LawBeefaroni wrote:Zaxxon wrote:From what I've read, the Mirai, and hydrogen in general, are a joke. They are EVs with an extraneous conversion tossed in. Electricity is used to create the hydrogen cell, then it's converted back to electricity to power the car. Fundamentally, this process cannot be as efficient as a pure BEV.
Then you have much-reduced power output (read: torque), the need to visit a hydrogen station for fill-ups rather than topping off at home, and you're carrying around a literal bomb in your car.
I'll pass.
The thing is, hydrogen is a good way to store electricity. The fuel cells are still expensive but that's similar to the EV battery barrier. They're coming down in price rather quickly.
And a hydrogen tank is not a literal bomb any more than a gas tank or lithium batter is a literal bomb ("hydrogen bombs" are nuclear fission bombs and the tanks in hydrogen cars are in absolutely no way physically capable of producing nuclear fission).
I'm kind of surprised at your immediate dismissal of the idea, knowing how much of the anti-EV bunk you're probably waded though.
It's not an immediate dismissal. It's been a long road. I just found that l don't see the worth in an energy-efficiency inferior method that also produces a less-enjoyable vehicle.
And yes, hydrogen fuel cells are more volatile than either properly managed Li-Ion battery cells or gasoline tanks.
For a quick-ish overview of why hydrogen is fundamentally flawed, see the
Wait But Why Tesla piece. There's a footnote in there with some explanation from the author, a video from Musk, and a more detailed breakdown. I think hydrogen is being pursued as much as it is due to the facts that it's friendlier to incumbents (keep on the fueling station methodology and nat gas sourcing) and the regulatory credits are huge.
It's just not very compelling from an end-user perspective, and will become less so as batteries continue to improve while hydrogen hits the barriers of physics.
I'm open to being proven wrong, but the initial hands-on pieces I've seen on the Mirai don't inspire confidence. Especially with Toyota reportedly selling them at a giant loss and their cost still being relatively high.