Why’d they have to make a gimmick vehicle then make it even more gimmicky by making it hydrogen powered
For some reason, lots of Japanese companies are in love with hydrogen despite it being the dumbest possible solution for compact mobile energy storage. The auto companies in particular keep trying to push it. I’ve been wondering if it’s a combination of trying desperately to recoup some R&D spending before the patents expire, the Japanese corporate culture of “the boss is always right”, and senior leaders who won’t risk the personal embarrassment of having backed the wrong horse for their entire senior management career and admitting that hydrogen fuel is a dumb idea.
For energy storage and personal transportation it’s stupid by hydrogen technology isn’t a complete dead end. For decarbonization of industrial and chemical plants it’s going to play a role.
I’m not sure that’s what’s going on and I’m probably giving them too much credit but there might be a problem that prevents hydrogen from adoption as industry modernisation takes decades and there is a pretty strong disincentive from going into hydrogen if there is basically no existing industry around hydrogen.
Neoliberal problems requiring neoliberal solutions. China can just build hydrogen steel plants.
There are a lot of use cases currently being filled by propane or methane than could be converted into hydrogen to reduce emissions.
But yeah the hydrogen tech for vehicles very much feels like they just don’t like the idea of people plugging their cars in at home instead of going to their lil fill-up stations where they can get a cut of the pie.
Untrained people handling hydrogen just sounds like a bad idea. And for most part the talk about hydrogen as fuel is just to keep combustion motors around for longer.
Even space agencies hate dealing with hydrogen despite the extremely high fuel efficiency, because it’s a nightmare to handle and requires ridiculous design compromises in rockets. Hydrogen-fueled rockets have a limited number of times they can be loaded and unloaded (for example, scrubbed launches due to bad weather) before the hydrogen embrittlement makes fuel tanks too compromised to use safely.
The Columbia disaster happened because foam insulation (needed to keep the hydrogen a liquid in warm Florida weather) came detached from the big orange propellant tank and smashed heat shield tiles. That kind of insulation just isn’t needed with propellants that stay liquid at higher temperatures, such as kerosene (very common) or methane (more recent but gaining popularity). The whole space shuttle design was wildly unsafe for numerous reasons and it’s a miracle that more astronauts didn’t die in them.
But yeah the hydrogen tech for vehicles very much feels like they just don’t like the idea of people plugging their cars in at home instead of going to their lil fill-up stations where they can get a cut of the pie.
Definitely. Basically all commercial hydrogen comes from a process called methane steam reforming (so-called “grey hydrogen”). You take high-temperature steam and use it to crack natural gas (mostly methane) into carbon and hydrogen, usually heated by way of just burning the natural gas since you already have a supply of it. A big problem is that the oxygen from the water and the carbon from the methane likes to get together into CO2, which is just vented into the atmosphere. Fossil fuel companies are deeply involved in hydrogen production and spewing out the most famous greenhouse gas as a side effect.
Sometimes they make a show of trying to capture the CO2. The marketing calls the hydrogen recovered this way “blue hydrogen”, but it’s very uncommon. “Green hydrogen” is from electrolysis which has no CO2 emissions, but nobody uses that industrially, it’s just a PR gimmick to try to convince people that all hydrogen is clean. The power requirements are absolutely ridiculous for the amount of fuel you get from it.
Ironically, one of the few truly green portable fuels is synthetic methane using something called the Sabatier process. The short version is that you combine electricity, water, and CO2 over a catalyst. The output is oxygen and methane. If the CO2 comes from the atmosphere it’s carbon-neutral. This is what most practical Mars exploration missions are planned to do. Mars is still close enough to the Sun for solar power to be practical. Combine solar power with subsurface ice (which is proven to be everywhere on Mars) and Mars’ almost-entirely-CO2 atmosphere, and you can manufacture as much methane and oxygen as you want. The stored methane and oxygen could also work to power methane fuel cells in case of dust storms that would block solar power, and of course the oxygen would also be used for breathing.
NASA’s Perseverance rover actually has an experiment on board, a small-scale Sabatier machine tech demo that worked perfectly. Human Mars exploration has a whole heap of technical challenges left to be solved but at least manufacturing fuel and oxygen isn’t one of them.
When it runs out of fuel it’s just an Orse
My thoughts exactly, where tf are people supposed to get hydrogen
Y’all ain’t cracking water in your garage? Lol kidding, you should never do that. That shit’s explosive. It’d be incredibly dangerous to put it in a confined space and use it for some sort of pressure based weapon.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
If it’s hydrogen tanks can you make them explode by shooting them? I know gasoline doesn’t really work like that, but does hydrogen?
If so, hell yeah. Future cowboy wars with exploding horses (no actual horses harmed)
Unfortunately they probably store the hydrogen in a way to prevent that. Now a post-apocalypse future cowboy? If you’re fighting the war out in the wastes, you’d just have to make do and strap straight up hydrogen tanks to their stallion.
dream crushing
unfortunately, I’d give hydrogen fuel cells less than 10 years of decent working condition post-apocalypse.
stupid horse
so i found the fuckin jockey and i grabbed that
Finally, vegan horseback riding
I know I saw a robot-horse in some recent sci-fi movie or tv series that looked a great deal like the Kawasaki prototype. Did anybody see anything like that? I can’t for the life me remember a single detail. Like were the characters on earth or a different planet? I have no idea!
Edit. I googled for a couple minutes but I got nowhere. This is going to drive me crazy all day.
Horizon Zero Dawn? That’s the closest example in fiction that I can think of.
It was a recent sci-fi movie or tv series. Netflix? I googled more but I made zero progress. Gah.
Just keep making cool motorcycles, please (I don’t even have a motorcycle license)
Frutiger Aero ass robot
I thought kawasaki made shoes???
brb designer virus buck_hoerszz calibrated for max neck snap potential pathing
