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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • 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.



  • 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.



  • I remember the “old” Skype, which was essential for keeping in touch with my siblings before we got cell phones. Once I got a phone, it was the end of Skype until ~2014 when I got a job where Skype for business was available. I still didn’t use it because that application would sometimes crash if you just jiggled the mouse. It became a running joke at my workplace.

    Clock into work, Skype crashed.

    Go to lunch, Skype crashed.

    Ran out of TP at home. You guessed it. Skype crashed.