Comment by hobofan
5 hours ago
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.
> 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.
Hydrogen is simply a really bad fuel for cars. It is hard to transport and store liquid hydrogen
They'd use compressed gaseous hydrogen, but that has its own problems.
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.
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.