Theres something clickbaity and missing from this article, I encourage watching youtubers like 'mirai club' for better info. What i recall from his videos is:
- The Mirai made financial sense AS A LEASE for folks in Southern California back in 2022 (possibly 2023) because:
- Car prices in general (including EVs) were fairly highly priced at the time due to demand, the chip shortage, etc.
- There were clean vehicle incentives to get a Toyota Mirai, including things like a hydrogen fuel fill up card to cover expenses.
- At the time there was some assumptions that hydrogen fuel costs would go down over time, but they actually went up.
Again, I suspect most folks LEASED the Mirai due to it being a very niche car with limited usage outside of california due to the lack of hydrogen fuel stations. Youre now seeing some viral videos on the ultra low cost used Mirai's showing up in states that dont have hydrogen infrastructure due to some odd car dealer auction buys (Transport Evolved has a youtube video on this.)
The article does talk about the lack of investment in hydrogen infrastructure, this is true and theres been a huge split between announced infrastructure investments and what has actually happened (see https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3labfzi... for a chart going through 2021-2024). The current US political situation and its impact on clean energy probably doesn't help either.
Kinda glad this is the case. When people go out of their way to avoid common sense they should be punished.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
People looked at how the cost of wind and solar went down and made a assumption that green hydrogen would follow. The reasoning was that the cost of green hydrogen was energy, and thus at some point green hydrogen would be too cheap to meter.
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
There is a great way to store, transport, and use hydrogen:
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
Synthetic fuels (including hydrogen) do still make a lot of sense for heavy stuff like trucks, buses or trains, and aircraft where the energy density is a big plus. Those are where you'd expect to see hydrogen take off first, not passenger cars. Same as how diesel started in trucks - expensive engines but economical when amortized and worth it for heavy usage applications.
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
Some people legitimately think we can just suck hydrogen out of the air or ground and store it in tanks. (We can, to a limited degree, there's a fancy color attached to that kind of hydrogen).
Then when you attempt to explain that no, that's not how it works, we need to always separate the hydrogen molecules from another substance, which takes energy. A significant amount of energy. So much energy that it's better to shove the same amount of kWh to a battery instead.
The only vaguely useful thing for Green Hydrogen would be renewable overflow storage. When your solar/wind farm is producing too much energy for the grid, you shove it to an electrolysis station that converts water to hydrogen and pressurises it.
Then you pump that into a gigantic fuel cell when the sun is down or it's not windy anymore.
> Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
Green hydrogen makes sense as a way to ship solar power to places that don't have it.
Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.
Yeah, it might make sense for some industrial processes as natural gas or coal replacement, but not really anywhere else just because all the tricky leaks and invisible fire hazards.
Why is it such a terrible idea? In theory you can generate it via electrolysis in places with plentiful renewable energy, and then you've got a very high-density, lightweight fuel. On the surface, it seems ideal for things like cars or planes where vehicle weight matters. Batteries are huge and heavy and nowhere near as energy dense as gasoline.
It’s not really fair to compare depreciation against MSRP when they were being sold new at massive discounts. You could’ve gotten one of these for $40,000 off.
This is a source of a lot of similar press around EV depreciation. They compare the MSRP of an EV 3 years ago with the current used market price, ignoring that the actual price paid is often significantly less due a combination of discounts, tax credits, and rebates.
It's extremely fair to compare depreciation against MSRP. What's not fair is to say that they were being "sold new at massive discounts" when in reality it's an asterisk-ridden rebate process that applied to one model year under specific circumstances. That article was spam when it was written, can you provide a first party source for these massive discounts?
At one point recently the Mirai came with a fuel incentive program: when you buy the car, Toyota gives you a gift card worth $15,000 towards fuel at hydrogen stations.
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
I don't think hydrogen will ever be a thing for personal cars. Apart from the abysmal "well to wheel" efficiency it's also just such a hassle to create a fuel network for it. Gasoline is bad enough but a gas that will just leak away whatever you do seems like a stretch. It is just so much simpler with electricity. Pretty much every gas station already has it. No driving it around with trucks. Just maybe once install a bigger cable or a battery/capacitor.
And more to the point, if you want to use synthetic fuels, why on earth would you pick hydrogen?
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
I always figured it would make more sense for hydrogen to be an option for renewable infra if the problems with leaking and embrittlement could be solved. Currently, moving renewable power over very long distances and storing it at scale is a non-trivial issue which hydrogen could help solve.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
Gaseous form is a problem, but have you seen the Fraunhofer POWERPASTE? I was optimistic when the news was first announced, but that was a decade ago and of course it's not widely used.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
Hydrogen fuel solves a long term strategic problem for Japan, which is why the Mirai got as far as it did.
Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.
Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.
Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.
Japan has a lot of potential for wind and geothermal power. And much of it isn't too bad for solar either.
The madness with hydrogen in Japan is that they produce most of it from imported LNG. If they'd solve domestic clean energy, they'd have no need for hydrogen in transport. EVs are a lot more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. So they'd need a lot less clean energy to power those.
Japan is slowly and belatedly figuring out that physics and economics just won't favor hydrogen, ever. The Mirai is an exercise in futility. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever. It never has. Toyota at this point is grudgingly producing more EVs per quarter than it ever produced hydrogen vehicles (in total). They only sell a few hundred per year at this point. The only reason they still make them at all is because they are being subsidized to do that.
But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].
The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.
On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.
Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].
Toyota restricted the sale of its hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to specific, qualified customers who lived or worked near existing, functional hydrogen refueling stations. I remember looking into them when first released but realized I wasn’t eligible and the fact that Toyota restricted the sale meant there was a huge risk in buying them.
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Approximately zero regular consumers purchased hydrogen cars. They were all fleet purchases designed primarily to publish burnish eco-friendly credentials, like this:
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
When comparing EVs to hydrogen cars it is very obvious that one is the superior solution.
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
> An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
It's got the EV problem, but 100x worse. No only do you have to worry about where to find a place to refuel, there are far fewer of them, and level 1 charging isn't a fallback. It also doesn't have the EV upsides.
I once did some research on Mirai and found at that time Plano, TX where Toyota NA is Headquartered did not have a Hydrogen station. Not sure if they have one now. It is such a limited car and because of the infrastructure stuck to LA and San Diego, I guess.
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
Beautiful car but for example I live in Hungary and there is a grand total of one charging station in the whole coutry in Budapest. Yes it's free to charge but probably only makes sense to get a Mirai if you are a Bolt or Uber driver. Nice tech demo though.
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
1 Kg of hydrogen is SUPER EXPENSIVE (equivalent ~ 1 gallon of gas)
$17/gallong when I looked at the pumps
When the Mirai first came out, owners didn't care because the fuel was free.
But after that ended, they had to buy it for themselves.
who wants to pay that?
(also, stations weren't plentiful like EV chargers, and even though you could fill up faster than an EV charge, who cares when you can't go very far (distance-wise from home).
I went to the Toyota museum where they actually have one of these cars as a cross section. I would never drive one. It's like driving around with a massive bomb under the rear seat. Forget thermal runway from batteries, I wonder how big the crater of the explosion from one these would be.
Safer than liquid fuel. There are videos out there of what a leak+fire looks like on a hydrogen and gasoline car. You would rather be trapped in the hydrogen car.
Why was it made? I ask because GM’s EV-1 was discussed earlier and it basically existed due to California’s zero-emission requirement in the 90’s. Is this just Toyota doing some random R&D while fulfilling a state minimum requirement?
To trick people into thinking hydrogen cars are the future so they don’t buy an EV now.
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life.
The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
I think that + it's an EV that Toyota don't have to source the battery cells. FCEVs are full EVs just like Tesla, that uses a different kind of battery than Li-ion.
This technology is completely amazing - for large fleet vehicles like buses, trucks, ferries, etc. Also airplanes! Getting this so compact and refined is a technological miracle. Now put it where it fits!
This is one of those cars that's interesting to me, but I don't know that we'll ever go this route in a significant amount. Problem is how complex it is to create hydrogen, although 'green hydrogen' is a thing, it would take quite a bit regardless. Interesting to note that if we could extract only 2% of the hydrogen burried under the earth, we could power the entire world for over 200 years. Which is crazy to think about.
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
It's very easy to create hydrogen from fossil natural gas. Which is the real motivation behind 99% of H2 projects; continue to emit CO2, just hidden from the end user.
Creating hydrogen isn't the only problem. Storage and transportation is a big one since it is an actual gas instead of a liquid. Needs to be compressed, causes embrittlement, highly flammable, etc...
You only see Mirais within spitting distance of the one place where they can tank. The network just isn't developed to the point that owning one of these makes any sense at all.
I've always been fascinated with these things. Is there any way to make your own H2 to fuel them? I suspect the purity requirements are too high for at-home electrolysis...
Cheapest second generation Mirai I could find is €9950 including VAT. It has scuffs all-round but no major or structural damage. Only 103k km.
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
There's only... well, 51 of them. If you're lucky, you're near one of the 42 that are actually online and available for fueling (as of this comment).
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
Given the complete collapse in sales last year (-83% to 432 units, in a market of over 4M cars sold), I'd venture to guess they're faring pretty badly.
If you think depreciation on a few cars is bad wait until you find out how many hundreds of millions taxpayers spent to build hydrogen stations for cars that don’t exist.
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
Toyota should have bought a page from pre-brain-damage Elon Musk's book and built a nationwide hydrogen-fueling infra-structure.
Teslas may not be anymore the future of EVs, but we can't deny that by building the Power Charger infrastructure, Tesla gave consumers the confidence to buy an EV knowing that it wouldn't be basically a geofenced vehicle.
I still feel hydrogen fuel cells are the better choice. The convenience of refilling quickly is great. Maybe that’ll matter less if PHEVs are allowed to exist but with some places banning gas cars entirely, I don’t have hope.
The convenience of filling is only there if you have the fuel stations. Considering how expensive it is I’d argue that it’s far better to spend that money on EV charging infrastructure, you get a lot more bang for gour buck. And EVs are arguable significantly more convenient when you have the infrastructure. Would you buy a phone that lasted a week or two, but you had to go to a phone filling station to refill it?
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
I'll take the convenience of being able to charge my car every night compared to having to drive out of my way to go to the extremely rare hydrogen fuel station.
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
The inefficiency of creating, transporting, and converting hydrogen into motion is way too much to bear for the purpose of eliminating a 45 minute charging stop.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
seltzered_|8 days ago
- The Mirai made financial sense AS A LEASE for folks in Southern California back in 2022 (possibly 2023) because:
Again, I suspect most folks LEASED the Mirai due to it being a very niche car with limited usage outside of california due to the lack of hydrogen fuel stations. Youre now seeing some viral videos on the ultra low cost used Mirai's showing up in states that dont have hydrogen infrastructure due to some odd car dealer auction buys (Transport Evolved has a youtube video on this.)The article does talk about the lack of investment in hydrogen infrastructure, this is true and theres been a huge split between announced infrastructure investments and what has actually happened (see https://bsky.app/profile/janrosenow.bsky.social/post/3labfzi... for a chart going through 2021-2024). The current US political situation and its impact on clean energy probably doesn't help either.
jjtheblunt|8 days ago
haneul|7 days ago
But I got in near the bottom and got out before the market for it dumped.
aunty_helen|8 days ago
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
belorn|8 days ago
The whole energy plan of central/northen Europe, especially Germany, was built for the last several decades on the idea that they would combine wind, solar and cheap natural gas and then replace the natural gas part with green hydrogen. In Sweden there were even several municipalities that spear headed this by switching mass transportation and heating towards hydrogen, initially with hydrogen produced through natural gas, as a way to get ahead on this plan.
The more sensible project were the green steel project. As experts in green hydrogen said consistently said through those decades, is that green steel would be the real test to make green hydrogen economical. The economics of burning it for energy or transportation would come several decades later, if ever. The green steel project however has not ended up as planned and gotten severely delayed and has seen a cost increase by an estimated 10x. municipalities are now giving up the hydrogen infrastructure and giving it an early retirement, as maintenance costs was significantly underestimated. There is very little talk now about replacing natural gas with green hydrogen, and the new plan is instead to replace the natural gas with bio fuels, hinted at carbon capture, at some unspecified time.
marcosdumay|8 days ago
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
nandomrumber|8 days ago
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main byproducts are carbon dioxide which is an essential plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesel engines from my cold dead hands.
HPsquared|8 days ago
If they couldn't crack those areas, no chance in the highly competitive passenger car space.
theshrike79|6 days ago
Then when you attempt to explain that no, that's not how it works, we need to always separate the hydrogen molecules from another substance, which takes energy. A significant amount of energy. So much energy that it's better to shove the same amount of kWh to a battery instead.
The only vaguely useful thing for Green Hydrogen would be renewable overflow storage. When your solar/wind farm is producing too much energy for the grid, you shove it to an electrolysis station that converts water to hydrogen and pressurises it.
Then you pump that into a gigantic fuel cell when the sun is down or it's not windy anymore.
dehrmann|8 days ago
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
foota|8 days ago
See: the Hindenburg disaster
afternote: There's the potential for an amazing pun in here, but I don't think I quite did the opportunity justice.
dmix|8 days ago
Sounds like it was mostly just people reacting to government incentives. Subsidized markets acting irrational.
rswail|7 days ago
Using it as a car fuel only makes sense as an interim step to full renewable/EVs.
Internal combustion engines, no matter what the fuel, are way more complicated than electric motors. Doesn't matter how you slice and dice the argument.
jjtheblunt|8 days ago
This is the most ridiculous assertion i've seen today. You'd shut down science, for example, and innovation in general.
m4rtink|7 days ago
ForHackernews|8 days ago
unknown|8 days ago
[deleted]
thewhitetulip|7 days ago
Hydrogen was meant to replace Oil so that the oligarchs can keep their oligarchy rather than "pull themselves up by bootstraps"
laughing_man|7 days ago
You could say the same about EVs. Most people in the US who bought an EV decided to go back to ICE for their next vehicle.
wlesieutre|8 days ago
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...
stetrain|8 days ago
appcustodian2|8 days ago
empathy_m|8 days ago
An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
kccqzy|8 days ago
newyankee|8 days ago
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
BadBadJellyBean|8 days ago
Tuna-Fish|8 days ago
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
bombcar|8 days ago
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
helterskelter|8 days ago
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
mappu|8 days ago
cbmuser|8 days ago
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
buckle8017|8 days ago
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
bitmasher9|8 days ago
Japan imports energy. They have to be very careful about which type of energy they build infrastructure for, because they must pay to import that type of energy for decades or centuries. (LNG vs Coal use very different equipment) This is specifically a strategic problem for Japan compared to other energy importers because they both use a lot of energy, and don’t have a military option to secure a foreign supply.
Hydrogen fuel could be created by almost any energy source and then used just like any other fuel source. Ideally Japan would like to pay energy exporters to convert their energy to Hydrogen so Japan has maximum flexibility when importing energy.
Projects like the Mirai exist as proof of concepts for Hydrogen, and the United States was never going to be an early widespread adopter of this technology.
jillesvangurp|7 days ago
The madness with hydrogen in Japan is that they produce most of it from imported LNG. If they'd solve domestic clean energy, they'd have no need for hydrogen in transport. EVs are a lot more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. So they'd need a lot less clean energy to power those.
Japan is slowly and belatedly figuring out that physics and economics just won't favor hydrogen, ever. The Mirai is an exercise in futility. It doesn't make any economic sense whatsoever. It never has. Toyota at this point is grudgingly producing more EVs per quarter than it ever produced hydrogen vehicles (in total). They only sell a few hundred per year at this point. The only reason they still make them at all is because they are being subsidized to do that.
alephnerd|8 days ago
But Japan has also been heavily investing in solid state batteries, whose supply chain Idemetsu Kosan and Toyota have begun to productionize [0].
The Japanese government made a decision in the early 2000s to make a dual-pronged bet on Hydrogen and solid-state battery chemistry because they lacked the supply chain and a legal method to access IP for lithium ion batteries.
On the other hand, Samsung and LG got the license for Li-On back during the NMC days, and BYD was able to piggyback on Samsung and Berkshire's IP access when both took growth equity stakes in BYD decades ago.
Another reason that a lot of people overlook is the Hydrogen supply chain overlaps heavily with the supply chain needed to domestically produce nitrogen-fixing fertilizers which is heavily concentrated in a handful of countries (especially Russia with whom Japan has had a border dispute with since the end of WW2) [1].
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/idemitsu-build-pi...
[1] - https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/impacts-and-repercussions-pric...
LTL_FTC|8 days ago
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Edit: typo
decimalenough|8 days ago
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...
Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
constantcrying|8 days ago
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
glitchc|8 days ago
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
dehrmann|8 days ago
sremani|8 days ago
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
haunter|8 days ago
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
m463|7 days ago
1 Kg of hydrogen is SUPER EXPENSIVE (equivalent ~ 1 gallon of gas)
$17/gallong when I looked at the pumps
When the Mirai first came out, owners didn't care because the fuel was free.
But after that ended, they had to buy it for themselves.
who wants to pay that?
(also, stations weren't plentiful like EV chargers, and even though you could fill up faster than an EV charge, who cares when you can't go very far (distance-wise from home).
some-guy|8 days ago
killingtime74|8 days ago
sandworm101|8 days ago
https://youtu.be/OA8dNFiVaF0
joecool1029|8 days ago
testing22321|8 days ago
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
numpad0|8 days ago
GregDavidson|8 days ago
throwaway473825|8 days ago
https://www.electrive.com/2026/01/23/year-end-surge-electric...
Meanwhile, hydrogen trucks are nowhere to be found...
dyauspitr|7 days ago
giancarlostoro|8 days ago
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
pjc50|8 days ago
Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.
Rohansi|8 days ago
mono442|8 days ago
jacquesm|8 days ago
alexose|8 days ago
swifferfan|8 days ago
https://alpha.chem.umb.edu/chemistry/ch471/evans%20files/Pro...
Nothing fundamental has changed in the last 2 decades to refute the arguments Bossel made in 2006.
unixhero|7 days ago
retired|8 days ago
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
vel0city|8 days ago
That original owner was probably doing all those miles on the free hydrogen given by Toyota.
unknown|8 days ago
[deleted]
stevenhubertron|8 days ago
1970-01-01|8 days ago
https://www.myartbroker.com/investing/articles/top-10-most-i...
pazimzadeh|8 days ago
decryption|8 days ago
HoldOnAMinute|8 days ago
helterskelter|8 days ago
kotaKat|8 days ago
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
https://h2-ca.com/
themafia|8 days ago
decimalenough|8 days ago
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fal...
numpad0|8 days ago
dizhn|8 days ago
sksasi|8 days ago
cryptoegorophy|8 days ago
ycui1986|7 days ago
oceanplexian|8 days ago
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
elzbardico|7 days ago
Teslas may not be anymore the future of EVs, but we can't deny that by building the Power Charger infrastructure, Tesla gave consumers the confidence to buy an EV knowing that it wouldn't be basically a geofenced vehicle.
m4rtink|7 days ago
I am sorry. ;-)
whatever1|8 days ago
vel0city|8 days ago
SilverElfin|8 days ago
audunw|8 days ago
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
vel0city|8 days ago
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
SideburnsOfDoom|8 days ago
Is it more convenient than plugging in an EV overnight at home, and having a full "tank" every morning?
It is not.
Electricity supply is everywhere. More so than Gasoline supply, and far far more so than hydrogen supply.
elsonrodriguez|8 days ago