Toyota gives hydrogen car successful debut in Fuji 24 Hours:
[...] "The goal is simply to become carbon neutral," said [Toyota president Akio] Toyoda. "Since we made this statement, I, as the chairman of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association, have been asking the government to take the correct steps and increase the number of carbon-neutral options.
"This is because, if all cars become battery-electric, one million jobs will be lost in Japan.
"I believe we have an opportunity to demonstrate one of these [alternative] options here in motorsports. I want to tell the world there is also this option to become carbon neutral."
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Toyota Gives Hydrogen Car Successful Debut in Fuji 24 Hours
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @10:57AM (4 children)
Hydrogen cars are fun until they explode into a fiery ball of flames.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @12:57PM (2 children)
> Hydrogen cars are fun until they explode ...
Cars are fun until they explode ...
ftfy -- it takes a lot of energy to accelerate and move a car and it has to be concentrated to get any kind of driving range, thus, potential for explosion exists with every type of energy storage.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @04:28PM (1 child)
>> potential for explosion exists with every type of energy storage
Wrong! Lard-ass Americans store huge amounts of energy in their mountains of flab, but they do not explode.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @06:10PM
No that would be the Brits that explode,
https://youtu.be/lhbHTjMLN5c?t=82 [youtu.be]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:44PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @11:02AM
What I'd be interested in is a alcohol/hydrocarbon fuel cell that's suitable for powering a car. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-ethanol_fuel_cell [wikipedia.org]
Alcohols and hydrocarbons are good and well proven for storing and transporting energy. Hydrogen gas is crap in comparison.
You can still be carbon neutral if you produce the alcohols/hydrocarbons in carbon neutral ways.
(Score: 2) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday May 26 2021, @11:07AM (3 children)
- Make electric cars
- Make a lot of people redundant, who won't have the means to consume as much.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:47PM (2 children)
Shirley those people displaced will be helped by the invisible hand job of the market.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:48PM
Those people who lose their jobs.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:01PM
You may be onto something here, with the sperm count going down, the price is bound to raise. (grin)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:29PM (6 children)
Going all electric will cost a bunch of jobs? Exactly what jobs would those be? Up front manufacturing isn't dramatically simpler, so I'm betting car maintenance and repair due to the much higher reliability? Maybe even some manufacturing since people don't have to replace their cars so often? Production and sale of fuel?
Oh no! We can't switch to new more durable windows, it'll put the window repair men out of business! Maybe we should hire a bunch of people to go around breaking windows to stimulate the economy!
Wiser people than I have done a wonderful job of explaining in detail why acts of destruction do not actually benefit society or the economy. Seems to me those arguments should all apply equally well to avoiding increased reliability or reduced consumption (which is inherently an act of destruction). Reducing the destruction by entropy or consumption should increase social wealth by exactly the same amount as allowing people to go around doing the damage intentionally would reduce it.
Only the starting point changes - the net effect of breaking windows is the same whether you're considering hiring window-breakers, or stopping the bands of volunteers currently breaking them.
That might not directly help the window repair men - but if you're talking car repair, I bet a whole bunch of those mechanical skills will be easily transferable to the booming industry of renewable energy installation and maintenance.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 26 2021, @01:52PM (5 children)
This is quasi related to EVs, but I seem to notice that Tesla appears to recognize some kind of supposed 'value' in greatly reducing part count in the manufacture of automobiles. Won't this take away jobs? Just as the increased use of robots does?
On yet a different tangent, integrating the all important and valuable battery as a structural component of the vehicle makes vehicles less repairable, like iPhones or Windows Surface tablets.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:32PM (3 children)
Less repairable? When was the last time you had to repair an electric drill, furnace blower, or window fan? The only maintenance an EV needs is tires, possibly brakes, and WD-40 on the door hinges every decade or so. You don't have pumps, fluids, thousands of moving parts that wear out, oil, coolant, or transmission fluid, since electric motors don't need transmissions.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:46PM
Any yet, if the battery life degrades before the car starts failing mechanically... you probably scrap the car anyway because there's no economically viable way to replace a battery integrated into the frame of the car. It might also make it a lot less profitable to recycle the batteries since you have to dismantle the car from around them. Think iDevice batteries only worse, since the battery isn't just glued in place, but being used as the central primary structural element.
I mean - maybe not. Maybe the structural battery pack is designed so that you can just securely support the front and rear casting, crawl underneath, and unbolt the central section of the car's frame... but that's certainly not the impression I've gotten.
It's not an innate weakness in EVs, but it is a troubling development in planned obsolescence by the dominant EV manufacturer, tying the lifetime of a vehicle which might last nearly forever to the lifetime with primarily cosmetic repairs, to the lifetime of the battery with guaranteed continuous degradation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @04:06PM (1 child)
> When was the last time you had to repair an electric drill
Had to repair my Dremel moto-tool a couple of weeks ago, so not that long. There is a plastic coupler between motor and output spindle, looks like a short length of tygon tubing, but has splines on the inside. With age (and perhaps ozone from the motor?) the soft plastic had turned to mush.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @04:10PM
... hit enter too soon.
The circulator blower in our house air conditioning has had the ball bearings freeze up solid and lock the motor. This happens over the winter, and we've been through more than one fan in the last 10 years. I've now learned to "snap" it loose in the spring before first turn-on, then it seems to work OK. I blame cheap shielded bearings, which have lost their grease--and I can hear the typical dry ball bearing sound when it runs.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:56PM
Not just supposed - as I recall it eliminates hundreds of separate parts compared to traditional manufacturing, and every part you can eliminate reduces time and cost to assemble - like a die-cast Hotwheels car versus the Lego Technic version. It should also slightly increase reliability since you don't have all the connections between non-moving parts that might fail. Not exactly a common source of failure, but not unheard of either.
And yes, it almost certainly reduces jobs as a result - but it's really got nothing to do with EVs, except that the dominant EV manufacturer is adopting the strategy. It would be similarly cost-effective and job-reducing for gas cars. In fact I understand Sandy Munroe has been suggesting it to various manufacturers for decades, Tesla is just the first manufacturer to actually take his suggestion. Which might have something to do with the fact that they're having to build manufacturing plants from scratch rather than looking at the cost of retooling existing plants. Not to mention Musk is big on questioning and optimizing everything, while the established manufacturers mostly have a century of ossified corporate culture resisting any change.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:00PM (1 child)
There is a very ancient saying the yung 'uns here won't remember. In the 1960s it became apparent to banks that without computers, the bookkeeping of a large bank would require the employment of more clerks than the US population.
From that you could infer:
* they became dependent upon computers and drove their development
* big banks can be blamed for cobol, and later java
* they were thinking of outsourcing long before it became popular, even eventually outsourcing to alien races
* they could have given everyone on earth a job, taking away potential employees for all other types of employment
Robots don't want to kill all humans. They just want to take our jobs.
Think about self driving trucks and taxis taking away jobs. Nope, never gonna happen.
The Centauri traded Earth jump gate technology in exchange for our superior hair mousse formulas.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:36PM
From Wikipedia:
On 28 and 29 May 1959 (exactly one year after the Zürich ALGOL 58 meeting), a meeting was held at the Pentagon to discuss the creation of a common programming language for business. It was attended by 41 people and was chaired by Phillips.[20] The Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers. FORTRAN, the only mainstream language at the time, lacked the features needed to write such programs.[21]
That said, your reasoning is still sound.
Impeach Donald Saruman and his sidekick Elon Sauron
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:31PM (2 children)
Low energy density, not a source of energy (just a way of storing energy obtained from a real source), hydrogen is hard to store without leaking away due to tiny molecule size, etc.
Hydrogen is so impractical that it will go nowhere.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:20PM (1 child)
They said the same thing about batteries not so long ago and yet here we are.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @07:01PM
Battery powered transportation, despite all the press coverage it gets, is still basically 0% of all transportation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:34PM (11 children)
the more sophisticated xor complex a system gets the more "locked-in" and inflexible it becomes.
if such a system breaks, say thru civil war or thru natural disaster the more catastrophict the failure.
throwing the "but the jobs" consideration out the window, a more "humain" metric would be to consider the development cost of "from zero to hundred".
considering the situation from starting in cave with nothing to:
A) hydrogen economy
or
B) electric with battery (dams, windmills and pv panels; cooking with induction).
which one can be done " faster" and doesn't need (civilisation like) development of a polictical-industrial complex tie-in first?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:48PM (4 children)
also, for me, "green hydrogen" smells like a nuke and steam and zirconium, and not "alternative storage for excess day time energy from infinite day-time solar (sun) energy".
so, more nukes but not making electricity but hydrogen ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @02:57PM (2 children)
-nomsg
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:33PM (1 child)
there might be room for improvement?
what we need to look out for in the energy storage sector is "more screws and less glue".
rotating machinary, like engines, turbines, compressors are " screw business".
batteries and, alas, solarpanels are in the "glue business".
for me and probably most people evolving from a cave, " screw business" stuff is more ..uhm... managable and serviceable. also probably more recycleable.
stuff in the "glue business" is mostly "buy, use then throw away". these " screwless" things might last a long time (mostly they dont) but are nevertheless not intended to be serviced.
if toyota can give me a fridge sized device that can store 5kW and be serviced for the next 30 years or so, using closed-loop hydrogen, without using "glue" but with only a charge and discharge efficience of ... say 50%, then that is desirable (add more infinit energy harvester).
if the "fridge" has resell value, that is the junkyard will take it with a smile, then even better.
i don't see the junkyard smile much when presented with stuff from the "glue" department...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:46PM
oops, forgot the "h" up there where it says "kw, so " kwh". n00b=
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:01PM
you know something is valuable when people fleeing a genocide, marching thru marshes and swamps decide to transport a bulky solarpanel.
not a case of plutonium or a canister of gasoline or a tank of propane/hydrogen, no, a solarpanel ^_^
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:41PM (4 children)
I'm not sure rebuilding after civilization collapse is a particularly valuable metric to measure technology decisions by. After all, if civilization collapses, we'll have much bigger and more immediate problems than trying to rebuild to the state before the fall.
But, if we use those standards... Honestly, hydrogen might be the better bet. Unless you're talking hydrogen fuel cells, in which case it's really just a different kind of electric battery.
Consider - pretty much all modern electrical technology, from induction cook-tops to modern high-efficiency motors, requires microchips to operate. You can't just jury-rig around them, you typically need to redesign the device from the ground up to not need them. And microchips require an existing high technology base to even consider manufacturing. Ditto solar cells, which use the same basic technology, and the existing ones will mostly stop producing useful amounts of power within a few decades of The Fall. And after a few decades of sitting around neglected in a mostly-depopulated world, the contacts on the existing chips will mostly be too corroded to realistically consider salvaging with the available technology.
Modern rechargable batteries likewise require high technology to produce. Lead-acid batteries could be recycled indefinitely, but they just don't have the energy density for mobile applications.
Hydrogen though - you can just burn it. Fuel cells need a high technology base to produce, but you can use it in an ICE just fine. Or even a more primitive external combustion engine such as steam engines. And much of the most promising hydrogen production technology utilizes biotechnology (mostly hydrogen-producing bacteria). And biotechnology has the advantage of being self-replicating without requiring any high technology after the initial creation. So long as some enterprising individual rescues a "seed crop" from the hydrogen plant during The Fall, people will be able to just farm hydrogen indefinitely, no matter how far industrial technology falls.
If you want technology that will survive The Fall, you want biotechnology. It can be maintained and replicated to any scale even if we lose all knowledge of its creation, and without depending on any other even modestly advanced technologies. Assuming we retain knowledge of agriculture and animal husbandry (as relevant) it can even potentially be adapted to new needs and situations.
Judging by non-dystopian standards though.... hydrogen has the reek of desperation to it. Just as plastic (and oil) companies hyped how easy it was to recycle plastic to keep its use thriving through the environmental revolution, so does it seem like we're getting an over-hyped story of how great and clean hydrogen is. And just like with recycling plastic, it *could* be. Theoretically. But it's just not nearly as cost effective as producing it from nice freshly-pumped fossil fuels.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:56PM (1 child)
i like your "biotech" approach to hydrogen production. it's abit like making alcohol.
tho i am not sure what-from the "bugs" will make hydrogen, but if it's just remotly like a solid state catalyst that you can throw into a puddle of water on a sunny day and then watch the puddle turn into a glass of water with a alcaceltzer and fizzle away, this might even be what leads to "the fall"?
methinks one can use alcohol (from fermentation and concentration) in a lamp with a wick but this didn't help them bio-oil carriers called whales much ...
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:28PM
I would imagine they would make the hydrogen from water - the primary source of all hydrogen in the ecosystem. Though I think there are several approaches being pursued. You could use sugar, just like yeast do with alcohol, though cellulose (agricultural waste) is probably far more cost effective. Really, any common naturally occurring organic molecule is likely to be very hydrogen rich. Of course, freeing the hydrogen is liable to convert the carbon to CO2 in the process, but so long as you're using ecologically sourced hydrocarbons you're not creating a big imbalance in the extremely slow geological carbon cycle, which is what's causing the buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere.
As for leading to the fall - I don't see how. One of the big properties of hydrogen - the whole reason it's being considered for energy storage, is that it's highly reactive with oxygen. The result of which is... it turns back into water.
Not to mention, any organism that produces free hydrogen is basically throwing away all the energy used to produce it as a waste product - that's going to make it pretty hard-pressed to compete in the wild against its cousins that harness that energy for their own use instead.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @04:26PM (1 child)
about "the cave" analogy. i consider every new human to start "in a cave" *blush*.
we humans seem very "alien" and badly adapted to living on this planet. if we compare to our fellow inhabitants that can fly and swim and run and whatnot without having to go to school first.
i am not sure if there is or already was a genesis moment where we took a wrong turnv knowledge handed down was geared towards a goal and maybe this goal wasn't (isn't) about understanding the universe (and our place and modus operandi of survival in it) but more about how to set the vcr clock or make online bookings?
i mean, some animals seek out certain plants when sick (how do they know?); maybe, if we are not so distracted by headlines, we would seek out or crave moldy breed or fruit when sick?
i mean what comes naturally (weeeeh and here the debate xplodeseses). it just seems we are far far faaaaar removed from being able to survive. education (plus grant financing $$$) doesn't emphasis lowly so-called survival skills. removed from nature-reality but squished between "magical-how-does-it-work" high technology, it seems to take humankind on a overhanging trajectory: to dump to survive bare, to dumb to build your own phone, tv, whatever.
i just fear "hydrogen technology" will make this "inbetween" or "inbe-pendant" space even bigger?
it sounds like anti-technology but i mean maybe our technology trajectory is anti-nature?
*omg* that was alot of blah-blah t-hehe
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday May 26 2021, @06:02PM
What do you mean? We're incredibly well adapted. Our biological "superpower" is endurance - a healthy human can run virtually any other animal on the planet to death. We can't keep up with a deer, cheetah, elephant, etc. when they dash - but they have to stop relatively soon, while we can run non-stop all day long until our prey collapses from exhaustion. The fact that, with moderate training, *any* healthy human from adolescence to old age can run such marathons at a similar pace (though there's a performance peak around young men in their prime), has been cited by many to suggest that our species went through a prolonged period as endurance hunters - running a herd of deer to death may take many dozens of miles, and the hunters aren't going to be able to carry a substantial amount of meat back to tribe members that can't mostly follow along to join in the feasting on site.
We *are* born prematurely compared to most animals - but that seems to be down to the size of our skulls (i.e. brains). If we were as well developed as most animals at birth, women would need ridiculously wide hips to survive the process, which would be impractical for other aspects of bipedal life. Give an infant a year or so to reach a stage of development similar to what most animals are born at (slowed because of the much harsher external environment), and they're about as capable of surviving in the wild as any other animal at a similar level of development. We also develop more slowly, but again that seems to be down to our brains - they grow a LOT, and take their time through a lot of developmental stages, fine-tuning a much more complex culturally-optimized organ than what other animals can slap together from blueprints to deal with a mostly unchanging set of environmental challenges.
As for seeking out medicinal herbs, etc. by instinct - humans do that all the time - that's what cravings are all about. Granted, we kind of over-saturate some of them with our incredibly calorie-rich diets, but surely you've occasionally gotten a real craving for foods that don't normally have much appeal? Pregnant women are especially notorious for that, but I think everyone gets it once in a while. Maybe you see or smell some food that would normally be "meh, whatever", but this time you *need* to have some. That's probably instinct kicking in to address some under-served need. We're just not normally taught to listen to such urges, quite the opposite in fact ("Don't eat that, baby!") as our cultures became more cognitively biased.
Such instincts are probably slowly weakening over time thanks to modern medical care mostly defanging the evolutionary pressure that would reinforce them, but I don't see how any particular (non-medical) technology could make things any worse. It's not like oil or coal are more "instinctual" fuels - hydrogen is just a (potentially) less environmentally destructive one. We're adapting our behaviors(and cultures) in the face of impending disasters that other animals wouldn't even realize they were the cause of.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday May 26 2021, @07:32PM
We're not going back to zero though, so it's just a fun mental exercise.
The important metric is "from now to hundred".
We've got electric infrastructure, we just need to beef it up to deliver more electricity. We can generate electricity from a wide variety of sources.
We've got gas delivery infrastructure, but it's through pipes that only handle one type of gas and/or propane delivery trucks. For piped gas we'd need expensive new infrastructure. For trucking hydrogen we'd need a lot more trucks, taking a whole new type of risk compared with current fuel delivery trucks.
OK, so if we go back to zero anyway and it's total chaos what's the power source? Beasts of burden and slaves; but unlike the Middle Ages we'd probably retain some knowledge so there would no doubt be horribly inefficient steam engines, ICEs running on wood gas and/or ethanol and such. Here's hoping it remains just a mental exercise.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @03:15PM (5 children)
more on topic, i totally agree that doing something useless, like motorsports, should not destroy finite resources (oil gas etc).
maybe ... uhm ... toyota solar cup in sunny australia?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by crafoo on Wednesday May 26 2021, @06:45PM
A) you calling motorsports useless is a value judgement and values are not universal. this may be difficult to understand depending on how much of a narcissist you are.
B) the pace of motorsport technology drives commercial automotive development, producing better quality, more efficient automobiles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 26 2021, @06:59PM (3 children)
Same topic, completely different opinion:
I feel that the very high energy-density fossil fuels, gasoline in particular, should be saved for higher purposes, like having fun. This means that ordinary needs for transportation, heating, all that boring stuff, should be converted to electric (or other boring energy source), making sure that there is always some gasoline left for motorsports.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27 2021, @03:27AM (2 children)
Or like bombing countries that have oil, right?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 27 2021, @06:03AM (1 child)
If our economy no longer depends on oil, then what would be the value in bombing countries that have it? Even if we keep using it in motorsports, nobody would wage a war just for motorsports.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 27 2021, @11:57AM
> Even if we keep using it in motorsports, nobody would wage a war just for motorsports.
Better still, perhaps sports (and motorsport in particular) could be used as a proxy for actual wars. I have the impression that World Cup soccer/football already somewhat fills this role?
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Wednesday May 26 2021, @05:29PM
Everything wrong with hydrogen fuel for internal combustion engines [youtube.com]
And Currently not that great for Fuel Cells/electric cars either. [youtube.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."