Toyota's Hydrogen Future Is Crumbling As Owners File Lawsuits, Call For Buybacks...
source link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/04/22/2353248/toyotas-hydrogen-future-is-crumbling-as-owners-file-lawsuits-call-for-buybacks
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
Toyota's Hydrogen Future Is Crumbling As Owners File Lawsuits, Call For Buybacks
Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system
binspamdupenotthebestofftopicslownewsdaystalestupid freshfunnyinsightfulinterestingmaybe offtopicflamebaittrollredundantoverrated insightfulinterestinginformativefunnyunderrated descriptive typodupeerror
Do you develop on GitHub? You can keep using GitHub but automatically sync your GitHub releases to SourceForge quickly and easily with this tool so your projects have a backup location, and get your project in front of SourceForge's nearly 20 million monthly users. It takes less than a minute. Get new users downloading your project releases today!
Another user wrote on Reddit: "We all need to realize that we bought a vehicle that had, at best, a questionable future. Unfortunately in this instance, the gamble didn't pay off, and the technology of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles does not appear to be something the vehicle industry is invested in pursuing. Very similar to HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, there was one clear winner and in our instance, the battery-powered EV won out over H2. Its sucks, but it is what it is."
-
›
Comparing the purchase of a car to the purchase of an optical disc drive suggests the guy in the last paragraph has way too much money on his hands.
-
Maybe, but he's right. You buy into some new tech and there is a chance you'll have backed the wrong horse. Probably better to think of a big purchase like a car as an investment, which may go down as well as up (well cars rarely go up in value, but you know what I mean). Early adopters of EVs took a similar risk, but at least they could just charge it at home if they'd never built any public chargers.
-
When I bought an EV over a decade ago, part of the deal was that Nissan were helping to build the UK's first charging network. They ensured that the infrastructure was there. I understand that Tesla later did something similar in the US.
Toyota don't seem to have done that with hydrogen filling stations. I'd say that consumers had a reasonable expectation that they would. A buyback seems reasonable, with deductions for mileage.
-
Makes me think how Tesla went out and built their own charging network, along with integrating the charge locations into the navigation system.
At the same time, H2 is really just another type of battery, so as battery technology gets better I’d suspect H2 would become less interesting. We should also remember H2, is likely produced either from oil & gas or from electricity, so we need to add a conversion loss to the equation.
-
-
That's the thing with EVs. While it would suck if the manufacturer went bust (e.g. Fisker is on the brink right now), the car itself would still function for its entire lifetime. Plug it into a home or public charger and its ready to go again.
Conversely, if you bought a car that operates on MagicFuel(tm), and the only nearby MagicFuel station is going to close down, then now you own a brick on wheels. And adding insult to injury the only reason MagicFuel existed was because a cynical automaker wanted to dis
-
-
To me it implies that, rather than the author of the statement, it is the people who bought the hydrogen cars had way too much money on their hands. It would be fairly careless of someone to buy a HD-DVD player in 2008 while knowing that Netflix wouldn't send them to your home, none of the other major manufacturers or movie studios supported it, and only 1 video rental store out of 100 currently carried them. Doing essentially the same thing with a purchase as large as a car is just irresponsibly throwing m
-
> has way too much money on his hands.
that's basically the case for people who overspend on next-gen tech cars.
so it does track. -
Eh, let's not make it personal. It's just telling us the buyer isn't a young punk. No kidding, none of these vehicles are for the young and poor.
Being an old guy myself, I remember when it wasn't clear whether BluRay or HD-DVD (or for that matter, Beta vs. VHS) would take over the market. It stunk to be on the side which eventually lost. My wedding video is on the single Beta tape I still have in a drawer somewhere. But if you bought an EV in the last ten years, it was already abundantly clear batteries won
-
-
if they don't change soon their strategy. But apparently they like more the natgas-on-lipstick aka hydrogen.
Also, they make some horrible and deceiving clickbait ads for supposed future battery breakthroughs. During 2023 and 2024 one could see every now and then articles with huge letters about a battery breakthrough that happened, and if you clicked and read it, it said that toyota is working hard on new battery technologies which in the future roughly around 2030 may make it possible to have 1000 miles batteries. And all this, in order to deceive people into not buying now an EV, but wait for toyota's... battery R&D department. Despicable.-
The one pure EV that Toyota currently makes seems like a compliance car, where the only reason it's not a terrible car is because they borrowed so much from the Prius.
-
The one pure EV that Toyota makes was co-developed with Subaru and is in fact a terrible EV by current standards. It would have been a mediocre EV 10 years ago.
Perhaps "disappointing" is more appropriate? For a company that has decades of electric drivetrain experience is is perplexing that Toyota could produce something so subpar. They rode their battery patent exclusivity for so long they forgot how to be competitive in an evolving market.
=Smidge=-
They put the majority of their EV R&D into hybrids and plug-in hybrids (and to be fair, had lots of early success in that area), thinking hybrids would be a bridge technology until hydrogen was ready. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have a plan B.
-
-
-
I don't have a link, but MIT is building several hydrogen creation plants based on tech they developed that can efficiently product hydrogen from water. Hydrogen is the most practical future as with this tech in place, you're looking at a fuel with almost zero footprint. It doesn't need to be a fuel cell to work, either. It can work in an ICE. Carbon neutral ethanol is achievable as well and most ICE cars support it now because of the Brazilian market, but profit will cause many ethanol providers to not do
-
-
I'm not sure who thought this would be a good idea.
Hydrogen, to the extent it makes sense at all seems a much better fit for trucks. Trucks have more room but weight requirements (and hydrogen is light but takes a lot of space), and have far more predictable routes like moving in between warehouses making it much easier to build a few hydrogen stations in the right places.
The problem I believe is that hydrogen is so far very expensive, and so even though that trucks make a good fit as far as infrastructure goes, the price probably discourages commercial operations.
So it sucks price-wise, and it sucks infrastructure-wise, and it's terrible if you run out of hydrogen. Very little reason to buy one of those only than risking a whole lot of money to be an early adopter.
-
The price thing is interesting if the info in the article is correct. It's claiming that in the US, hydrogen is about $36/kg.... but in Europe, it's only $15/kg and just $11/kg in Japan.
So what's up with the US hydrogen? Has the price tripled only in the US in the past three years? Or did it also significantly increase in Europe and Japan during the same time and their starting price was also just that much lower?
-
All commercial hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels, Everyone had the idea that hydrogen would be cheap and green, but industrial scale electrolysis is only now being realized, it accounts for about 0.1% of all hydrogen produced.
-
-
It's actually not very light either, Apparently hydrogen needs very high pressure (much more than propane) so you need very sturdy tanks which are heavy. I understand like 20kg tank for 1 kg of H2 (https://hyfindr.com/en/hydrogen-knowledge/hydrogen-tank)
-
It's not just the price of the hydrogen itself. It's also the cost of the tanks and fuel cells, which both wear out (and are both expensive). The tanks in a Mirai are rated for 15 years, which sounds ok for a sedan, but a truck would be expected to have a much longer service life than that. I suspect the pressure cycling in a truck would put more stress on the tanks as well. Building them for longer life would make them even more expensive and even heavier.
The fuel cells themselves also wear out. Toyota cur
-
-
At 1/3 yield, electrolyze for Hydrogen has parity with Diesel at about 150-200 €/MWh. This is about twice what a Europe in energy crisis pays per wattage.
Now mind you, that is not why Toyota or a lot of Japanese companies care: They care because they know they are one fun happy global ship war away from being completely barred from using Petrochemicals at any scale.This create a interesting paradox: Technically one of the Japanese companies could foot the R&D bill to make this technology competitive on the potential edge it has, but the core interest is just to keep a patent pool and production going so Japan don't have to deal with the worst consequences of WW3.
The end result is that we each decade gets some vehicle/production based of Hydrogen, which go and die in the news cycle because its just there as auxiliary potential technology. -
Toyota has only ever used hydrogen tech as spoiler and FUD to counter the uptake of battery electric vehicles. It never stood a chance of taking off for a variety of reasons and was never intended to. Same for their other efforts of late - liquid hydrogen power (not merely compressed but liquid), ammonia power, solid state batteries (which they've been claiming could come any day for the last 10 years) etc. All intended to dampen enthusiasm for BEVs and spread the illusion of viable alternatives. And yeah s
-
+1000
i would mod you up, but already commented on this thread.
-
-
I like the idea of hydrogen as a fuel source, but to buy a car powered by it and then filing lawsuits cause you cant find fuel is a bit ridiculous. The shit might as well be leprechaun juice, and then they want to act surprised
-
I understand the law suit. The car was sold to you as the future of movement, and without a steady hydrogen source, you don't get the movement.
A car is a tool to move people and stuff from A to B, and without fuel, it ceases to fulfill its promise, on which it was sold.
-
Yeah, but oh man you have to be pretty daft to not have seen this coming. No serious group of people thought there was a reasonable chance that hydrogen was the immediate future. They were gambling and they lost. If they didn't understand they were gambling? Just absolutely daft. A fool and their money. And yeah, I'd apply this to the first BEV users too. It wasn't certain they would be successful, and would have a lot of pain points.
-
You are the consumer, not the industry insider. If the sale was happening with the promise of an ever improving hydrogen infrastructure, and this didn't come to pass, then the promise leading to the sale was not fulfilled, and this could be seen as culpa in contrahendo.
If that argument holds, the court will decide. But as with every contract, they can be ligitated if one side feels wronged.
-
-
-
-
I'd like to get one of these to park in a barn for 40-50 years. It would make an interesting museum piece.
-
Comparing the fuel production efficiency of hydrogen at 61% to that of an electric vehicle (EV) at 95% (T&E 2020), it's evident that hydrogen was never a particularly favorable option. A decade ago, lithium batteries were not as energetically efficient, but they held promise as a revolutionary technology. Now, with advancements in battery technologies offering better range, efficiency, and the ability to charge within 10 minutes for at least 100 miles, the superiority of EVs becomes even more pronounce
-
In case someone was wondering why it can take over an hour to refuel, it's not because of the pumps as the summary erroneously mentions. According to the article:
To me, this looks like poor design of the pump and/or the car. Heat tracing, anyone?
-
...a great research project, but it's NOT even close to ready for widespread adoption as a motor fuel
There are a LOT of really hard technical problems remaining to be solved -
If I had the money to burn on a Mirai, I could likewise hire a few Mechanical/Chemical engineering majors to build me an at-home electrolitic fueling station.
It's not that hard to find hydrogen sources these days. Some people even have it plumbed to their residence.
Recommend
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK