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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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Electric Vehicles
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japan has this problem as all of its automobile companies decided to invest down the path of hydrogen (as it fit their home country/interests better) over the rest of the worlds EVs. because of it, japanese fully EVs tend to be kind of lackluster, because theyre usually second thought.
I don't understand how anyone anyone thought or thinks it could be better to use electricity to pull hydrogen from water, then turn it back into water to get electricity again, with energy losses of 40-60%. Not while you could just keep the whole chain as electricity, with losses of ~10%.
It’s designed to greenwash natural gas. The petroleum industry threw their weight behind it because you can make hydrogen from methane.
There is the theoretical advantage of storage.
Storing HYDROGEN is an advantage? The thing where the atoms are so small, it diffuses through the walls? The thing that needs insanely high pressure containers? THAT should be an advantage? WTF?
Don’t forget hydrogen embrittlement which means the entire fuel system must be replaced every so many years.
Did you miss the word theoretical? And yes, AFAIK we are already storing some but certainly not at the scale required if that's even possible (I wouldn't want to live anywhere nearby a huge storage of hydrogen). Another related advantage would be the transport of stored hydrogen where transferring electric energy comes at cost when it comes to long distances.
No and there is no theoretical nor a practical advantage. Throwing in the word "theoretical" to make a wrong idea sound valid doesn't work with me.
A gasoline range extender makes more sense than hydrogen.
Gasoline in the EV? That is the worst combination. Also we are storing hydrogen today, so it works to some degree.
No true. That's way more efficient than hydrogen and the gasoline could be substituted by ethanol.
Hybrids are perhaps worse than both ICE and EV. More complex, burns more than the other two, still consumes a shit ton of oil and pollutes a lot. Ethanol has also its problems, like how does one get it in enough quantity. Why do you think we are not driving ethanol cars today?
because oil, and gas companies pay government to keep you their bitches.
Many countries, like Brazil, run cars on pure ethanol, and this makes it a competition to gasoline, which gas companies hate. Over 83% of new car sales in Brazil are flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) capable of running on any blend of ethanol (E100) and gasoline. While the majority of vehicles are capable of using high-percentage ethanol, actual consumption varies, with nearly all gasoline in Brazil currently blended with 27% to 30% anhydrous ethanol.
And ethanol engines run cooler, and last longer because they burn much cleaner.
That's certainly a part of the reason. But I guess a bigger issue is ethanol production where you'd need large fields for "growing" ethanol instead of food. And lastly, it still produces co2.
Yes a hybrid is more complex but less so than hydrogen because the engineering problems of hydrogen haven't yet been fully solved (storage that doesn't use more space than battery or tank).
It's an upgraded ice.
EV with range extender is not hybrid. You keep confirming that you don't really know what you're talking about.
Range extender doesn't make sense which is while serial hybrids died out for cars. At the rpms where gas is most efficient, it's better to drive the wheels directly with the ice than waste energy converting it to electricity with a generator and back into motion with the ev motors.
That's what all hybrids do today.
Ok, my bad, but also doesn't pollute, right?
You make no sense. Of course a range extender pollutes but it's an edge case only for very long distance drives.
Manufacturing hydrogen is way more energy intensive and pollutes much more.
In what way hydrogen manufacturing pollutes much more assuming we are talking about green h2? Sure renewables have a pollution cost associated with manufacturing but I really don't think the end result is much more pollution. Even less so in the cities in resulting co2 and pmN emissions.
Because it takes grid electricity to store, and it takes Diesel trucks to move around. Green H2 is not green, even with electrolysis, it would be more efficient to just use the electricity.
Grid electricity can be from renewables including h2, trucks can be either electric or hydrogen. 🤷
Japan's electrical grid is pretty outdated and has been pushed to it's limit. It simply cannot support an influx of EVs. That's why the government has been pushing hydrogen, which can be produced from electricity like you said, but is "better" produced from natural gas or coal, which they have easy access to. It's a terrible solution to the problem.
Hydrogen also solves the range anxiety issue by being incredibly energy dense, with the minor downside of occasionally exploding.
Japan has the best mass transit infrastructure in the world.
You loose ~50% of electricity in transport.
Hydrogen isn't great, but synthetic methane is much more efficient to store and transport
Wrong. Oil and gas "fact".
1-2% of energy is lost during the step-up transformer from when the electricity is generated to when it is transmitted.
2-4% of energy is lost in the transmission lines
1-2% of energy is lost during the step-down of the transform from the transmission line to distribution.
4-6% of energy is lost during the distribution
https://www.chintglobal.com/sa/en/about-us/news-center/blog/how-much-power-loss-in-transmission-lines.html
Batteries used to kinda suck, and there are still issues Like weight and scarce minerals
Rare earths are not actually rare. No one mined these metals until recently.
We need a fuck ton of the minerals, not just rare earths but nickel and sometimes cobalt
Also degraded batteries can be reprocessed into fresh batteries again, we will only need to mine a lot of them when growing, once the batteries are made we don't need to mine as much.
Given inefficiency you need 10% of virgin materials to make a new one, and there are batteries that don't end up in the recycling stream
It still means every gram of the materials are yielding essentially 10x of use. And when we make these huge batteries it's easier to get them back to the recycling stream since we can easily make that the only way you dispose of them.
Fundamentally as long ad the atoms still exist they should be theoritically recoverable but the last percent is gonna be harder than the first 99%
Materials Recycling needs to be a major research focus
It's only Toyota who went deep into hydrogen. Even then they have 1 model, the Mirai, which is horseshit even without taking the infrastructure problem into account (which should absolutely be taken into account). They sold like dozens. It was a fairly transparent anti-EV deflection. None of the other OEMs made serious foray into the tech, though some did pay it lip service (for the same reasons).
Also importantly, hydrogen doesn't suit Japan any better than anywhere else. They have zero production capability and the import route is an oil exec's fever dream
Oh no, Honda has been talking up Hydrogen just as long as Toyota. Toyota has the Mirai, Honda has the Clarity.
Both companies seem to be stuck going for it for whatever reason though. Hydrogen vehicles are literally more complicated EVs, still use a highly combustible fuel, need even more safety systems than gasoline to prevent fires and explosion at the fueling stations, and the large tanks naturally leak because hydrogen is such a damned small atom that it literally sublimates through the skin of the tank. Hydrogen fuel cells are used to generate electricity for standard electric motors. There is literally no good reason for it with battery technology advancing as it has the last decade.
Meanwhile a BEV can be slowly charged from any standard outlet, and very quickly at dedicated chargers. As quick as an 80% charge in 10 minutes from the cutting edge Chinese batteries and chargers. And that doesn't even get into people being able to charge overnight at home and rarely needing to visit a dedicated charger at all.
Hydrogen makes no sense in any situation with modern battery tech anymore. But for some reason both Toyota and Honda keep trying to beat that damned horse to oblivion.
Honda had the Clarity.
it suited japan better because japan doesn't remotely have the capacity to be making batteries. something china has a huge grapple on. It's governement when to push its basic hydrogen strategy and it keeps pushing for it if you read japanese headlines.
Toyota, Nissan and Honda literally are in consortium for hydrogen mobility
The entire drive train is electric, though. Nobody really does hydrogen combustion (I think it's the nitrogen in the atmospheric air that reacts with the hydrogen to make poisonous gas.)
Taking the drivetrain seriously would mean improvements to all cars with either kind of energy store.
The Japanese government invested in hydrogen, with R&D grants. It was a huge fail.
Then, Toyota stockholders kicked out Toyoda because he said there was no market in EVs. He was right, Toyota is ruling sales with hybrids and PHEVs. Unlike Tesla, Toyoda needed Toyota to make money selling cars, not conning an investor cult.
I don't think I've seen a single hydrogen station or vehicle here in Japan.
Apparently there's ~150, for a country of 125m.
The main issue from what I hear is that they realy though hybrid would be the perfect middle ground, hence why every vehicle they both had was hybrids.
And those should have been easy to move to fully EV when they saw that was the way forward, but apparently they didn't see that, so kept on with the hybrids.
[EDIT] noticed from the reply under that i forgot to add Toyota on this. that is what i ment by "both": Toyota and Honda.
Who's "they"? Cause other than Toyota, the rest of them didn't even care about hybrids until very recently.
But yeah, Toyota really dropped the ball after being the defacto leader of hybrid tech for so long.
Toyota is leading sales worldwide with hydrids and PHEVs.
You guys want companies to make EVs no one is buying. Only Tesla can do that because it's a cult.
I'm in Australia. BYD, MG, and a bunch of others are making a killing with their EVs. It helps that we have (one of) the highest rooftop solar adoption in the world.
Honda has been selling Hybrids since atleast '99, when they came out with a hybrid right before Toyota came out with the Prius.
for a while they have had Hybrid version available for most of their car models.
Not really. The Insight was a gutless two seater designed for CARB compliance. You couldn't even buy one at most dealers.
Toyota Prius was the first serious hybrid. They sold over 6 million of them. Honda sales were 1/25th that.
Ah I stand corrected. I see they never sold them globally outside the local & American markets. And eclipsed by Toyota by about 20x.