What factors led to shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles?
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1. Hydrogen keeps failing in the market. You can go buy a hydrogen car right now. Nobody is… But you can. They’ll even give you $15,000 worth of free fuel. Still no takers.
2. After all these decades and decades in development, hydrogen still hasn’t overcome most of the initial problems. Storage, generation, handling, using platinum group metals in the fuel cells. Basically everything you see on the road is still in the experimental stage.
3. It’s completely unaffordable. You may have gotten a clue with all the free fuel Toyota was willing to give you with the purchase of a hydrogen car, but if not, it bares emphasizing that there’s no company on earth that could afford to install the infrastructure necessary to make hydrogen refiling easy and ubiquitous. It will require massive government subsidies, to the tune of the GDP of all the large developed countries in the world. How do you think taxpayers will feel to double their respective national debts just so we can have hydrogen instead of pure battery electric.
4. Keep in mind, fuel cell cars ARE battery electric cars. They just have an exotic range extender that enables the consumption of very expensive fuel bolted on. So any criticism one levels against electric cars ALSO APPLIES TO FUEL CELL CARS.
5. We could go on and on and on about all the issues with hydrogen, but fundamentally it’s an exercise in greenwashing and delay. “Look, we’re developing a hydrogen car so don’t bother making us offset ICE sales by shipping something that’s going to actually work!” Or “The world needs energy, we’ll just keep fracking up all the methane we can till hydrogen is ready, and whenever that is we will be able to supply hydrogen by cracking off the CO2 and venting it to the atmosphere so that some well meaning soccer mom can pretend she’s saving the planet because she has no TAILPIPE emissions.
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