this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
892 points (97.2% liked)
Technology
87279 readers
3588 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
He was never about that.
He said he was, but actions speak louder and if he ever was he'd be promoting Hydrogen-electric with a Hydrogen ICE transition* instead of battery electric which isn't sustainable and is environmentally disastrous in its own way.
*Diesel ICE can be converted to Hydrogen ICE (note: they still need ~5-10% diesel, so it's not a forever technology) - https://www.unsw.edu.au/engineering/research-technology/is/converting-diesel-engines-to-run-on-hydrogen
Give it up. Hydrogen is not happening. Batteries have won. Now we need to move to more sustainable chemistries.
Oh, and yeah, Elon was always just posing.
While I believe that the various pushes for hydrogen in cars and light trucks is a shameless attempt at replacing the revenue stream from petrol, hydrogen does make a lot of sense for heavy trucks, trains, ships - anywhere diesel or bunker fuel is used now.
Or possibly converted into ammonia which is not as hard to transport. But yeah, there might be some residual uses.
Found the Toyota rep
My diesel car has run on B100 (100% biodiesel) just fine for years. That's already good enough and requires no new technology or infrastructure. Hydrogen is stupid as hell.
Hydrogen can make some degree of sense if we take as an energy reserve, stockpileable, for an event where it is necessary to suplement energy needs.
So many countries with solar farms being turned off to prevent grid collapse could consider building hydrogen plants or, those with sea acess, dessalination stations, to stockpile fresh water underground and extract minerals directly from the water.
Batteries have a much smaller overall environmental footprint than traditional ICE vehicles. Hydrogen is also produced at scale in a super dirty way right now. There is no clean way to produce hydrogen fuel. So, our goal should be less travel overall, public transit, and EVs, in that order.
If we find a way to mass produce hydrogen in a clean way, then I'm all for hydrogen vehicles. But, we aren't there yet.