Comment on Tesla confirms it has given up on its Cybertruck range extender to achieve promised range

• k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I’m not a car guy so I don’t understand why your view seems to be so popular on the Internet (at least in the Anglosphere).

  Is Toyota doing the Sony thing where they double down on a certain format in hopes that it will make them money if/when it gets adopted as an industry standard?

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  • Bytemeister@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It’s the nature of hydrogen as a fuel. It’s a gas, and has a very low power density. You can either compress it, but that requires the car carry a robust (and heavy) pressure vessel around. Plus, all the delivery infrastructure has to handle hydrogen at those crazy pressures, or you need to carry the compressor in the vehicle, which again is heavy, and slow. The other possiblity is to condense the hydrogen by cooling it. But now you need bulky insulation for the tank, plus, it will either need active cooling from the car, or your have to accept that the hydrogen will eventually get too warm and blow the tank, and then you have to vent it.

    Hydrogen doesn’t make sense at car scale.

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    • PieMePlenty@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Its not that I don’t agree with you but I figure there has to be a business case for it if Toyota is willing to keep investing in it for 25 years. Surely, at this point, they would have thrown in the towel but they keep at it. And to make maters more interesting, they don’t seem to give a shit about full electric either. It feels like they know something we don’t.

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      • kameecoding@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        They bet on the wrong horse, they are reluctantly making the switch in BEV.

        And the previous commenter didn’t even give the full picture, it’s that even making hydrogen is just wholly uneconomical any way you look at it, you can look up grey, green hydrogen.

        The use case for hydrogen would be if someone drives like a shittton a day, so maybe semis, and like the less than 1% of drivers who need to dive that much.

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    • k0e3@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Thank you kindly! It just seems so weird that Toyota and even Japan seems so gung-ho about it. I guess it’s a case of sunk cost fallacy?

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      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Not sure. Toyota is a very conservative and risk-adverse automaker. My guess is that they thought it could work better in Japan, as they have less land area and more miles traveled by train. Hydrogen can kinda make sense for a service/fleet vehicle that works in a limited area and always returns to the same location at the end of the day. Hydrogen can be run through an ICE engine, or it can be used in a fuel cell to produce electricity. Plus, everyone else was doing R&D into BEVs, so doing a little into hydrogen makes sense. If you fall too far behind on BEV tech, you can just buy a competitor’s vehicle and reverse engineer it to catch up.

        I’m not a business person. Take that all with a grain of salt.

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