[FreakyT]

The key difference between Toyota's approach and Tesla's was simple: Tesla built out their own charging infrastructure.

Just like with battery-electric-vehicles, there's a chicken and egg problem: no one will buy a car if there's nowhere to charge/fuel it, but no one will build fueling/charging stations if no one has that type of car. If Toyota was serious about hydrogen, they should have done what Tesla did, and built a countrywide network of hydrogen stations.

[gonehome]

Part of the difficulty was that when starting off early EV adopters already had charging infrastructure in their homes the same isn't true for hydrogen. Tesla later was able to build and expand superchargers, but initially people just charged at home (and still mostly do except for longer trips).

There isn't a path for hydrogen to build out like that - you need the entire infrastructure at once, there isn't a real path to success there. Failure was obvious imo based on this alone (there are other issues too).

I'm not even sure Toyota really expected anything other than failure? Based on the attention they gave it, it mostly seemed like something they could point to for marketing and then ignore with some justification that their own failure is evidence people don't want non-gasoline alternatives.

[Dylan16807]

Toyota has a lot of money. If they wanted to make a thousand hydrogen stations they could have done it, even without the option of slow home charging. If hydrogen was a good fuel it would have been a reasonable option.

[gonehome]

Has there ever been an example of that working in history?

Even with lots of money, I think that’s a story of how to go bankrupt.

[fragmede]

The Tesla Supercharger network is part of the calculation on buying a Tesla vs any other electric car, and was, and is, a huge investment by Tesla. As to bankruptcy, ask the shorts how Tesla is doing.

[gonehome]

The supercharger is a counter example.

It was built out over time while early adopters had the ability to charge at home. It explicitly didn’t require being built up all at once because people could charge at home.

[Dylan16807]

Has there ever been an example of that failing in history? I'm not sure you can find any historical situation that's close enough to this one to make a good analogy, especially because hydrogen isn't even a good fuel to start with.

> Even with lots of money, I think that’s a story of how to go bankrupt.

Well on a pure product/market basis they probably never should have made these hydrogen cars at all.

[eigen]

> Has there ever been an example of that failing in history? I'm not sure you can find any historical situation that's close enough to this one to make a good analogy, especially because hydrogen isn't even a good fuel to start with.

I'd think Iridium satellite phone is a great example of this. Motorola spent $5B to setup a constellation of satellites to sell $3k phones. It failed. turns out spending a ton of money to create a market is a huge gamble and the market can move in unexpected ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...

[gonehome]

> Has there ever been an example of that failing in history?

Zune, Windows Phone, Betamax, HD-DVD - maybe not perfect analogies, but there are lots of examples of people throwing lots of money at something to try to force widespread adoption and failing because the market doesn’t want it.

[Dylan16807]

If betamax and HD-DVD count as failures, then surely VHS and bluray count as successes?

The other two don't work as well as infrastructure analogies.

[simondotau]

Betamax was not a failure, it just took second place to VHS in the consumer market where rental tapes was the dominant use case. Betamax still had moderate market share and found success in various professional niches.

Listing it alongside actual failures like HD-DVD is disingenuous.

[antris]

> Has there ever been an example of that working in history?

Gas stations.

[janheidbrink]

After reading your post, I was curious how the chicken/egg problem was solved at that time. Searching for "first cars gas stations" on Google, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station which states

"The first drive-in filling station [...] opened to the motoring public [...] on December 1, 1913 [...]. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks."

So gas stations have actually not been built in a large upfront effort, but existing infrastructure was used to distribute gas.

[Animats]

I wonder when the last gas station will close.

[gonehome]

I don't think that was all at once - and it was replacing horses?

[tikiman163]

The problem with hydrogen fuel is mainly one of supply. Even if they built hydrogen stations every 4 blocks across the whole world, the technology necessary to generate enough hydrogen to run even 5% of all the cars simply doesn't exist yet. We've had advance in the field of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it still takes more electricity to do than you get from using the resulting fuel can generate.

Other sources of Hydrogen simply can't keep up with power generation or transportation needs.

[pajko]

> We've had advance in the field of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it still takes more electricity to do than you get from using the resulting fuel can generate.

That's not necessarily true. Several years ago I have read somewhere that industrially water is not split by electricity (at least directly) but by heating metal plates to >1500 degrees Celsius and spraying water on them, or something like that. That's tremendous heat, but nowadays it's possible to reach so high temperatures by just using solar energy [1].

The technology is not yet feasible, but who knows, where it will be in 10 years... It also took some time for solar panel manufacturing to reach today's efficiency numbers [2].

[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-th...

[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/brief-history-solar...

[perilunar]

> There isn't a path for hydrogen to build out like that

It's easy enough to produce hydrogen at home. Compressing it to 70 MPa and then storing it would be expensive though.

[nickik]

> The key difference between Toyota's approach and Tesla's was simple: Tesla built out their own charging infrastructure.

No it isn't. The key difference is that Telsa picked the right technology and Toyota didn't.

Tesla could build its own infrastructure because the grid exists already and building chargers is not that hard.

Toyota couldn't because building hydrogen infrastructure is insanely incredibly stupidly expensive. Even had they tried, it would have been a gigantic money shredder.

Building fuel-cell cars is really expensive, in addition the the infrastructure they are also losing money on each car.

So basically, your asking Toyota to spend billions to build infrastructure that loses money, and more billions to build cars that lose money.

The right technology choice matters!

[taneq]

If someone's choices don't make sense, you're not understanding their motivations. Toyota didn't mistakenly think that hydrogen was the way of the future, they chose it as a trendy "future tech" to make them look green and keep CARB at bay while they continued to sell exclusively ICE-powered vehicles. It was never intended to be a mainstream technology.

(Their hybrid cars are cool but for many years after introducing them, Toyota was actively hostile to any attempts to charge the batteries independently of the onboard ICE generator.)

[rcMgD2BwE72F]

> The key difference between Toyota's approach and Tesla's was simple: Tesla built out their own charging infrastructure.

No. The vast majority of Tesla charging sessions are done at home (and it cost little to charge at night, for most people). Toyota cannot compete with that if they continue to sell hydrogen (which they promote it as being green while 99% is produced from natural gas). They just don't competition and one of the two is dead on arrival. Hydrogen may have a future, but certainly not on the road.

[notJim]

> (which they promote it as being green while 99% is produced from natural gas)

If the carbon-containing part of the production was sequestered, it could reduce the carbon intensity of the fuel greatly, couldn't it? Still has to be extracted and stuff of course.

[AtlasBarfed]

Remember that Tesla is still a small company in terms of sales, business units, number of models, certainly only recently are they making a big numbers splash.

And they have a charging infrastructure.

Big Auto has:

- locations to put chargers (dealerships that are often in busy commercial areas close to highways)

- lobbying power (to get buildout incentives)

- a lot of money, at least right now

- lawyers and negotiating power

Remember, the grid already exists. A "charging infrastructure" is some last mile wiring and plopping down charger ports, ok, and maybe some review/planning/negotiation with the local power companies.

As soon as major companies are all-in (GM, VW currently), then Electrify America won't be able to get away with their crappy service, will build out, and the dealerships will provide a lot of expansion.

I believe GM could make a usable near-worldwide charging network in less than a year with their dealerships. I know the dealerships have been a massive foot dragging barrier for EV adoption outside of Tesla, but GM does have some power with them, and the writing should be on the wall.

You move to EV, or you are a shady used car lot.

[gonehome]

Dealerships suck and they dislike EVs (for political reasons, and for low maintenance cost service reasons) - I'm bearish on their ability to roll out charging via dealerships.

They might try, but I wouldn't be surprised if dealers parked cars in the spots for charging, had them in locked off areas, had them turned off or otherwise inaccessible, etc. I may be misremembering, but I think this was the case with existing infra at Nissan dealers and the leaf? Might have been GM and the volt? I remember seeing complaints online.

I suspect they'll fail to adapt the same way most large companies fail to adapt when a startup disrupts their existing customer base.

In this case, there's the added element that car manufacturers are also harmed by their legacy dealership relationships.

[davidgould]

> dealers parked cars in the spots for charging, had them in locked off areas, had them turned off or otherwise inaccessible, etc

That has caused me a few anxious drives in my Spark EV, finding charging at dealers that was available on the way there but blocked on the return trip. Also, sitting in a car dealer lot for half an hour is not anyone's idea of a good time.