The future for cars, hydrogen or battery?

A collection of climate stories mostly

My interest this week was piqued by a search I recently made, Volkswagen, hydrogen or battery?

I can’t remember why I included VW in the search, but as one of the biggest automotive manufacturers, their view on where propulsion is going is probably as good as anyones.

The search brought back a long list as you might expect. What was interesting was the clear shift away from hydrogen at the end of last year, 2022.

Encouraging headlines about patents and vehicles with a whopping 1,243 mile range have been replaced with more grounded statements about hydrogen having some big disadvantages compared with battery technology, and it no longer being for VW.

The first question I had about this u-turn was whether they were saying no to using hydrogen as a combustible fuel, filling up the tank at the gas station in similar fashion to today, or was this specifically about powering cars using a hydrogen fuel cell?

Toyota, even bigger than VW, have had a love affair with the hydrogen fuel cell since launching the Mirai in 2014 in Japan. They weren’t the first manufacturer to do so, but they’ve continued to invest in the technology, releasing a second generation Mirai which made the news recently…