Hydrogen is a fundamental superior technology compared to batteries. If anything, Toyota is decades ahead of Tesla. Everything Tesla is aiming to do is just a pale imitation of what Toyota is already achieving.

And yet I've seen at most a handful of hydrogen-powered cars since they've been available commercially, and I've only once seen a refueling station for them.

Superior technology -- assuming it is; I have no idea -- often doesn't win.

The problem with that thinking is that BEVs are guaranteed to be more expensive in the long run. A hydrogen car is basically an EV minus the most expensive part. That is going to be a decisive advantage.

It's not fundamentally superior due to the challenge of storing hydrogen at high densities.

It's superior in some cases where you have an existing pipeline network.

Hydrogen storage has a higher density than li-ion batteries.

Others discussed hydrogen. Frankly it seems to me to be a bad bet by Toyota. I assume they have better information than I do, but they also may have been prevented from a reasonable position on battery vs hydrogen by some internal politics or other dynamics.

The robot: Tesla seems to have approximately reproduced the state of Japanese robotics in 2000 (Honda Asimo) using technology that has seriously advanced in twenty years. I am not qualified to say what the future value of that is, or why battery packs are a competitive advantage to something that never leaves the home.

Tech to sell to other car companies: Humans run the other car companies. What will they do if they recognize a competitive threat with a technology advantage? Will they say “great, let’s buy that from our competitor since they’re clearly superior”? Or are they more likely to say something like “let’s figure out a way to neutralize or eliminate this advantage” and then go about doing it (even as a collective)?

Tesla hired Toyota execs to build their manufacturing line. There is little chance that Toyota could not, if it could get out of its own way, do what Telsa is doing from a manufacturing and technology perspective. This to me suggests that others will, even if Toyota culturally cannot make it happen.

The profit per vehicle available is primarily indicative of competition. Toyota is a mature company in a mature segment with a lot of competition. Tesla is entitled to those numbers as long as they can maintain them and stave off competition. Some people think they will be able to do that for a long time. I’m not one of them.

Tesla’s barrier in justifying their market cap is not only the other car companies, of whom there are roughly a dozen with similar revenue or higher. In the process of capturing the value they are talking about, their competition becomes major portions of the structure of global markets in the energy and transportation sectors, at least.

Hydrogen is a fundamentally superior technology to batteries. It is Tesla that will eventually have to move on to fuel cell cars, not Toyota doing the other way around.

To which fundamentals are you referring?

If you factor in production, transmission, and combustion, tank cycling, and failure modes, is it still superior?

If you realize that fuel cells are electrochemical systems, you'd also realize that there is no fundamental difference between how a fuel cell and a conventional battery works. Fuel cell cars are also EVs, just without the expensive and heavy battery.

I understand that fuel cells are electrochemical systems.

I also understand that there are fundamental limits to their physics and to the storage and transfer of hydrogen that put it at a severe disadvantage to batteries in these respects.

This does a reasonable job of explaining it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmorris/2020/07/04/why-hydr...

This is more technical and lays out the advantages and disadvantages of both: https://c2e2.unepccc.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/09/...

Batteries also have the practical advantage that if a charging cable fails it does not with some probability spontaneously ignite into an invisible 1400 C flamethrower.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603....

There are no fundamental limits. You cannot name them because they don't exist. The point of fuel cells being electrochemical systems is the explain that these limits don't exist.

What you're really arguing is the existence of practical limits. The problem is that most of these practical limits are solvable. Some have long been solved, and most anti-hydrogen claims are attacking an version of the technology that hasn't been true since the 1990s. In reality, FCEVs are already pretty close to BEVs on efficiency. This is especially the case once you look at full lifecycle costs and energy consumption, where battery production and recycling are going to be major penalties.

A hydrogen car is arguably safer than a battery car. The problem is that battery fires continue until they consume the car. But since hydrogen is lighter than air, hydrogen fires are not persistent nor do they surround the car with fire. This argument is basically fearmongering, and is as silly as Edison's attacks on AC power.

Tell me how you get to 90% efficiency (or even 50%) in a system in practice going from not hydrogen (let’s say water, and you don’t even need to pressurize it or filter it for this example) to vehicular thrust.

Hydrolysis maxes out at 65% efficient. Then you need to compress the hydrogen to 700 bar. Don’t forget to transport it unless you are doing hydrolysis and compression in your home. Then you need to convert it back to propulsion.

Do that and make it beat EVs without hand waving at battery recycling (old EV batteries are great for a lot of uses and better than primary products in many lower volume markets, so this argument is nonsense). Please cite your sources.

Electrolysis maxes out at 100% efficiency. And theoretically, so can the fuel cell. So if both sides are 100% efficient, then there's your answer. Also, compressed gas is an energy storage idea. You can in theory extract energy from that.

It's worth noting that electrolysis and fuel cells are electrochemical systems. It is only BEV propagandists that wants you to not be aware of this. If more people knew this, they'd know that FCEVs are eventually going to catch up and surpass BEVs. So instead, they lie and spread FUD like crazy.

Electrolysis cannot hit 100% efficiency. Maybe the approximate math can, if you only consider the first law of thermodynamics, but you’ll violate the second the moment it enters reality.

Alkaline electrolysis maxes out at 66% theoretically. PEM is maybe 80% but that’s neglecting system-level losses.

You cannot extract energy from compressed gas if your fuel cell requires gas at that pressure in order to operate.

There is this weird cult of first principles I keep encountering where people think they’ve cracked the code but they just don’t understand systems.

You are completely wrong. You are not thinking of the laws of thermodynamics. You are thinking of Carnot’s theorem. Which doesn’t apply because electrolyzers are not heat engines. They are electrochemical systems, just like li-ion batteries. What you’re writing is just pseudoscience.

The theoretical limit of both alkaline and PEM electrolysis efficiency is 100%. Real world is somewhat less, but you can get to something like 98% even in the real world: https://www.inceptivemind.com/hysatas-record-breaking-electr...

Fuel cells do not operate at 700 bars of pressure. There is definitely a possibility of extracting energy from compressed gases.

Sorry, but you are spouting total bullshit on all levels here. The only cult is whatever battery/electrification fanbase you’re a part of. You are just repeating BEV propaganda designed to shut down critical thinking and defame all alternative ideas. If anything, this type of tactic is a good sign that we are witnessing the end of the BEV, mainly because its advocates must resort to blatant lies to promote it.

> What tech is Toyota going to sell to other car companies to make money?

What tech is Tesla going to sell to other car companies? Beyond allowing access to a charging network?

Other manufacturers want as little to do with Tesla tech as possible.