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Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation

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

#421

Post by bdcravens »

breve wrote: post #309
bdcravens wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the bz* models you listed are Chinese models, and while the Woodland and C-HR are listed on their US website, they aren't really available for purchase (though I did find one C-HR if I'm willing to drive 500 miles to buy it). Obviously the world auto market is greater than the US, but the US is the leading market for Toyota in terms of total units sold, so it's odd to me that if I drive to the Toyota dealershi…

China is the biggest EV market, Europe is the second biggest, and North America is third. For EVs the US will remain lower priority than China and Europe for a while yet. Toyota understands how to sell cars. It's funny how this thread has gone from "Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines" to "Toyota is not prioritizing small EV markets first".

You are correct that China is the number one market in terms of BEV sales, but the US is number two, selling more than 3-5 combined. That's an odd way to define a small EV market. Funny thing is, in terms of rankings, the US is actually a "small market" when it comes to gas-only cars.

Prior to moving to only BEVs, our family bought several Toyotas (and before that, only Hondas), and I was disappointed to find that I had no options (at the time, and in the 4 years since, between the 2 manufacturers, only 2 have come to market that I can purchase). Perhaps VW and Kia don't understand how to sell cars, but they understood how to sell them to me.

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

#422

Post by fuzzfactor »

Joker_vD wrote: post #404
adrian_b wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the beginning, the oceans were acidic, because they were formed by the condensation of volcanic gases, which consisted of water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride (i.e. hydrochloric acid) and a few other less abundant acids. In time, the oceans have become less and less acidic, by dissolving from the volcanic silicate rocks the oxides of the alkaline metals and alkali earth met…

I am fairly certain they teach the gist of all of that in even in school-level textbooks on biology/geography.

Hopefully they never stop.

adrian puts it quite well though.

Keeping that in mind;

>What role, if any, did carbonate mineral formation have in sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere?

Looks like as much as it possibly could.

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

#423

Post by margalabargala »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #418
margalabargala wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's extremely safe, except in the event of a black swan event, in which case it becomes extremely unsafe. This is compared to, for example, a coal plant, which is quite unsafe to be near constantly, all the time.

Pull back from the extremes a little bit and it's an excellent synopsis. Keep in mind an off-white swan can be pretty bad too :) The main thing about such uncommon or even unlkely events, is that nobody knows what to do about them.

I suspect it's all a moot point.

Prices of solar and battery are plummeting. If anything they are dropping faster than they were 5—10 years ago.

10 years from now I suspect the grid will largely be transitioning remaining fossil fuel base load to solar and wind backed with batteries, because the economics will be there to overbuild the solar and battery to the extent needed to provide reliable base load through the winter.

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

#424

Post by fuzzfactor »

ACCount37 wrote: post #411
fuzzfactor wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without cryogenics, methane has such low energy density that a low-pressure fuel tank would still have to be as big as a bus for your compact methane-powered vehicle to go as far as you could on a few gallons of gasoline.

Why? CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits. They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.

Good question.

It's just the physical properties of methane.

That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car.

Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.

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

#425

Post by pfdietz »

closewith wrote: post #398
pfdietz wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A BTU of hydrogen requires more energy to compress to a given pressure than a BTU of natural gas, but hydrogen also has lower viscosity, so less recompression is needed. The point you raise does not rule out hydrogen pipelines.

It does, definitively.

If it does, then it also rules out long distance transmission of electrical power, as that is even more expensive. And the hydrogen advantage is even greater when one considers one can piggyback storage onto this system, as is done in natural gas pipelines. The electrical system would need additional batteries which are much more expensive per unit of storage capacity.

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

#426

Post by ACCount37 »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #424
ACCount37 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? CNG ICE vehicles exist, especially in parts of the world that have cheap natural gas and expensive gasoline - often as dual fuel retrofits. They have to deal with high pressure tanks, but compared to the woes of hydrogen storage, that's downright benign.

Good question. It's just the physical properties of methane. That's why they use high-pressure tanks because with low-pressure gas storage, the tank needs to be bigger than the car. Energy density of methane is still lower than any other hydrocarbons.

Again: current day CNG ICEs don't actually have "fuel tanks bigger than the car".

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

#427

Post by seanmcdirmid »

smcin wrote: post #289
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.

Independent of that. I'm saying there was some wisdom to continuing to fund it in Japan post-2010 as a hedge in case REEs were unavailable. (Separate to whether the idea originally made sense back in the 2000s.)

Rare earths aren’t really that rare though. China has been the only country to invest in refining, sure, but any other country, including Japan or USA could have made similar investments and simply didn’t, because Chinese refiners were cheap and they couldn’t compete. Yes, the market failed to solve the REE problem at us, but it is not because we don’t have access to the inputs and we don’t know how to refine them.

Japan could have simply started their own refining business if they were really worried about REEs in 2010. Yes, it would take them until 2015 or so to ramp up, but that was still 11 years ago.

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

#428

Post by WalterBright »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #284
WalterBright wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but it's a fallacious argument. It's still emitting the same amount of CO2 into the atmosphere. You can also bury dead trees in a landfill.

The point is that emitting CO2 into the atmosphere was never the problem. Adding geological carbon back into the carbon cycle is the root cause of the entire thing. You can certainly bury dead trees. I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture. I somehow doubt the economics work out since what is all the carbon capture research even about given that we could just b…

> I'm not sure how deep you'd need to go to accomplish long term (ie geological timeframe) capture.

Coal mines are sequestered trees.

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

#429

Post by WalterBright »

shmeeed wrote: post #400
WalterBright wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's just verbal sleight of hand. There's no such thing as "green" CO2.

Yes there is. I used to fall for the same lie, but it's just not true. It's a question of system boundaries. Green CO2 was recently (in geological terms) captured from the atmosphere into biomass, that's why its release is basically net zero. Fossil CO2 hasn't been part of the atmosphere in eons (back in e.g. the Crustacean, the CO2 ratio was many times higher), so its release is additive.

So bury the trees. Or run them through the sawmill and build houses.

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

#430

Post by vkou »

dehrmann wrote: post #120
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.

> It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines.

Which is also the reason why its plug-in hybrids are so reliable, despite being dramatically more complex than either an EV or an ICE.

Toyota is very good at making engines, and it would be insane to throw away all that expertise to deliver a half-assed new product.

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