• 8 Posts
  • 361 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle






  • It kind of is. It’s an extra variable introduced to account for a bunch of things that aren’t adding up.

    Aether was the same thing, until people discovered electromagnetic fields. People knew light was a wave. Waves travel faster through more solid mediums. Light is pretty damn fast. Space is pretty empty.

    Things didn’t add up. Light is simultaneously traveling through possibly the stiffest material in the known universe while also through nothing at all. People had to come up with Aether to try to explain that.

    It was wrong, but it was an obvious placeholder acknowledging that something huge is missing from our current theories.







  • You keep saying stupid phrases like “people drinking the kool-aid!!!” while you’re doing nothing but pouring out Kool aid yourself.

    In case you weren’t aware, Hydrogen cars ALSO got massive subsidies. They received these subsidies far before Tesla even existed, before BEVs took off, when hydrogen looked like the more viable alternative.

    They had the head start, they got government subsidies, government backed infrastructure, AND manufacturer incentives. They had the public opinion back then too, with celebrities like Top Gear endorsing hydrogen over batteries. They are STILL getting government incentives today.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-04/california-s-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-lose-traction-against-battery-models

    It’s still not enough. The bottom line is that it’s still inconvenient, expensive, and highly limited. If they spent the US military budget to force the issue, they could, but why?

    Battery vehicles won because they met consumers’ needs, not some grand conspiracy against hydrogen, and not because everyone hangs on Musk’s every word.

    Even 10 years ago, I could buy an EV anywhere in the country and it would meet 99.5% of my driving needs if my home had a garage. Hydrogen cars were STILL limited to a 100 mile radius to the nearest filling station, which is basically the California coast. And you had to pray the filling stations didn’t run out of hydrogen. It didn’t matter how much the vehicles themselves cost. Whether they were $200,000 or free, with a hydrogen car you could only go 100 miles from the pumping station, and only when the pumping station was full. With batteries, you were always full all the time, and you could always go 100+ miles from home. Even before any fast charging stations were built, if you took a short road trip and stayed in one location for a few days, you could go 250 miles away and slow charge at your destination simply by bringing an extension cord.

    Electricity is cheap, too. Hydrogen was, and remains, expensive. EV buyers could look forward to not paying ridiculous gas prices. Hydrogen buyers had to look forward to paying MORE per mile than gasoline.

    You keep whining about batteries not being the perfect solution to every single vehicle on the planet. Guess what? Average consumers are not driving every single vehicle on the planet. Average consumers are buying midsize crossovers. They drive to work and around town, and maybe do a road trip once a year. They can charge at home and never worry about whether or not the local filling station will run out of electricity. BEVs have won the suburban consumer segment, period.

    As charging stations get built out, they will soon meet urban consumer needs, too.

    Hydrogen might have some place in industrial processes or long haul trucking, possibly aviation maybe. But it makes absolutely no sense for regular consumers.


  • Lol. Blaming Tesla for all of hydrogen’s woes is just buying your head in the sand.

    I’ve been following hydrogen vehicle development long before Tesla even existed. The field has effectively stagnated since the 90’s. Same promises for the past 3 decades with no substantial improvement. The hydrogen car of today is still the same hydrogen car of 1995 with a better infotainment system. Cost, storage, distribution, range are all problems that have yet to be solved and again are still not substantially better than what we had in the 90’s. Every “revolutionary” hydrogen technology from the labs have basically gone nowhere.

    It seemed like a viable competitor to batteries in the 90s and early 2000s because battery technology and prices weren’t up to snuff. But hydrogen has stagnated while batteries have improved. Hydrogen is a “solution” that is 2 decades behind at this point





  • Ebikes have arguably been one of the biggest boons to cycling in general. Many people who often wouldn’t have cycled at all are now getting on bikes, and many more people who would have taken a car for a particular trip due to distance or hills are now also taking their ebikes instead.

    Ebikes have probably gotten more people riding bikes than anything else on the list.