[hobofan]

They are not delusional.

Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs, and in order to prevent a gap in the market where EV-first competitors can steal market share from them, they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars. There they have a head start via some latent research and more reuse of ICE car platforms. I'm sure the hydrogen division is well aware that they are doing research on a dead-end technology (at least for the automotive sector).

The exact same thing happened in Germany. In 2020 there was a huge push from politicians to push more hydrogen technology to distract from the fact that German car manufacturers were lagging behind, as well as general missed initiatives for renewable energy. Now, 6 years later those initatives are deader than ever.

[chupasaurus]

> Japanese car manufacturers were late to EVs ... they lobby the government to subsidize and create a new market segment in the form of hydrogen cars

Production of Toyota Prius started 28 years ago.

[1970-01-01]

The Prius is a hybrid. Did you mean the Nissan Leaf in 2009?

[UltraSane]

Hydrogen is simply a really bad fuel for cars. It is hard to transport and store liquid hydrogen

[pfdietz]

They'd use compressed gaseous hydrogen, but that has its own problems.

[toast0]

Yep... Anyone who looked at how CNG cars went in the US and was like yep, let's do that but with a gas that's harder to transport and store and has no existing network, had to know it wouldn't work out very well.

CNG fleet vehicles work out for many fleets; especially those that have vehicle depots where fueling happens.

I haven't looked into detail for the hydrogen cars, but I wonder if they made the same kinds of designs with regard to the fuel tanks. On pressurized fuel vehicles, the tanks expire after 15-20 years; on most CNG cars, the tanks take a lot of labor to replace, so most vehicles will expire when their tank does; I suspect the same for the hydrogen cars. Fleet vehicles tend to do a lot of miles, so a time based tank expiration is less of a problem.

[pfdietz]

In its defense, hydrogen cars would use fuel cells, not the IC engine of CNG cars. So there's at least a theoretical case that could be made for them. In practice it didn't work well at all.

The case for BEVs becomes even more clear when you look at complexity. BEVs are just simpler, even simpler than today's IC engine cars. IC engines have become baroque and expensive. The tooling needed to make these engines has become a boat anchor on the old car companies. And similarly for transmissions: the transmission of a BEV is a very simple thing, just a single stage of gear reduction without a clutch.

Fuel cell cars were a bet on the proposition that BEVs would be inhibited by range and charging time concerns, but rapid charging and widespread availability of such high power chargers has nixed that.

[toast0]

> In its defense, hydrogen cars would use fuel cells, not the IC engine of CNG cars.

Looking at a CNG car and thinking the reason they didn't get adopted is ICE and not gaseous fuel is pretty silly. Fuel cells are cool, but they don't solve the problem of tank expiration, and hydrogen storage is harder than CNG storage.

ICE may be complex, but most of the complexity comes from emissions controls / efficiency mandates. CNG "solves" emissions. You could burn hydrogen, and you'd really solve carbon emissions, if your hydrogen wasn't just coming from natural gas anyway. You'd probably need DEF, because high combustion temperatures with air intake from the atmosphere is going to generate NOx. Might not be as efficient as fuel cell vehicle, but it really doesn't matter when the problem is the fuel.

BEVs are clearly going to win as ICE is pretty close to fully optimized and batteries are still getting better. Although, if you could make a fuel cell vehicle based on a STP liquid that is energy dense and reasonably non-corrosive, it would have a chance.

[pfdietz]

Indeed, the theoretical argument for hydrogen vehicles did end up being silly. But it's important to understand what it was, if only to help one avoid mistakes like that in the future.

[pfdietz]

You're explaining the practical consequences of their delusion, but delusion it remains. Hydrogen for cars isn't going to work to save them, even with the lobbying. Granted, they were probably screwed anyway, so they had no good options.