this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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is that purely because they can't make them well or is there another reason?
honestly the japanese EV ive been in felt decent?
I know Toyota is still ragging on EVs because they invested a lot into hydrogen tech and want that to be the next big thing instead. But I didn't know Honda, Mazda and Suzuki also under-invested.
It isn't about development investment. It's about engines. Engines have long tail after sales profits from maintenance and parts. It's why Toyota recently unveiled their ammonia fueled engine and declared electric vehicles are dead. Electric engines remove a ton of after sales profits in the form of servicing, spare parts and upgrades.
Honda is full-on for hydrogen as well.
Toyota may be cranky about EV's beating out hydrogen, but they're the company claiming to have invented some new solid state battery that has an 800 mile range and can charge 80% in ten minutes on a fast charger, which would be huge for the EV market.
i hear it has to do with the fact they don't have much space for solar?
I don't really understand the hatred for hydrogen honestly.
It seems like a great tech. There are huge hydrogen facilities being built in Western Australia to crack hydrogen from sea water.
I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time. Toyota are really good at internal combustion engines
Presently yes. It's a by-product of natural gas production. There hasn't been much of a market for it. In Australia there's $230b of green hydrogen production projects on the table. Just one of which in Western Australia is going to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen per year.
Yes but electricity transport is very wasteful. There's plenty of sun in Western Australia, falling in desert areas where land for solar arrays is practically free.
There's problems yes, but the industry believes these are solvable problems. Toyota is the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world. Japan has several other very large vehicle manufacturers. They're all betting on hydrogen. They've invested $2.3b in a hydrogen supply chain which is already shipping hydrogen.
Hydrogen doesn't provide power through "internal combustion". A hydrogen fuel cell produces energy by running hydrogen over a catalyst which produces water and electrical energy.
I'll layer on to the other replies which are spot on...
One reason I've soured on hydrogen is that it's overall much less efficient than battery as an energy storage mechanism.
This is a really in depth article about a study that found that "well to wheel" efficiency of battery EVs was 70-80% and with hydrogen it's 25-30%.
I was initially excited about hydrogen as energy storage for renewable sources, but battery tech has improved and is improving.
Also, one of the major advantages of a BEV for me is the ability to charge at home, possibly from energy generated by my own panels. Even if there were solutions for me to generate my own hydrogen, I'd rather lose 20-30% of that energy with a BEV than lose 70-75% with a FCEV.
I've provided a rebuttal for the other replies which you might find interesting.
In a scenario where you're considering using roof-top solar to produce hydrogen for your car then yes, the inefficiency of cracking hydrogen from water makes it unappealing.
The thing is, I don't think most of the world has access to roof-top solar and the portion that does will diminish as population and population density increases.
If you consider for example this project in Western Australia covering 15,000km2 it makes a lot more sense. The land (and associated sun light) is practically free. Hydrogen is a far more cost effective method of energy storage to get the energy from middle-of-nowhere-west-aus to market.
I guess one way to look at it is that hydrogen is a better option if the cost of the solar energy is less than a third of what it would be if you produced it nearby.
Counterpoint, most of the world does not have access to "middle of nowhere" regions with lots of sunlight, that is just Australia and a few places near major deserts.
If only there was some way we could transport energy from these areas of the world with cheap land and plentiful sunlight to those areas where the energy was required.
Yeah, ideally a way that doesn't leak out of pretty much anything like hydrogen does.
Embrittlement is a problem but it can be mitigated with careful selection of materials and ceramic coatings et cetera.
It probably has to do with some of the engineering problems with containing hydrogen.
It definitely has a lot to do with influential people bandwagoning onto Elon Musk et al. trashing EVs
Every tech has problems.
"Oh we couldn't possibly make an electric vehicle because there's nowhere to recharge it"
There are problems storing hydrogen but we've been working on mitigating those problems.
Australia has $230b worth of hydrogen projects on the board. Do you think no one involved in any of those projects has realised that it's not possible to store hydrogen?
You say that as if it is completely ridiculous but have you seen how many companies jumped onto impractical technologies like the hyperloop or self-driving cars or even replacing half their workforce with LLM-based AIs?
Who jumped into the hyperloop?
Self driving cars are going to be worth infinite money. Great investment.
Sure some companies were over-exuberant about LLMs, but not to the same scale of national infrastructure we're talking about.
Failed investments are not evidence that all investments will fail, but large investments are an indicator of economic viability.
No I'm not thinking about that.
I'm just trying to reason between public sentiment and over here, trying to say that public sentiment has less to do with actual technical viability and more to do with random comments from influential people.
There are actually, many directions in which people are trying to find ways to make the H~2~ storage viable for specific applications..
I know someone with a decade old Leaf and that thing is still going strong with more than 300k on it.
yup that was the one! and it wasnt even that old. which is why i'm confused, it seemed good enough.
japan seemed to me like one of the places where great EVs would consistently be coming from.
What about the batteries, though? How would Japan source those? All-in into aluminium-air?
The good thing about modern batteries is that in a decade after they are new and are down to 80% capacity, if that's not enough for you and you want to keep the car, a new battery will be cheaper and/or better
Leaf owners got twice the range from new batteries compared to the car when it was new
it would be sick if they could make an aluminium-air battery
Japan doesn't have enough electricity. After Fukushima, they lost most of their nuclear. The country is densely populated, and the parts that aren't populated are covered in forested mountains, which all makes building the required amount of renewables very difficult. So today and in the future, Japan runs on coal and natural gas. So they make cars that run on hydrogen (which is more efficient to create out of their imported natural gas than burning the gas for electricity) and then sell those abroad greenwashed as "but you can produce hydrogen from green electricity!"
First of all EVs do not need that much power. We are talking something like 25% more electricity production for a country like Japan. Then Japan has rather a lot of onshore and even more offshore wind potential. Mountains are a problem, but hardly something which can not be overcome. Solar can easily be installed on roofs and mountains are even less of a problem.
Also really important to say it. Combustion engines in cars are massivly inefficent. So an EV is still better for the climate, even if run with coal electricity. The other factor is that Japans population is falling. So they will need less power over the long term.
Japanese carmakers were trying to go with hydrogen fuel and did a big grift on their government to get it subsidized. I think the idea was that Japan would have a national disadvantage with EV production as they don't have the material base for batteries but they could have an advantage with hydrogen.
Those failed, or course. Now they're a decade behind - there were only two Japanese EVs sold internationally just a few years ago.
The margins are thinner. There's almost no resale value. Someone might buy a 60k car and eat the payments for a few years, knowing that they can sell it any time for a decent price.
Buying a 60k EV is more like setting your money on fire. The car might be fine, great even, but it just won't hold it's value.
why is that? i don't think lithium batteries degrade THAT fast?
~~if the used market had these dirt cheap evs here id probably be considering them.~~ scratch that there is no way to charge them in my country unless you live in a house, or unless you can use regular power outlets hahaha
You can use regular power outlets if you drive less than a couple of hundred kilometres a day. I charge mine on a 15 amp 240V plug and it charges from 30% to full in about 10 hours. I charge about weekly
Guess I'll just buy a cheap used one then
This is what I've done on my last 2 cars. First was a Leaf that I leased dirt cheap. The second was a used Tesla at more than 1/2 off. I'm looking at a truck now and finding amazing deals on the '23 F150 lightnings. I'd prefer a Rivian and I'm not quite ready to let my Tesla go, but soooooon.
Someday, the deals will be harder to find, but for now take advantage!
Those are reasons people don't want to buy EVs, not reasons for companies to sabotage the change over.
Companies give zero fucks about anything but money.
Completely retooling for EVs is expensive with a lot of risk. And they'll make less money afterwards...
People not wanting to buy them seems like an entirely normal reason to be lukewarm.about making and selling them.
Not at 60,000 dollars they don't. But too bad, between the IRA and the Chinese EV tax the administration is making sure we aren't ever burdened with EVs cheap enough for mass adoption.
That is not an EV thing, that is a new, rapidly developing technology thing.