel trains and you can make it in almost the same way as hydrogen if you really want to make it carbon neutral.
> Furthermore, electricity cant be piped through our existing gas infrastructure.
Electric infrastructure that can do that already exists. Also, doing that is actually very, very costly and not worth doing. This infrastructure then ends up suffering from hydrogen embitterment and has massive leakage and is really expensive to maintain.
> Hydrogen complements solar and batteries but I think solar and battery will get into consumer hands first. Consumers don't require the high density energy storage that hydrogen/oil allows.
There are already many companies who are trying to make batteries that are more efficient and cheaper at storing energy then creating hydrogen. Using hydrogen as a battery is inefficient and expensive.
Grid batteries don't need to be energy dense. The only thing that matters is cost.
It's been obvious for 5+ years that hydrogen was the wrong tech though, and Toyota just kept stubbornly doubling down on it. I don't really feel sorry for them. There's just so many problems with hydrogen, from distribution to storage, to the more fundamental problem that most hydrogen today is produced from fossil fuels and we don't have a way to efficiently produce it from renewables.
Most large automakers have really been dragging their feet when it comes to electric vehicles. Tesla has had a real and visible impact. Now, years after Dieselgate, VW is pretty openly trying to copy Tesla's plan, bringing battery production in-house, etc. Their new CEO seems to admire Elon Musk. Car companies are doing preorders and trying to model new EV launches after what Tesla is doing, etc.
If you read the NYT article that is the source for this, though, that's not the whole story. The real issue is that Toyota placed a big bet on hydrogen, which turned out to be the wrong clean energy bet, and now they are caught flat-footed.
It's like people who bet on Mesos and then later had to try to catch up because the world chose Kubernetes. It's not like those people were against "container orchestration", they just bet on the wrong tech.