this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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This horseshit again? Physical product available for independent analysis, or it didn't happen.
It's not like the Chinese are famous for lying about the specs on things they manufacture or anything. Every week we hear about some Chinese company poised to "revolutionize" the EV with pie-in-the-sky range figures and yet the market continues to remain resolutely un-revolutionized.
And as usual, this article harps on "range" as if that's not an easily fudged figure. The real numbers we need to see are watts per volume, or watts per mass. And number of charge cycles tolerated, and how many before it loses what percentage of capacity. Any idiot can claim to make a 1,300 mile, 2,000 mile, 5,000 mile, 1,000,000 mile battery pack -- just make the pack bigger, or the vehicle lighter, or both. That tells us nothing meaningful whatsoever about the battery chemistry itself. Advertising us what hypothetical ranges someone thinks a pack made of these "could" build is meaningless. We could build a 1300 mile battery pack right now with LiFePo cells if we wanted to, via the simple expedient of filling a dump truck with the things.
Well, Toyota seems to be promising something around 700-800 miles range with solid state lithium battery tech, but as you say, the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding isn't ready yet.
Not Toyotas first time either Toyota has said their solid state batteries are just around the corner.
http://www.electric-vehiclenews.com/2010/12/toyota-announces-4-layer-all-solid.html?m=1
All the while lobbying anti EV policies around the world.
That's because Toyota is trying to put all their eggs in the hydrogen basket. Toyota is the only brand that really has a functional consumer-available hydrogen fuel cell car and I think they're stuck in sunk cost fallacy mode with that technology.
If there was serious investment in green energy. There would be large spikes in power, to have reliable baseline to power the grid. This excess power needs to go somewhere. Hydrogen seems a good solution. It takes free electricity and turns it into a sellable product. One that can be sold at a much higher cost than storing the energy in a battery and selling it back to the grid. It may be able to ease natural gas transitions as well.
The big issue is no country is taking low carbon power generation seriously. Toyota is assuming governments will be responsible now. EVs are being sold because performance, running cost and individuals environmentally attitude is better. Hydrogen requires governments to change their attitude.