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Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
41–50 of 520 posts
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#42I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install…
I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve. This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
Only if we had a true oversupply of green energy. Converting electricity to H2 and then back is so incredible inefficient. It's less work to just create better electrical transmission systems. China did that with their high voltage DC lines.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#43This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think a…
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.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#44I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget keeping everything cold enough. On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones. High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
Is the shape round? I bet it's round.
Ultimately, it's shrapnel-shaped.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you can do that at a meaningful rate you might as well install ev charging and just not electrolyse when cars are charging
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage. This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down. But the true point, is as we convert to more and more so…
We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#47When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#48I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
The inefficiency of creating, transporting, and converting hydrogen into motion is way too much to bear for the purpose of eliminating a 45 minute charging stop.
Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#49Re: Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
He didn't say it doesn't have local tanks. Only that it makes h2 local. You can still make h2 to replenish, and have storage. This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down. But the true point, is as we convert to more and more so…
We won't get rid of natural gas any time soon. Ng pipelines are not in any way similar to H2 pipelines except the word 'pipe'. You can't just put hydrogen in them. You can't even retrofit them. You're looking at laying an entirely new pipeline either way. Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expe…
h2 can be co-mingled with Ng and extracted with a molar filter at the other end.
Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.