Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

carbuzz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 520 posts

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#111

Post by loeg »

stetrain wrote: post #85
wlesieutre wrote: post #8

It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off. https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...

This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.

My state assesses annual car taxes based on MSRP rather than real market value, unfortunately, so these fake MSRPs matter to me. :-(

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#113

Post by pjc50 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #78
aunty_helen wrote: post #60

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

> There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.

Yes, it's not the new oil, it's the same oil in "green" packaging. Plus some comforting lies about carbon capture.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#114

Post by vel0city »

retired wrote: post #72

Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km. This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).

> And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen

That original owner was probably doing all those miles on the free hydrogen given by Toyota.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#115

Post by pjc50 »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #52
pjc50 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user. Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.

How do you solve aeronautical and maritime applications?

The Toyota Mirai neither flies nor floats.

There's a bit of a movement for battery electric ships, but currently limited to short haul ferries. I have a suspicion this simply won't be "solved" for quite some time after car and heating electrification.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#116

Post by ssl-3 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #88
aunty_helen wrote: post #60

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.

Ignoring some of the other issues:

Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.

But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.

So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.

And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.

Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.

It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.

But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.

So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.

(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#117

Post by _aavaa_ »

newyankee wrote: post #110
empathy_m wrote: post #76

At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations. An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains b…

I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech,…

Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.

The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#118

Post by pjc50 »

pfdietz wrote: post #43
pjc50 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user. Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.

In fairness, hydrogen from gas would enable the CO2 to be sequestered. If the vehicle itself burned the natural gas that would require recapturing the CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which is much more challenging. None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.

Carbon sequestration is another of those "if we did this, it might solve the problem, but there's no serious move to do it and pay for it on the scale required, plus it's prone to cheating".

Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

#120

Post by dehrmann »

aunty_helen wrote: post #60

Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished. Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.

> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.

It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.

Post reply on HN