Tesla announced it had quit the FCAI on Thursday and Polestar followed it up on Friday, saying the FCAI campaign – driven largely by Japanese car makers led by Toyota – is intolerable.
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Tesla and now Polestar’s announcement that they intend to leave the FCAI adds to mounting pressure on CEO Tony Webber who last month came under fire for threatening to run a 2010 anti mining tax style fear campaign against the government’s New Vehicle Efficiency Standard.
The fossil car lobby group CEO claimed that the NVES would cost the entire car-buying public $38 billion in the first five years, which led to the AFR running a story titled “Labor’s new EV-boosting rules will cost $38b, auto group says” followed by Coalition leader Peter Dutton and Nationals Senator Matt Canavan parroting claims that the NVES would see the price of popular vehicles increase by up to $25,000. Claims that have been widely rejected including by the Electric Vehicle Council.
@zurohki @notgold In some ways, it’s also a tech standards war, a bit like VHS vs Betamax. Or HD-DVD vs BluRay. Or Windows Phone vs Android.
Right now, it looks like most of the auto industry is going in the direction of BEVs, just like most of the home electronics industry went with VHS in the '80s.
Meanwhile, Toyota is sticking with hydrogen.
The best technology doesn’t always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.
The problem with one company supporting one standard when the rest of the industry goes the other way is that it can get expensive.
You have most of the economies of scale with the industry-leading technology. That tends to make it cheaper for consumers.
You have a bigger ecosystem of companies and more infrastructure supporting the industry standard.
That means a company that uses the non-standard technology typically has to do more work (and has more costs) to support it.
At this point, Tesla doesn’t have to spend a lot of money to roll out its own EV charging stations, because there’s a growing ecosystem.of companies doing it.
However, if hydrogen doesn’t become the industry standard fuel for cars and Toyota wants to stick with it, then it might need to cover some of the costs of rolling out hydrogen refueling itself.
A company like Apple, which has a large and loyal customer base, can get away with charging customers more to use its own standards.
I’m not sure Toyota does.
None of that in itself means Toyota will go out of business. But it will be a lot more challenging.
The best technology doesn’t always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.
As far as I can tell, the only benefit is green hydrogen can be faster to fill as long as the filling station has had a rest between cars.
The disadvantages include some killers: the woeful energy efficiency ensures the cost of driving a FCEV can never be less than three times the cost of driving the same distance in a BEV, and that’s even if someone just waves a magic wand and a trillion dollars worth of hydrogen infrastructure appears out of thin air.
Fuel cell EVs kind of make sense as plug-in hybrids, where you have around 80km of battery range for daily use and use hydrogen for longer trips. You need a lot less filling stations and spend a lot less time using expensive hydrogen that way, but that’s not Toyota’s vision.
Comparing charging infrastructure and hydrogen infrastructure isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison, because charging reuses a lot of pre-existing infrastructure. You can buy and drive a BEV with zero charging stations, just plugging it in to an outlet in your garage overnight. In the early days there was a lot of charging from caravan parks and the like. I’ve got a portable charger that plugs in to the three phase outlets you find in parks and showgrounds. There’s no hydrogen equivalent to any of that, 100% of your energy needs to come from a FCEV filling station.
Fuel cell EVs kind of make sense as plug-in hybrids, where you have around 80km of battery range for daily use and use hydrogen for longer trips.
I get this. But my brain just can’t wrap itself around that you have the complexity and disadvantages of both systems in the one vehicle.too.
I’m in the city. Apparently having batteries means you couldn’t drive far enough and would catch on fire lol. I was asking someone the other day how often they drove more than 50km from their home, and they looked at me like I was an alien. Full on tilt.
