Toyota’s hydrogen-powered Mirai has experienced rapid depreciation • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by crote » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:01 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #467

rsynnott wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is incorrect, unless you're viewing the US as a single market but the EU as multiple (which, I mean, ah, you do you, but that doesn't make any sense from an industry perspective). Last year about 1.3 million BEVs were sold in the US (a minor decline from 2024), 1.9 million BEVs w…

Nation-based segmentation makes the most sense to me because as I understand it (coming from a US-centric perspective, so I may have misunderstandings) there may be additional friction (fees, regulations, etc) buying from another EU country as opposed to someone in the US buying a vehicle from a different state. In many cases, you don't even have to go to another state; dealerships regularly transfer inventory (with…

The entire point of the European Union is to eliminate all of that friction. Most of the rules and regulations have been pushed to the EU level, just like the USA pushed most of its rules and regulations to the federal level. A car only needs a single type approval granted by a single member state, and it can be sold across the entire EU.

There are of course still some tax differences and importing from another member state might be slightly trickier for a consumer than buying it from a dealership in their own country, but I don't see how that is any different from dealing with different kinds of sales tax in the various US states, or having to transfer your car title to another state.

The European single market operates as, well, a single market.

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

#472

Post by sandworm101 » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

vel0city wrote: post #464

sandworm101 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inspection is expected. In the transport industry, all sorts of parts need regular inspection. Batteries are different. Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Lots of parts have time limits, especially in aerospace, but few degrade. Those running fleets see this as unussual and unpredictable which, at scale, means…

> In the transport industry I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store. > Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after…

Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.

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

#473

Post by mapontosevenths » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

travisb wrote: post #448

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You either need batteries that store energy for weeks of consumption, or backup with fossil fuels, and in any case, that makes solar panels more expensive than fossil fuels. I love the wild mental gymnastics and cherry picking data these people put themselves through in order to delude themselves in to believing solar is cheaper than gas. How can it be, when you need to build both. Or freeze in the dark. As you sai…

A big part of it is the industry standard for using the Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCoE) as the benchmark metric. By that metric, solar IS the lowest cost power source. But that definition doesn't take into account availability. This wasn't a problem when all electricity sources were highly available by default. You can burn coal or run the hydro turbines any minute of the year. With the rise of often-unavailable…

> By any metric which takes into account minor availability requirements (eg. supplies electricity at night) solar badly loses its cost advantage. It gets even worse if the metric is the still important "deepest winter night" scenario.

This is wildly incorrect. Batteries have gotten cheaper, solar has gotten cheaper, and even accounting for storage solar now wins by a wide margin even in "wintery" climates.[0]

Ten years ago you were right, but the cost has been falling by a huge percentage every year for about 15 years straight now. There will never be another time when it makes sense to dig up fossil fuels, ship them all over the world, process them, and then set them on fire when we can just slap up a solar panel and store the power for something approximating free on a 20+ year timeline.

Even if we discount the tax breaks (which we should since Trump is a doofus) both the LCOE and LCOS (levelized cost of storage) of PV + battery are lower than for natural gas, coal, nuclear, etc. Wind beats it by a small amount but less of our land is suitable for wind.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation/pdf/...

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

#474

Post by foota » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #361

Symbiote wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people would use 100% rapid charging. Even on a long journey, they can arrive home with, say, 5-10% remaining, and recharge at home. (The car calculates this automatically.)

The range of most EVs is only about 120 miles, which isn't especially useful when they take around six hours to charge.

Maybe most EVs in the wild, but no way for EVs being sold today. There are only 5 cars on this list below 200: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons..., and more than half above 300.

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

#475

Post by crote » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:11 PM UTC

rgmerk wrote: post #221

Plasmoid wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're actually not that far off. Right now, liquid fuels have about 10x the energy density of batteries. Which absolutely kills it for anything outside of extreme short hop flights. But electric engines are about 3x more efficient than liquid fuel engines. So now we're only 3x-4x of a direct replacement. That means we are not hugely far off. Boeing's next major plane won't run on batteries, but the one afterwards def…

Hmmm. If we do simple extrapolation based on a battery density improvement rate of 5% a year, it takes about 30 years to get there. So it's not as crazy as it sounds - and it's also worth noting that there are incremental improvements in aerodynamics and materials so that gets you there faster... However, as others have pointed out, the battery-powered plane doesn't get lighter as it burns fuel.

If we do simple extrapolation, a cellphone-sized battery will reach the 80kWh needed to power a car in as little as 180 years.

Expecting a 5% / year growth rate sustained for 30 years is very optimistic. It is far more likely that we'll hit some kind of diminishing return well before that.

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

#476

Post by crote » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #428

fc417fc802 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct, but burying trees today isn't going to turn them into coal.

The big difference is that when the current coal layers were formed, bacteria to decompose trees hadn't evolved yet. There was a huge gap between trees forming and the ecosystem to break down trees forming, which led to a lot of trees dying and nothing being able to clean it up, which meant it was just left lying there until it was buried by soil and eventually turned into coal.

Try to bury a tree today, and nature will rapidly break it down. It won't form coal because there's nothing left to form coal.

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

#477

Post by vel0city » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #472

vel0city wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the transport industry I'm not in the transport industry, I just want to go to the grocery store. > Performance loss over time leading to replacement decisions is unussual. Virtually no other part degrades in performance the moment you use it. Tires? Brake pads? Lubricants? Belts? Springs? Bearings? Bushings? Seals? There's tons of parts on my cars that have expected wear intervals that will need replacing after…

Nope. All those parts work at basically 100% until failure or replacement. Some even improve with a bit of use (tires, brake pads, seals). They wear, they dont degrade. Batteries drop in performance from day one.

So tires with 2/32nds will have better grip in the rain than warmed up fresh ones? They just get better until they pop? That must be the reason why race cars only use heavily worn tires instead of fresh ones when they race. Engine lubricant is better at 5,000mi than 1mi?

You only bother buying heavily used motor oil and tires right? After all they perform so much better.

And springs and shocks are perfect examples of things that start to lose their effectiveness on a curve instead of necessarily just all at once. You can tell the dampening effects get worse and worse, the car might start sagging more, etc. They have a whole range of performance before they need to be replaced.

Even the motor itself will often slowly have reduced compression due to slowly looser fitting parts before actual failure, fuel injectors will slowly get more gummed up over time, valves might get gunked up having reduced airflow, spark plugs are slowly vaporizing themselves and can have worse spark characteristics throughout their life, etc. Its not like everything just continues working 100% until they snap. Everything that's moving or reacting is slowly wearing itself out.

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

#478

Post by crote » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

ssl-3 wrote: post #305

aunty_helen wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even the grid, by the time you’ve done the electrolysis you’d be better off just charging a battery. Also, compressing and cooling a gas takes another huge hit at the efficiency. Electrolysis comes out at atmospheric pressures. Oh and the platinum electrodes you need… I’m also just now visualising a hydrogen pipeline fire… terrible terrible idea.

It's the everything, yeah. There's a lot working against using hydrogen as the local energy source for automotive propulsion in the world that we presently have. Some advantages are that a fuel cell that accepts hydrogen and air at one end and emits electricity and water at the other can be lighter-weight than a big battery, and it can [potentially] be refueled quickly for long trips. Some disadvantages: We need a co…

> A quick Google suggests that a regular 120v US outlet might charge EVs at a rate somewhere in the range of 3 to 5 miles per hour. So a dozen or so hours sitting, plugged in at home every day, is enough to cover most folks' every-day driving.

And this gets significantly better once you start using 240v sockets - like the US is already using for dryers. Got a dryer in your garage? Guess what, you are only a weekend project away from having an overnight EV charger in your garage!

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

#479

Post by rsynnott » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

bdcravens wrote: post #467

rsynnott wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is incorrect, unless you're viewing the US as a single market but the EU as multiple (which, I mean, ah, you do you, but that doesn't make any sense from an industry perspective). Last year about 1.3 million BEVs were sold in the US (a minor decline from 2024), 1.9 million BEVs w…

Nation-based segmentation makes the most sense to me because as I understand it (coming from a US-centric perspective, so I may have misunderstandings) there may be additional friction (fees, regulations, etc) buying from another EU country as opposed to someone in the US buying a vehicle from a different state. In many cases, you don't even have to go to another state; dealerships regularly transfer inventory (with…

From the point of view of the manufacturers, the Single Market is, ah, a single market; they only have to get type approval once, and then they can sell anywhere. The only real complicating factor is Ireland and Malta, which drive on the left side of the road (and some niche cars will never be released there as a consequence; for instance Tesla stopped selling Model S/X in a left hand drive configuration a while back, though they now seem to have stopped selling both in Europe entirely, in any case).

Post-Brexit, the UK has its own type certification (and of course it also has the left hand drive problem), and, again, some niche car models may be available in the EU but not the UK. But in practice, for mainstream stuff, the manufacturers tend to treat it as just part of the European market.

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

#480

Post by bryanlarsen » Sun, Feb 22, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

tedk-42 wrote: post #358

MaKey wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Is suspect large trucks may eventually move to hydrogen [...] They won't, why would they? The number of hydrogen gas stations is going down and the price is going up. Batteries are good enough already - the Mercedes eActros 600 with its 600 kWh battery has a range of 500 km.

Lol yes lets just casually plug into a 1.2MW charger and not take down the electricity of the nearby town while I charge my truck. Nuclear trucks and boats are what I envision so maybe I'm the one who needs a reality check.

Electrifying all transport in the nation would increase electricity load by 20%.

But even if 100% of all vehicles sold today was electric, it would still take ~20 years before almost 100% of vehicles on the road were electric. And it's not, so we're probably looking at > 30 years to increase electricity load by 20%.

That annual increase is far less than the increase caused by data centers. It's about the same as the annual increase in load caused by increased use of air conditioning.