[jorvi]

The Leaf 2 was and is a very good EV for its price point.

Its weird how Toyota had the first mass-market PHEV with the Prius but got hyperfixated on hydrogen cars, and Nissan had one of the most successful BEVs (Leaf 2, maybe even Leaf 1) and just sort-of gave up. I vaguely remember Honda having a decent EV.

I wonder what makes EVs so antithetical to Japanese car companies..

[panick21_]

All of Japan got obsessed with they whole 'hydrogen economy' nonsense. This was just the generally agree on 'future' of the economy.

In my opinion this is complete nonsense and after decades very little has happened.

Even for planes I don't think its the future. Just going one step further and making SAF is just a better plan.

With hopefully more trains, and electric planes for many shorter routes.

[rightbyte]

At the time hydrogen was not nonsense. Good lithium batteries happened.

Hydrogen is very impractical. Leaks easely and the pressure involved is scary. It is no surprise that good alternatives more or less scrapped the whole thing.

[ebiester]

There's an alternative future where some genius figured out a technical innovation for hydrogen and batteries struggle to scale. There are definite disadvantages to hydrogen in retrospect, but some of that has to do with the relative success of the engineers.

[adolph]

Hydrogen is also not particularly "green" without further spending for generation capacity.

Currently, most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, specifically natural gas. Electricity—from the grid or from renewable sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass—is also currently used to produce hydrogen. In the longer term, solar energy and biomass can be used more directly to generate hydrogen.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-resources

[rightbyte]

Sure but the same is true for charging batteries.

[panick21_]

Going directly to batteries is far more efficent. Going from power to hydrogen is incredibly inefficent. So at least not as much energy needs to be produced.

[pfdietz]

And expensive, which is the real killer.

(Noting that this is hydrogen for vehicles; hydrogen in other applications are separate matters that should not be painted with the same broad brush.)