WITAF.

At best, he doesn’t understand what a Hybrid Car is.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    What hydrogen cars?

    The sum total of Toyota and whoever else’s efforts still amount to an inconsequential fraction of the vehicles currently in operation, probably not even a notable portion of a percentage point.

    • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      We’re dealing with a man who saw pictures of a spray bottle and the sun and decided it meant injecting bleach and putting a lightbulb inside you. Do not presume he thinks rationally.

  • Treczoks@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    You’ll need a ginormus piece of paper to write down everything that Donald does not understand…

  • EleventhHour@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    I actually read the safety reports from the NTSB, and they did an awful lot of testing on this Toyota hydrogen fuel cell cars. Even far surpassing the test parameters, the fuel cells remained intact and undamaged. In fact, it was pretty incredible.

    • saigot@lemmy.ca
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      4 days ago

      nothing short of a .50 Cal armour piercing bullet gets through those tanks. And even then a chance of an explosion is very very low, it would probably just produce a fire just like gasoline (which can also explode under the right conditions). But that safety requirement is still a barrier, as it raises the cost of an already extremely expensive technology. Personally I can see hydrogen catching on for some niche applications, but for every day driving I don’t see the price ever going low enough for it to make sense compared to electric.

      • TotalFat@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        The worst part about the gas you put in your car are all the additives they cram in there. Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full. Your finger doesn’t even smell afterwards unlike car gas where you stink for a week. Also no skin cancer! Next you drain some from the bottom to make sure there’s no water. After a quick visual inspection, you just pour it out onto the ground.

          • TotalFat@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            All natural, organic, free-range, gluten-free lead! With a name you can pronounce. Couldn’t harm a fly. Look at me! I turned out fine!!

        • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full.

          I know some people have different practices, but myself and the pilots I’ve known use a dipstick to check fuel level. You do you, but remember that aviation fuel contains lead, which is easily absorbed through the skin. I always use gloves when checking fuel.

          I can’t deny that most pilots don’t use gloves, that there are fewer additives in aviation fuel, nor that we are trained to dump checked fuel on the ground. But I don’t see those as “green flags” for aviation fuel.

          For anyone interested, here’s the Material Safety Data Sheet for aviation fuel. For comparison, here’s the MSDS for automotive gasoline. I wouldn’t want to touch either without skin protection.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Wow, even when he’s accidentally correct (hydrogen cars really aren’t good), his “reasoning” (if you can call it that) is dumb as Hell.

    The real problem with hydrogen cars (aside from H2 storage being a pain in the ass) is that they’re mostly a greenwashing scam, since the vast majority of H2 produced is not “green” hydrogen produced via electrolysis powered by renewables, but instead so-called “blue” hydrogen produced from natural gas or coal. If you’re gonna do that, you might as well just fucking burn the hydrocarbon in an internal combustion engine directly and save yourself all the damn hassle!

    • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
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      4 days ago

      The part that pisses me off the most about this is that in states that have a very heavy amount of Renewables like let’s say California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there’s literally nowhere for them to put it.

      Meanwhile they will simultaneously say they can’t do green hydrogen because it takes so much energy and isn’t super efficient, they will also say the same thing about desalination it needs too much energy where are they supposed to get it from. Motherfucker you are literally curtailing solar constantly just fucking dump it into one of those two things who cares if it’s not the most efficient 20% efficiency is better than 0% efficiency

      (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        In… California they are literally curtailing insane amounts of solar because there’s literally nowhere for them to put it.

        Um…

        ?

        • batmaniam@lemmy.world
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          They meant “no where to put the power”, which is true (although it’s not a new problem by any stretch and there’s a lot going on to address it).

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      I think the idea is that if you create the demand for hydrogen, then there will be more incentive to produce cheap and environmentally friendly hydrogen.

      • Sconrad122@lemmy.world
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        And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the “if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it’ll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road” promise

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          It’s kinda like software development…every experienced dev is aware that when management says we’ll do it shitty for now and fix it later that later never comes.

      • quicklime@lemm.ee
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        I’m pretty sure the basic thermodynamics of it are against truly green hydrogen production ever becoming cheaper than the dirty business of producing it by reforming methane from natural gas, unless basically all fossil fuel subsidies are someday cancelled – or else after the energy cost of energy gets so high (in other words, the energy return on energy invested falls so low) that it’s no longer practical to extract fossil fuel from the ground regardless of price or any other economic factor; – but by that point in the future, that same scarcity will have permanently crashed the world economy thus humanity will already be in forced deindustrialization. I could go on…

        • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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          The thing is, hydrogen is a byproduct of damn near every industry. It’s usually just released into the atmosphere because it’s a pain in the ass to capture and store and isn’t worth much. If it starts being in demand, you can bet your ass they’ll start trying to gather it.

          • quicklime@lemm.ee
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            Remember, though, that it is currently profitable to reform hydrogen out of methane, at the same time as it’s not profitable to contain and sell ‘byproduct’ hydrogen. There are sure to be reasons why, and they might be fairly durable reasons that don’t change much even as the demand for hydrogen increases. I’m no expert on this so I won’t speculate too much on what those reasons might be – maybe factors related to scale and logistics?

      • auzy@lemmy.world
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        Even at 100% efficiency when producing, the efficiency of the car will still be much lower than battery (even batteries from decades ago were 90%+ efficient).

        Electric distribution basically abstract the energy source away from the car (you can use any battery chemistry). You can also feed power back into the grid

        With hydrogen, realistically, you just need to pray you improve it long term. Because at the moment it’s an efficiency suckfest.

        But it’s awesome for petrol companies and dodgy salespeople who want to provide cheap fuel that continues to F**k us whilst undercutting green alternatives

        • AA5B@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          We need to pivot the goal for hydrogen …… there are fossil fuel uses now that batteries can’t serve and hydrogen might be a good substitute.

          Instead of saying that even with feee electricity it’s too expensive to make green hydrogen for cars, let’s use that free electricity to make synthetic aviation fuel Or at least create hydrogen as a precursor

          • auzy@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            It’s not about free electricity though. It’s about efficiency

            It’s not about cost

            The facts are, with hydrogen, you waste at least 40% of the energy excluding transport due to inefficiencies and manufacture and fuel wastage . So you need to build a lot more solar panels. You also need clean water to do it

            With electric, you waste less than 10%

            We don’t have hydrogen planes yet, and it might not really be that feasible (there are a lot of considerations for planes. I’ve actually got a pilot licence).

            With hydrogen, you need almost twice the solar panels to produce the same results

            You also need to consider, battery technologies are still early days. If lithium at the moment supports 1000km of travel, later generation lithium air can support 12000km with the same space.

            That’s why hydrogen has such limited applications too. Because even if you increase the density of lithium 2x, most applications where hydrogen benefits disappears

            But in reality we’d probably shift from lithium anyway I’m guessing

            Hydrogen still hugely better than gas though, and Trump is an idiot lol

            • AA5B@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Let’s start by agreeing Trump is an idiot and battery electric vehicle technology covers personal transportation. We need to move as completely as possible to renewable energy.

              However

              • current BEV technology can’t replace aviation, shipping, cargo trains, construction and farming equipment, and we don’t really have a good solution yet. We’ll keep improving related technology and see how far it goes but we may need other choices.
              • renewable energy is intermittent and current grid storage technology does not scale. It’s great to stabilize the grid and allow peaked plants to come online but not to, for example, last through the night until solar is again available. We’ll keep improving related technology and see how far it goes, but we may need other choices

              One possible choice to cover both storage and creation of renewable fuel for the cases where batteries do not scale, is hydrogen. We do need to overbuild renewables, because production is affected by the weather, plus we need to produce enough energy in part of a day to run everything for a full day. Production of hydrogen might let us productively convert that daylight (for solar) energy into nighttime energy, and might help other areas where batteries don’t scale. And it doesn’t have to be hydrogen directly: perhaps we need a liquid fuel that works at room temperature and green hydrogen can be a precursor to methane or some variation of synfuel. That can be stored or manipulated more regularly. A tank of green synfuel might be an effective storage for turning daylight energy into nighttime time energy. We already have an approved synthetic aviation fuel - using renewable energy to create that might be more efficient than the more difficult task of scaling batteries for aviation

              While I completely agree on the limitations of green hydrogen as a primary fuel, I also see that there are many usages that neither renewable nor storage nor batteries can yet scale for. Hydrogen as a storage medium is no worse than those options

  • Donjuanme@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine’s also have a tendency to explode. I haven’t seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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      Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it’ll just burn up because it won’t all be released at once. And I’ve never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.

      • stewie3128@lemmy.ml
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        4 days ago

        I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.

        • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          EV battery packs are also designed to mitigate thermal runaway events, even down to Tesla packs making every cell connection a fuse on case of issues. That doesn’t stop them from catching fire anyway after some accidents.

          • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 days ago

            Since hydrogen is so light though, it escapes into the atmosphere before collecting enough to explode in a car. BMW claimed this way back in the 90s when it was experimenting with the gas.

            There’s probably more of a danger of the tank and in hydrogen cars bursting, since the hydrogen is stored at relatively high pressures. But the gas could easily escape without igniting.

            Obviously anything is possible when you are storing energy as densely as possible. And one of the highest density energies we store is still hydrocarbons.

        • Rekorse@sh.itjust.works
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          4 days ago

          Are they routinely tested in high impact crashes too? Slamming into a phone pole might be more energy than a rifle round.

    • meco03211@lemmy.world
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      Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn’t hydrogen’s fault.

      • FlexibleToast@lemmy.world
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        It wouldn’t have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn’t have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.

      • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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        No… No, that’s not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won’t burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn’t have been a catastrophic fireball…

        • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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          4 days ago

          The Hindenburg’s skin was also highly flammable. Regardless of what gas it contained it would still have burned as fast.

          The leaking hydrogen was just the initial fuel that the static arc ignited.

          One the skin was burning it was over.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        3 days ago

        Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.

        If nothing else, hydrogen can’t burn without oxygen, and there’s very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.

        • meco03211@lemmy.world
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          Thank you. After the deluge I did hit up Wikipedia. The skin was coated in flammable material as I remembered. It did say the skin being a major factor was controversial and that the burn patterns didn’t indicate that to be likely, which is fine. But just the blanket downvotes with no one addressing that is annoying. It stifles any conversation. Were I not a naturally curious person I wouldn’t have looked into it further. I’m sure plenty of the downvotes came from people that probably didn’t even know about the static discharge part and still don’t know because they just downvoted and moved on in their ignorance.