Comment by seanmcdirmid
13 hours ago
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
13 hours ago
Japan went heavy into hydrogen for a couple of decades ago. The only reason we are even talking about hydrogen passenger vehicles now is because Japan thought it was the future, they made a mistake.
I'm pointing out that the timeline of continuing funding it, to the point of a major model design and launch, and nationwide network of hydrogen stations, might well be linked to China's emergent REE dominance and that Japan doesn't have those raw materials.
(In some future decade/century, people might conclude that car dependency on fossil fuels, after electric from renewable became viable, was a mistake.)
I think Japan made their plans in the 2000s, maybe starting to gain traction in 2010, this is long before China became an EV power house or even had a dominant share of rare earth processing.
Independent of that. I'm saying there was some wisdom to continuing to fund it in Japan post-2010 as a hedge in case REEs were unavailable.
(Separate to whether the idea originally made sense back in the 2000s.)