My speculative hot take on the reason that Toyota did not jump on the EV bandwagon and stuck with PHEV/Hydrogen is that much of it's operations are financed indirectly via low cost Japanese bank loans encouraged by Japanese government. These loans probably have an underlying perhaps unspoken component which nudges them toward business models which employ Japanese workers.

The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries.

Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over.

Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies.

VW and Tesla/US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) or had home court advantage and government support (Tesla/US car brands) to finance the US EV networks. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry and had less to lose on ICE than the Japanese incumbents.

There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.

I'm talking about falling far behind competitors in EVs. Which they have. EVs are the cars of the future, and they're flailing around wasting time on hydrogen instead.

I think of a car company- except tesla - to be like a massive container ship or similar

Think Titanic

I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric'

Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy

Their bz4x shows har far behind they are (not to mention wheels that fall off)

I think Toyota is making a Solid-State Battery too, and putting millions into it. This means it won't ever explode, is what I gathered when I read about it.

> Electrification makes them much more economically independent.

The Japanese electric grid is so shitty you won't even believe it. They have single phase 100V power. Half the country is 50Hz and the other half 60Hz.

Their grid just plain can't handle electric cars at scale without a full and complete overhaul.

> The hydrogen shit was ridiculous. JAPAN IS AN ISLAND WITHOUT OIL RESOURCES. They import virtually all their oil. Electrification makes them much more economically independent. The only place hydrogen was coming from was oil, unless they have some unknown methane reserves I am unaware of.

The hydrogen was generated from nuclear power. They have a lot more of these sources than they do for a lithium ion supply chain.

> The fact that every car company could buy a Model S and drive it around and not have drop-everything skunkworks doing EV development shocks me.

I think every company did back on the envelope calculation and in about 10seconds realised they won’t ever have the battery supply to satisfy even 10% of their sales for decades. Only Tesla managed to convince Panasonic to build new factories.

I don't think buying Chinese battery/BEV company is an option due to national security. Worst thing happened in Japan was Nissan sold AESC to Chinese conglomerate. Govt should relief it instead of sunsetting companies like JDI.

Japan has no domestic oil, something they have been keenly aware of since WW2. I think they wanted Hydrogen to be the future so badly because it would remove that disadvantage.

Now Japan has to import the batteries, and the fossil fuels to charge them.

One of the hardest parts about hydrogen is bootstrapping the infrastructure. You need new production facilities, pipelines, storage tanks, pumps, and probably a lot more. All of which need to handle hydrogen, an extremely flammable gas that likes to squeeze through any material you contain it in due to its tiny size. In terms of switching away from oil, the only options are biofuels (which have their own major issues) or electricity (which already has a distribution system across much of the world). If we run out of Lithium in the ground, we'll start recycling it a lot more efficiently. While mining isn't ideal, at least mining and using Lithium isn't causing climate change.

The fact you can charge you EV at home (from your own solar panels if you have then) is a massive added bonus that's going to be hard to convince people away from once its established.

Thinking about what comes after battery cars (assuming there's a Lithium shortage) - I'd be very surprised if Hydrogen can scale up; I think it's much more likely we move to other battery tech, or perhaps novel liquid fuels. Hydrogen was always a greenwashing ruse by petrolchem companies.

>All car companies will shift away from the EV and towards hydrogen at some point.

Sure and all coal plants will be replaced by fusion, but a utility executive single-mindedly pursuing fusion is not a good corporate leader.

Hydrogen still requires a distribution network yah? The electric distribution network (electrical grid) is already here, and every building and house has a hose. Incrementally upgrading that infra seems light years better than building a hydrogen distribution network.

You mean like high density LFP/LMFP that is coming into mass production this year at 200-230 wh/kg? (aka the 350-400+ mile car) That require no cobalt/nickel?

You mean like sodium ion batteries that are coming into mass production this year at 150 wh/kg? (aka the 200-300 mile car) That don't even require lithium?

You mean like Lithium Sulfur batteries that are poised in five years to double or triple battery density?

Or you mean like the Sodium Sulfur batteries that will probably come a year or two after that which similarly double/triple NMC capacity but only require sodium and sulfur?

Your take is ten years old. High density LFP and good-enough density sodium ion is going to deliver a comprehensively cheaper car drivetrain than ICEs can deliver, and each year will only be worse and worse news for ICEs. I would predict by 2030 there will be 600 mile range EVs (real world, not WLTP) whose drivetrain component cost is 1/2 of an ICE.

We'll have to see what comes out of Toyota. They have the DNA of execution, efficiency, and engineering. It's hard to see if it is "too late", because EV transition is such a massive investment in vertically integrated manufacturing at this point, while carmakers outside of Tesla are so OEM focused. We'll see.

I had kind of assumed that Toyota would be asleep at the switch and a joke for another 2-3 years, this is a surprising development. The fact they were pushing hydrogen still last year in public and poo-pooing EVs, and given the ossification and malaise of large Japanese corporations, I assumed it would be status quo until substantial market share was lost.

Is this activist investors again, like BMW, VW, etc? Is that even a thing in Japanese megacorps?

> fossil fuels

> battery related metals

only one of these continuously emits greenhouse gasses through its use

hint: it's not the one that you can recycle into new batteries

Your "just" there ignores the efficiency, pollution, and emissions aspects.

Going from gas to electric is slow.

If electric -> hydrogen offers fewer of the benefits beyond removing a dependency on battery metals over much-cleaner-already EVs, that transition will take even longer, if it happens.

You're right. Mining 400kg of carbon, iron, and aluminium for a battery in a sodium ion car is prohibitive. Rather than replacing it with nickel, copper, noble metals, and rare earths in an electrolyser and fuel cell we should remove and shrink as many cars as we can by mass expanding transit, active transport, and LEV infrastructure.

Hydrogen cars are no help here unfortunately, they also use metals such as steel and aluminum.

> It is just replacing a dependency on fossil fuels with battery related metals. All car companies will shift away from the EV and towards hydrogen at some point.

You are aware that nearly all commercial hydrogen comes from fossil fuel extraction, yes?

I wish more people would realize that lithium battery production is still pretty nasty, especially in countries like China with minimal environmental regulations. Not to mention the electrical grid will take some significant investment (hopefully in renewable energy sources for this huge transition to make any sense) to be ready to accommodate such a huge increase in consumption.

A dependency on fossil fuels isn't a good thing, certainly not to the extent that we've developed, but I really don't think the answer is as clear cut as everybody treats it to be.

Hydrogen is superior because those high pressure tanks and electronics do not require metals.

Same. They made their entire Sienna lineup go hybrid by default and the vans have been unobtanium ever since.

I think the idea that they should start taking away resources from cars that are already beloved and selling well to (potentially) throw away their reputation on trust and reliability seems incredibly short sighted.

And given that they are the number one seller of cars in the world, incremental improvements in fuel efficiency fleet wide seem like a much better use of their time than providing a gimmicky electric model just for California.

It's not a matter of subtractive solutions or not: It's that in a low-car environment, way too many people's real estate investments are worth near zero. How much of, say, Suburban Florida remains usable if we price cars high enough to make their use unadvisable? Entire subdivisions are worth basically zero. Same thing with commercial areas that are not really reachable on foot.

Old US cities only became car centric through massive amounts of pain and hardship, which happened to hit people that were mostly politically disenfranchised. Reshaping in the other direction would involve a similar amount of hardship, but on people that vote. We can make it easier to increase density, but the kind of efforts that would make us not end up relying on EVs have such economic and political costs that we lack the state capacity to go there.

> we don’t need more efficient cars we need fewer cars

I don’t think politically viable, despite being the real solution to the core problem.

At some point we need to stop acting like transportation solutions for areas with orders of magnitude higher population density than the US are obvious solutions. Infrastructure for a country like the Netherlands (a popular “see we should bike” example) with a population density of 459 people per km^2 is going to be completely different than the US with its 35/km^2.

It is just as naive to think the US can remake its transportation infrastructure to be like Europe, as it would be to expect every road in Italy to be made wide enough for a Ford F-150 Raptor. Places in the US with high population densities (NYC, DC, Chicago, SF, etc) often do have far better public transportation than the rest of the US.

1. Actual numbers and sources please? I'm not convinced that hydrogen storage has the same costs as CNG/LPG, it's a very different gas to store.

2. Actual numbers and sources please?

3. Who will construct and pay for these pipelines, since you can't use CNG/LPG pipes for hydrogen?

4. Actual sources please?

5. https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/german-city-to-ret... and https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-19/shell-clo...

6. Ahh yes, BMW press release about BMW testing a BMW car themselves. Totally neutral and unbiased. Toyota had the same thing, they preheated the car before each run because fuel cells really don't like freezing.