[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.

[gonehome]

Arguably Bluray and VHS were already winning in those instances? They'd be the EV to Hydrogen's example, though it's a bit of a strained metaphor.

I think it's rare for something without adoption to get taken up just because a larger player tries to use funds to force it to against the way the market is already going. I think Windows Phone is a pretty good example.

Hydrogen adoption had a lot of issues of which infrastructure was just (a big) one.

[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.