Merv's Politically Incorrect Audio Blog

Hydrogen is going to find its market in long haul trucking, stationary backup generation, and possibly rail and aviation. As it becomes more available it may (or may not) trickle down to consumers. Toyota's Mirai has better range than most EVs, it is only the last of fueling infrastructure that makes it impractical, which is why they are mostly sold in places where they are testing H2 trucking and fueling is available. The biggest argument most people have with hydrogen is that it is mostly made by steam reforming natural gas. Electrolysis is inefficient, but if you can use otherwise wasted renewable energy (overproduction which is inherent in variable generation at times) it can be made to work eventually.

Yes, even after the 2035 cutoff there are still going to be many millions of ICE cars on the road for decades to come. There will also always be people who prefer ICE cars and can afford expensive, inefficient fuel. For the same reason I prefer mechanical watches to digital ones, if technology allows me to drive a clean car with a nice engine I'll take that over a BEV any day.

 

The Japanese are investing heavily in hydrogen... Makes me think its probably worth it.


I would not take any of the zero carbon technologies off the table.

Luckily EU did not ban E fuels and is not going to. I mean what would happen to motosport otherwise..?

 

Formula One plans to start using e-fuels in 2026. Hopefully that means they will have a future as the current hybrid cars, because honestly Formula E is slow. Slower than Formula 3, with short races and no ground effects because they are limited by their batteries.

Thanks to Germany and Italy who were the biggest advocates for the EU e-fuel exemption. Not surprising given that they also make the nicest cars (IMO).

https://europe.autonews.com/environmentemissions/porsche-and-ferrari-center-e-fuel-debate

 

The big reason that Japan is big on hydrogen is that they have considerable methane hydrate reserves off their coast. Amongst their dearth of domestic energy options, converting that to hydrogen fuel is extremely attractive. But that still isn't really zero carbon.

Elsewhere in the world, hydrogen makes so little sense for the general public. The end-to-end efficiency is terrible, and building hydrogen storage and transport networks would be far more difficult and expensive than just bulking up electrical networks.

 

A lot of people think Toyota has missed the proverbial ball, but I think they are entirely right to go slow. They could have gone all in on EVs long ago, but they still have a huge market for their hybrids. That has given them lots of EE knowledge and they can (and are) jumping into full BEVs any time they want, but I'll bet their hybrids continue to sell huge numbers until the day comes they are banned. Likewise with hydrogen, they are hedging their bets dabbling in a technology that may never be dominant, but I would not be surprised if a day comes when they build H2/battery hybrids for all the people who are insecure about electrical access, because that is not going to change in my lifetime for sure.

Toyota knows exactly what they are doing. They have all the plays covered, and are pretty much alone at that.

 

I'm amazed people falling for this crap too. I guess I would like to imagine that a "more sophisticated" customer would be able to tell the different pretty easily... but nope. 90% of "luxury" vehicles I've been in or driven in the past 10 years I really don't feel like are worth it. I didn't feel the same up until about 2005-2008 for most vehicles. And I'm annoyed b/c the "good driving car" market is getting hit by this too with cars being made to be POS.

Yep, I have a B58 powered BMW. Sadly - plot twist - it's not actually THAT fast or that powerful, but yes, it's definitely relatively low worry and does get decent gas mileage. As a matter of fact, I got the 240 over the M2 at the time of purchase because it had a B58 instead of the S55. New M2's have the S58 now, but really not digging how they look or the fact that they're still 3800+ lb (which is my biggest complaint with my car too).

Golden age of gas power to me was 2000-2007/2010ish - though - exact dates depend on mfg and model. Tech was good enough to have sorted through most of the problems of the past but car weren't excessively electronic, dumbed down, etc. yet. In retrospect, I probably should have just got a half busted or POS level 2nd gen Honda Fit I could thrash and "drive a slow car fast" almost anywhere with the rest of the money going towards another "even more fun" than my current car... but this is the non-PC thread, not the car thread, so I'll stop.

 

Back to the topic at hand:

It was a bit of a stretch as a conspiracy, but I did want to see what everyone else was thinking. Too many things putting hard downwards pressure car prices for too long which made me wonder if it's at all possible something else may be going on.

Personally, I agree - hydrogen may work in Japan where most things are packed closely together, you never really drive that far or that fast in a city, the cars are small on average and the transportation + other overhead costs for the fuel would be relatively cheap. Not so much for a lot of other countries.

While I do personally believe in the idea of EVs for day to day around town stuff, I will be the first to say that I REALLY don't think it will work from a technical perspective for "everyone" nor do I like it from a personal perspective.

 

That's the kicker with hydrogen, some regions/countries are well suited to adapt existing infrastructure, or have existing industry to support it through similar resource extraction and transport. So why not leverage that?

Toyota would love to sell them cars.

Here's another interesting tidbit. Toyota just started delivering the new Prius, you know, that car that was originally the butt of all the jokes about granola nuts, Greta-REEEEEES and incessant left-lane campers? Oh yeah, she's a looker now... But according to Toyota (yeah, yeah, marketing...), for every 1 BEV they could produce like the horrendous bZ4X, they can produce 90 Priuses or Priiii, or Priusi, or whatever. And of the Prius (optimus) Prime with it's conservative 8kwh pack, USDM is only going to see 10k units in 2024, and hopefully 15k units in 2025. We may love BIG BATTERY, but it just isn't sustainable at scale. What good is a car if the manufacturer can't wrangle the supply chain to build it? You folks do realize scarcity is precisely what shitty dealerships are counting on for absurd ADM and countless DIOs, right?

 

What does someone with diarrhea and an electric car owner have in common?




They both hope to get home in time.

 

If I am in Dallas and I want to blow up a toilet, may I go to your house?

 

Big part of the reasoning for hydrogen are ships and planes, cars can be 1 / 3 of that.

EU is still in a dead zone. An experienced American energy / oil market trader claimed that the Natural gas and oil infrastructure can't be used for hydrogen. Same guy claimed that LNG isn't going to be good for the continent in the long run. Kinda obvious right.

The idea that hydrogen is going to "fix" anything here is same as thinking a copper wire laying on the floor provides energy.

Outside of green hydrogen - fuel cells can work as more efficient natural gas micro power generators that are more efficient than gas turbines.. and I dont remember if the efficiency was higher than 60%. But still, if theres plenty of resources and excess energy it can be used to make power or hydrogen - energy dense fuel.

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At the end if the day the Free market is going to work this out. Few years ago the energy prices were too low for any investment worth having. Since the prices have risen, investment in energy is going to be more attractive again and so on.

 

I am sick of this trend of bigger and heavier vehicles that weigh as much as a tank. With 3 second 0-60 times. People are fucking stupid and have zero responsibility driving these killer monstrosities. Weight and size regulations for consumer vehicles needed to be reassessed 20 years ago.

Karen doesn’t need a 5 ton electric Escalade to take her kids to soccer practice and run to Whole Foods. Kyle doesn’t need a 5 ton pickup truck to drive to his office job. When does it fucking end? I guarantee more than 50% of these people can’t actually afford these vehicles.

 

This is going to be bad from a public safety standpoint... the average parking garage will not support these heavy EV vehicles. Parking garages are actually designed for less weight (40 pounds per square foot) than a typical office building (50psf), or office corridor (80psf).

 

To top it off, 99%+ of Karen and Kyles are not car people and already find it hard to recover when they start to lose slight control of a normal sized car, can't properly launch or stop a normal powered and weight car already, and will probably continue to buy cheap tires that make both of the above worse because "the other tires are $200 each and these are $35" (I've also seen several luxury car drivers do this... funny enough all of them emitted sleaze and you can tell only drive their car for the image and ego, not because they know how to drive or can appreciate actual luxury). This is just what I thought of in the few seconds it took me to read the first sentence of your post. I'm sure I can think of more.

Have better things to do 99%+ of the time, but one day, I want to napkin math the numbers and see how much allowing these karen-mobiles to proliferate harms the environment vs just having most people continue to drive sedans and sports cars (so I guess the % of the population that didn't drive trucks pre-Ford Exploder) without even substituting hybrids or electrics into the equation. That and poorly programmed traffic lights.

On the flip side, I am all for freedom of choice and I too will rent or borrow a large karen-mobile 1x every 2 weeks or for work - except I don't feel that hypocritical doing so because I typically fill the thing up with work related tools, materials, and supplies (as in I even have to put some of it in the passenger seat most of the time to fit everything).

I don't blame Karen for the cost though - I think car companies know they can turn a $15k econo-box car in their lineup into the same econobox repackaged as a $35-45k suv simply because SUV. Make sure the sedans being replaced suck hard enough for long enough to justify these actions via poor sales to their hurr hurr I work for da gubamin EPA / similar auditors. I also suspect this is why GM is making an electric hummer that isn't viable or sustainable long term instead of a more practical and sensible EV platform. Unfortunately the consumer and environment continue to suffer for this.

 

The Hummer is on the GM BT1 platform, which is the EV platform for all of GM's body-on-frame EVs. So the platform would still exist, Hummer or no Hummer, because they're not gonna stop making pickups, Suburbans and Escalades. Packaging it as a Hummer is fairly trivial if they have a platform that works, so I suspect their market research just told them that the Hummer name had regained enough cachet (from people who were too young to know or have forgetten how crappy Hummers were) to be viable and profitable again. If it wasn't the Hummer it would just be another body-on-frame SUV, the segment is just too profitable to ignore.

I do think manufacturers left sedans and compacts to flounder and fail in the US because emissions regulations and profits pushed them in that direction, but at the same time I think consumers met them halfway because in the US people genuinely prefer SUVs and trucks, and easy long-term loans made more expensive vehicles more approachable. Compounding that, there's less of an size penalty for EVs compared to ICE because battery size is a big factor in range, and smaller batteries in smaller cars will mean more range anxiety for consumers.

 

Was reading just recently that trucks have now overtaken cars in all 50 US states.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/07/trucks-outnumber-cars/ (may be paywalled).

Where I live trucks and SUVs have long been the majority. We do have some pretty snowy winters though so I can see the appeal.

 

I have a 4WD truck (for hauling), my wife has an AWD SUV (older Highlander (2008) - she needs the space for work) and I have an AWD sedan (Volvo)... a typical winter for us is 200+ inches of the white stuff. All of the cars are fitted with snow tires in the winter. The best performing winter vehicle is the sedan... by far. The only time the truck/SUV outperform it is if we have more than 12" of fresh white stuff that hasn't been plowed yet... so that's maybe 1-2x a winter.

People who claim they need a truck or SUV to drive in the winter either have never driven a properly equipped vehicle, or don't know how to drive in the winter. Probably both.

The majority of the people have big SUV's/trucks for the same reason they live in McMansion's... conspicuous consumption/bigger dick syndrome.
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that was a great article

 

Can confirm currently living in Michigan, drove by more than a few flipped over SUV's this winter. My 2014 Prius C did great. Combination of short wheel base, thin tires, and low slung heavy-ish battery/low center of gravity makes for great snow stability.