But those hydrogen cars are going to have their breakthrough real soon now!
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2026
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Usually I mention Poe's law when sarcasm isn't indicated, but in this case it's so obvious it isn't necessary.
It's really strange how hydrogen was all the rage 20 years ago, and everybody invested heavily in this new technology for the future.
All physicists I heard commenting on it, were 100% sure hydrogen is the future? Despite the obvious problems of energy loss making hydrogen, which is still only 50-70% efficiency, against 90% efficiency charging a battery. And then on top of that the fuel also loses about 50%!! Making the net efficiency of the total system only about 25%. Where batteries easily have more than twice that.
I'm guessing in the future that to cover our needs from renewable, we will need to have enormous surplus production, and at that point hydrogen will be great, because enough hydrogen can be made from energy that would otherwise be wasted, to cover our transportation needs.
So maybe another 10-20 years?
The main factor that led to BEVs being the dominant technology was the price of batteries. Twenty years ago, nobody could have predicted that they'd get this cheap this quickly. So you could be forgiven for believing that fuel cells would be viable back then. Ten years ago, the situation was very different and it had become pretty clear the BEV was the way to go. Doubling down on hydrogen at that point was just dumb.
I mean... I would hope so. I went to a couple Toyota dealerships last year and they had nothing available in this segment. They tried to sell me a truck.
Its pretty easy to double nothing.
Because they made an actual decent EV instead of a compliance car.