Now that we’ve trained the whole world in american-style corporate criminality, we’re gonna pull the rug out from them and reveal ourselves to be the good guys! Right? Right, guys?
Let’s just block Chinese EVs. Crisis over
Sounds like oil tycoons didn’t find ev adoption humorous any more
Seems kind of spurious to call lobbying sabotage as if the politicians being lobbied are machines and not human beings doing what they’ve been elected to do as nominally bourgeois party members.
Seems weird to assert politicians do anything they were elected to do. They’re far more worried about what the donor class wants.
Politicians from bourgeois parties are going to serve bourgeois interests. Nobody should expect anything different from them.
Just in: capitalism continues to be shit
Let the market find the most efficient solution.
The market cheats, lies and scams.
Oh
Celebrated greed will be our end.
The kick is there is a large voting block who thinks we aren’t being greedy enough.
Sabotaged, or just efficiently increasing shareholder value. It’s called “Fiduciary Responsibility”.
No. So many people misunderstand that. No, it does not simply mean you automatically sacrifice longterm profits. Fiduciary responsibility is pretty widely open to interpretation because shareholders overall can want different things. Some stocks barely budge in price but the board gives good dividends. Some companies make no profit for years upon years because they are pushing for growth. Just chalking this up to fiduciary responsibility is misguided and misses many big reasons why many boards choose short term profits while sacrificing longterm sustainability. Many get most of their earnings in stock. As long as they can keep the share price up long enough for them to make bank, they have little care about the longterm health of the company. This is one of the reasons that stock buybacks have been so big over the last decade.
Well, ackchyually… /s
Then other companies do stock buybacks instead of quality control in their airplane factories…
The Lich the holds Jack Welch’s phylactery demands sacrifices.
I am constantly baffled how refusing to futute-proof the company meets the definition of “fiduciary responsibility”.
“Let’s spike today’s profits by destroying tomorrow’s profits” doesn’t seem very responsible to me.
The desires of private shareholders, which have exclusively become “give me more NOW!” are wholly incompatible with the long term needs of our species, such as homeostasis with our sole shared COMMUNal habitat. The private shareholders that dictate how our economy runs through their captured governments literally only care as far out as their next quarterly earnings/ego score report, the planet can explode beyond that as far as they’re concerned, and my pet theory is that the wealth class is so egotistical, living like Pharoahs as others suffer and still needing mooaaaaaaar, that they kind of want the world to end after they’re gone, as they were the only point of it ever existing from their perspective.
Our species only pays lip service to the second, because many to most of us have been successfully propagandized to believe in the lie that we may one day be in the irresponsible sociopath hoarder con-man class, whether through lottery or not buying lattes, lol. And heaven forbid we kneecap the gluttonous, destructive lifestyle we delude ourselves we’ll one day have with… barf… responsibilities towards the societies that facilitated such unethical levels of antisocial wealth hoarding to begin with. Punching down looks fun amirite?
Basically the self-inflicted doom of our species that we’re sleep walking towards can be boiled down to this meme:
It’s because it’s a prisoners dillema. If they do it and other companies don’t, they are at a disadvantage. The only way to get proper behavior is to have the government force companies to behave.
Exactly… And ultimately they are beholden to shareholders. Which are largely in it for the stock price, not the dividends - they want numbers to go up, and they don’t care if it crashes the company in a few years when they’re no longer holding the bag
Money today is worth more than money tomorrow. With enough data and analysis, riding companies into the ground is the optimal way to make money
It doesn’t.
the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.
money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.
and money today that i invest now, will be worth a lot more than money tomorrow that i can’t invest and get interest on
it’s not responsible in terms of my company lasting a long time… but it’s responsible in terms of profit.
the same reason that you’re better off taking the lump sum vs the 30 year pay out if you win the lottery.
money today that i can use today is worth more than money tomorrow.
You might be theoretically better off in an ideal outcome, but I’m pretty sure taking the 30 year payout is the generally recommended option. If I were to win the Mega Millions at the current level, I would need to make investments that paid $96,244,081 over 30 years just to equal the tax savings of taking the annuity versus the lump sum payment. That works out to a 3.1% return on the initial lump sum, every year, 30 years straight. Granted, this isn’t exactly impossible, but it does require a few caveats. For example, this assumes you don’t actually spend any of that money, investing 100% of it and never having a bad year. Of course, the average lotto winner is not exactly known for their great ability to invest their money. Meanwhile, there’s nothing preventing the person taking the 30-year annuity from investing a portion of their annual payouts, which are guaranteed, while returns on investments are explicitly not guaranteed.
A guaranteed $96,244,081 return is a better investment than a possible $200,000,000 that’s continent on absolutely nothing going wrong for the next 30 years, but the sort of people who run companies seem to forget about this these days.
money now is worth more than money later.
because of inflation, and also because i can use it now. money i am getting in 30 years is no good to me now.
this isn’t that hard of a concept.
When your justification is an uncertain investment, it isn’t that hard of a concept to realize you’re wrong. You’re literally the only person I’ve ever seen advocating for the lump sum payment as the financialyl sound move when it quite nearly halves 100% sure income.
Inflation is also much less of a concern when you’re talking about literal millions of dollars, unless you’re talking about the Zimbabwe national lotto. If you’re living in a way that your ability to live with $15,000,000/year towards the end of a 30-year annuity payout has materially changed, you have bigger issues than inflation going on.
And people don’t really care about it . Let the wheel spin and get as much as you can while you ride, don’t think about next drivers.
I’m only buying Toyota because it didn’t get sucked into the stupid EV craze. They have common sense. The U.S. doesn’t even have the electrical grid to currently manage many parts of the U.S., especially California. How tf are we going to introduce a product that will require electricity, straining the electrical grid further beyond its capacity? It’s fkin nonsense.
Not to mention… the number of EVs (Teslas) that were having battery failures during the Winter in the midwest. And this last Winter was mild.
Been driving a VW ID4 for 3 years in Ireland. They’re lovely to drive. Zero battery issues, zero charging issues. The future is electric.
Stupid is as stupid does.
Driving my Prius to own the libs
Maybe one day when the libs work towards better public mass transportation, they’ll drive their EVs to own the libs.
This is the most fear mongering nonsense I’ve read on Lemmy to date
Literally google, “tesla stranded in winter”. Urineidiot.
edit: lol and I just learned not only that Teslas were having battery issues but even the charging stations were having issues. Good grief. Imagine being stranded in the middle of nowhere… but hilariously, stranded in front a fkin charging station lmao dead.png
Gasoline is a finite resource, so at some point all gas stations will sell out of gas. Imagine how hilarious it will be when gas cars are stranded at gas stations because there’s nothing to fill them with.
Lmao Dead.gfy
I agree, if the resource is out… there’s nothing you can do but to go to another gas station. However, gasoline in winter weather, even if it’s -30 degrees Fahrenheit, is still usable. You’re still able to pump the fuel into your vehicle. Where as with these charging stations cold temperatures is a nemesis.
I have no beef with EVs, I just think we’re putting the cart before the horse. Like building a house with no foundation, it’s ludicrous.
I’m trying to say that eventually there won’t BE another gas station, and we have to prepare for that. Progress isn’t always a straight line, but I’d still rather be moving forward than digging our heels in with something we know we can’t use forever.
Agreed.
You should act like it, then.
Gasoline is a finite resource
No it isn’t. Crude oil is finite, but gasoline could be synthesized from other carbon and hydrogen sources (up to and including CO2 + H2O + solar power) if you really wanted to.
Cool.
The process of synthesizing it is inefficient and expensive. Companies have gone bankrupt trying to make it profitable, so it really doesn’t seem like that’s an answer here, especially when we have cars that don’t require any such fuel already on the roads.
Sure seems easier.
Bruh has never experienced the pain of getting an older carbureted car going in the cold.
That is true… apparently diesel is pretty bad in the winter as well.
Diesel is manageable or it wouldn’t be used in most heavy equipment. It usually just requires using a heater block in particularly cold climates.
Indeed!
Then we never should have used diesel or carburetors.
I live in Canada, Québec more specific.
There are Teslas EVERYWHERE here. There hasn’t been any widespread reports of failing batteries.
So wherever you got your information, you might want to look somewhere else next time
Also, you can keep your insults to yourself. Just because someone disagrees with you, doesn’t mean you can call them an idiot.
It was common in the Midwest. And I just literally gave you the keywords to google search… there’s all the sources you need for the limited information I provided in my initial comment. Don’t like it? Kick rocks. You can’t re-invent reality.
You know what? I don’t like your attitude one single bit.
I’m not arguing with you.
Take a chill pill. Go outside and touch some grass.
Montreal?
I think the OP has a point here: most of North America is distinctly not urban, distinctly not pedestrianized, and really spread apart. EVs take a substantial range hit in the cold, which might not be a problem in the Montreal area but is a bit more of an issue when living in bumfuck, Wisconsin.
I have relatives up in Saguenay where temperatures reached -50 last year. They have EVs and it’s not an issue. Sure the range and efficiency drops, but I wouldn’t say they break or become unuseable
Also… lmao you’re such a liar.
Google, “teslas stranded in quebec”
And lol @ the gullible people upvoting you.
Google: Norway EVs.
Thanks. I find that quite fascinating, honestly. How is it that in the Americas, EVs - or at least Teslas and their charging stations were failing but in Norway apparently this is not an issue they face.
In the U.S. extreme heat and extreme cold is bad for the electrical grid. He have blackouts / brownouts and rolling blackouts during these extreme weather/temperature conditions.
First of all, you need to check your attitude. I don’t know why you’re being so aggressive.
Second, I’m not a liar. I fucking live here and my cousin who has TWO Teslas for his family has never encountered any problems. I have other relatives who have other EVs from different makes who never had problems. The vast majority of people with EVs here, even in the northern regions where it gets fucking cold, don’t have problems.
And third, Tesla’s get stranded everywhere, regardless of temperature or weather, more than any other EVs, mainly because they’re poorly built PoS cars.
I think Teslas get stranded because they lie about their remaining range
Gas stations popped up where they could make money, cars came first and then the gas stations.
Cool… I’ll buy an EV when both EV and electrical grid issues have been resolved. Until then… LOL
Nobody is going to upgrade the grid, if there is no prospect of increased demand.
I’ve noticed that media tend to bitch equally about both surplus and shortage of certain commodities. Expensive power? Horrible! Cheap power? Catastrophe! That way the world seems even more depressing than it really is.
They should be upgrading the grid as the population and demand for electricity increases ahead of time. This is how it works in the tech world. We set the base for the upgrade and then commit to the upgrade with fall back / disaster recovery plan.
Check when the last time an installed utility performed maintenance. Now you want them to turn things off while they put in new hardware? The only thing that will drive a business to make that kind of change is if the money is behind it, which will happen when EVs are much more prevalent.
Not from all the profits made by all the people using electricity and paying for electricity? And electrical grid has redundancy. You can take down primary and secondary takes over temporarily.
Why would they need to turn anything off? That’s not how they expand capacity in the Netherlands. Why would it be needed?
Let’s be honest: They’re not even going to upgrade the grid if it fails and burns down half the state
That’s just the media doing its thing. Information content is a byproduct of making money. Actually, educating the public isn’t strictly necessary, because you can also manipulate emotions to attract attention and clicks.
The only reason Toyota is pushing back against EV is because they are so heavily invested in hydrogen powered vehicles, which isn’t going to happen.
And still proudly producing gas powered vehicles which I will continue to outfit my family with.
Right. At the moment, hydrogen production is too costly, energy wise. If we could find an easier, better way to make it, that would change the game entirely.
Ah, the magical technological advancement that is only possible with hydrogen. While ignoring the advancements with EVs.
At the moment, hydrogen production is too costly, energy wise.
EVs are already way more efficient. You’re repeating things that have been discussed ages ago as something new.
Ok calm down, you don’t need to be condescending.
I know that right now hydrogen production is really not efficient compared to simply recharging a battery. Producing hydrogen takes more electricity to produce from water electrolysis to fuel a car for the same range as it would take to simply charge a battery. This I am aware of. And that’s what I was implying in my previous comment.
However, a small hydrogen cell powered car has at least twice the range of a similar sized EV. And also, it doesn’t take hours to recharge. Only a few minutes to refill the hydrogen tank.
What I hope it that we one day find a way to efficiently produce hydrogen. Because I’d rather have to wait a couple of minutes to refuel on a long trip than having to stop for an hour every time I need to recharge.
We have a more efficient way to produce hydrogen, which is using nagural gas. That’s obviously a bad idea. You can’t change the laws of physics, producing hydrogen from water and electricity just takes that much energy.
Yeah I know that. That’s why initially I was saying it would be great if we found a better more efficient way to produce it. Obviously hinting at the fact that it wasn’t the case right now.
A fuel cell car is an EV.
But it’s an electric car with a much lower efficiency than one that uses batteries
A highly exaggerated claim. Once you factor in all of the challenges of grid energy storage and battery manufacturing, there’s likely to be little to no difference.
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If that was the case, Toyota would never have created the Toyota Mirai.
And have you ever seen what happens when an EV battery is damaged? Many residential buildings with underground parkings don’t allow EVs to park underground due to the fear of the intense fires and how it can cause severe damage.
Have you ever seen what happens when a hydrogen tank ruptures? It’s the Ford Pinto all over again.
Not just costly. Transportation and distribution is a big problem.
With electrical we already have an entire distribution network, it just needs to be significantly (but gradually) upgraded.
Right now there is a hydrogen refueling station in Quebec city that produces it’s own hydrogen on the spot. It takes electricity and uses water electrolysis to create hydrogen.
It’s inefficient, but it works. No need for transportation.
You ever wondered why traditional carmakers are pushing so hard for hydrogen? That’s because they can still reuse those super inefficient combustion engines, which they perfected in the last 50-100 years, and which is serving as a big gatekeeper to newcomers.
And with EV, they need to start from scratch like everyone else and they hate it.
Uh… No. Sorry my friend but we’re talking about hydrogen fuel cell technology. Not hydrogen combustion.
You should look into what hydrogen fuel cells are. Here’s a video that explains it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Here’s a video that explains it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
The entire premise of hydrogen is dumb.
We would legitimately be better off combining it with CO2 to make synthetic gasoline and just use it with normal vehicles and infrastructure.
Dude, that produces methane, I think?. The whole point is to avoid combustion engines to prevent greenhouse gasses.
The way hydrogen is being used is to work with hydrogen fuel cells which is electric.
Carbon is what matters, but not in the way the hydrogen-pushers want you to think:
-
It doesn’t matter if the fuel has carbon in it, if the carbon is part of the short-term carbon cycle. Biodiesel, for example, releases no net greenhouse gases even though it has lots of carbon in it.
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The dirty secret of hydrogen is that the vast majority of it is made by cracking fossil methane. (My previous comment about combining hydrogen with carbon to make synthetic liquid fuel charitably presupposed it was made the right way, by electrolyzing water with solar power, but most hydrogen production is not like that)
In other words, anybody telling you that hydrogen is better for preventing climate change than biofuels – despite them containing carbon – is trying to hoodwink you.
Ok. Because over here we’ve had a hydrogen station that’s been producing hydrogen at the station itself via electrolysis using electricity from the grid. It’s been working fine so far.
I’m gonna have to look into your claim about cracking methane being the way the majority of the hydrogen is created.
From https://solaredition.com/green-hydrogen-production-paths/ :
Only “green hydrogen” (4%) is actually good. For the other 96%, it would be better to just use the source hydrocarbon as fuel directly.
In other words, for the most part, the entities pushing hydrogen are mostly engaging in greenwashing bullshit.
See also:
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People don’t seem to get it. Electricity to hydrogen to electricity to motion is really, really lossy, and hydrogen leaks. It is worse than electricity to hydrogen to methane to power.
Exactly: it makes sense only if you have an excess of clean electricity to electrolyze it from water, and even then the best thing to do would be to immediately (at the point of production) use it to synthesize a liquid hydrocarbon fuel for easier transport and storage (which also has the benefit of letting it be burned in existing ICE cars).
I think time will show Toyota has been very wise in this decision.
EVs are not and may never be the right answer for everyone. Personally, I don’t ever plan on buying one.
If you’re in a city, bikes and public transportation are the answer. Rural areas are stuck with cars though. America seems to be a bit of an exception to this rule, because lots of things would need to change before any of this could potentially happen.
Force them to commit or repeal Chinese tariffs
The tariffs were explicitly to protect them. To prevent them from having to compete. We’re about to eat a lot of shit.
Well they have to first compete… I have yet to see a good under $25k mass produced EV
And now you won’t. They don’t have to work their prices down now.
The issue I’m seeing here is that there isn’t anything to protect legacy auto does not make a product that is remotely comparable
is that purely because they can’t make them well or is there another reason?
honestly the japanese EV ive been in felt decent?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is great tech, but there are serious downsides too.
- storage and handling: Hydrogen is a tiny atom, so it leaks like nobody’s business. Even liquid hydrogen is terribly low-density which makes pretty much a hard limit on storage density, unlike battery tech which can at least hypothetically dramatically improve. Pressure vessels suck. They have to be crazy sturdy and roughly spherical which places major design limitations on vehicles that use them.
- distribution: EVs can limp by on sparse fast charging stations and home charging while better infrastructure builds out. Electrical supply is already ubiquitous. Who’s going to want a hydrogen vehicle (which you can absolutely already buy, nobody’s stopping you in the US at least) with so few fueling options? The upfront investment to bootstrap a market with hydrogen stations to the point of even competing with crappy EV charging is enormous.
- no onboard energy recovery: Regenerative braking is an incredible benefit on its own.
- industry synergy: EV manufacture benefits from tons of other industries investing in battery tech. The tide lifts all boats.
There are solutions as with any tech, but the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs. The least worst option tends to win.
I don’t have a good understanding of the storage and handling aspect, other than to say I think most of the leakage is from embrittlement, for which the primary defense is ceramic coatings, or periodically baking the pressure vessel. That is to say it seems like a manageable problem. Design limitations are also manageable IMO. Ok it’s unfortunate it can’t be made into any shape like batteries but it’s also not significantly worse than a fuel tank.
For distribution, of course there’s no network if no one is driving hydrogen cars. It’s not that much of a leap to imagine that gas stations will start selling hydrogen surely.
Regenerative braking is possible for HEVs. The Toyota Mirai has it.
I don’t really follow you with industry synergy. Like people are using batteries so batteries are best? What if we hit peak Lithium (or China puts the squeeze on)? In that case it would be better to have an alternative up your sleeve.
the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs.
That may be your opinion but I’m not convinced. Japan and Australia are going all in on Hydrogen. I don’t know much about this, but it seems like there’s plenty of smart people who believe it’s viable enough to invest entire countries economic futures on.
None of the points you make are wrong, it’s just a lot more uphill for hydrogen looking at the total picture. With almost every issue there is a way forward for hydrogen, but EVs are already significantly farther along the curve. It’s hard to overcome that kind of snowballing. Only time will tell!
IMO EVs are going great but adoption / implementation is struggling in some use cases, and hydrogen might be a nice alternative.
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 EVsEvery 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?
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.
Do you think…
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 H2 storage viable for specific applications…
- Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, it’s much cheaper than green hydrogen, so you can guess what people would fuel their hydrogen cars with
- Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful, you get less than a third the energy than you would if you went electricity to battery to electricity
- It’s really difficult to store and transport, it is very very low density. Being the smallest atom hydrogen can leak from practically any container or pipe, but that doesn’t compare to (2) above
I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time. Toyota are really good at internal combustion engines
Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels,
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.
Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful,
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.
It’s really difficult to store and transport,
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.
I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time.
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.
i hear it has to do with the fact they don’t have much space for solar?
Honda is full-on for hydrogen as well.
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.
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.
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 hahahaYou 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
There’s almost no resale value.
That is not an EV thing, that is a new, rapidly developing technology thing.
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.
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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!
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?
it would be sick if they could make an aluminium-air battery
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
Tesla and Tata Motors are exceptions noted, but noted highlighted in the article.
Tesla isn’t really a major car company in the transitional sense since they didn’t exist at all as a pre-EV car company.
Nothing surprising.
EVs have been developed since the 90s at least as far as I know, and progress on them has been sabotaged at nearly every turn by the industry.
Technically the first one was developed in the late 1800s, but it had a range of about 5 meters.
41 miles at 20mph.
Wasn’t aware of that. My thoughts were more towards the EV1, although I assume there were many others before that.
They’re referring to how Thomas Edison created the first electric vehicles back in the 1800s. They might have had a future until Ford introduced assembly lines. Then the rest is history.
The EV1 was the first commercial development in the US following the World Wars, but even before then you had solar EVs being made for science and eclectic racing before then. Think of those weirdly shaped cars only made for 1 driver that have solar panels covering the entire body of the car.
Funny thing is that we’re now seeing some commercial (or soon to be commercial) manufacturers add solar panels in the same way. Just look to Hyundai and Aptera.
Yeah, no… edison was way late to the game. https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car
At one point steam cars were 40% of the market, electric was 38%, and gas was a paltry 22%
Edison didn’t create a damn thing, just stole ideas from everyone else.
I remember an early Saturn EV that was never sold, only leased so GM could maintain ownership of them. Even with a limited range, the drivers all loved them for commuting and running errands, and many tried to purchase them outright, which GM refused. Eventually, GM issued a mandatory recall for all the Saturn EVs, mothballed the project, and then they released the Hummer… made me sick even at the time.
Saw that on a great documentary, “Who killed the electric car?”
Japanese car manufacturers actually sell a lot of EVs… in Japan. They don’t seem to be interested in selling those mini EVs abroad.
Well to be fair, trying to sell anything with the word mini in it in America is it uphill struggle; if there’s one thing us Americans hate, it’s walking uphill.
Or just walking.
Especially walking uphill both ways
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You say that as if Americans don’t want kei cars, but we do. Even rural off-roading Youtubers (who would probably be revealed to be ultraconservative if they didn’t keep their politics out of their videos) love things like Suzuki Samurais and Subaru Sambars.
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but kei cars aren’t street legal for most consumer purposes in the US
Speak for your own state.
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They sell slightly modified kei cars in other countries, but not these electric models.
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Maybe in the US, but in Asia, a huge portion of sales for Honda, Toyota and Suzuki are for their modified kei cars. Even so, they still don’t seem interested in releasing their electric models there. This gap is currently filled by Chinese EV manufacturers.
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Imagine where we’d be if this stuff was allowed to mature in the 2000s alone
Blame everyone but your SUV driving selves. The devil made you do it Im sure.
