Physics Girl
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2021–2022
13:06 · 716K views · Aug 18, 2021
Physics Girl compares hydrogen fuel cell cars and battery electric cars after driving 1800 miles in a Toyota Mirai. The video was part of a series sponsored by Toyota.
HN mostly cites it as an example of sponsored content, with critics calling it FUD about battery electric cars, though one commenter noted it as a comparison.
4 comments from Hacker News
> You can claim that todays designs are 99.9999999% safe, but there is no such thing as 100%. I'm not sure how you wrote this and took it seriously. Should I never leave the house? How do I eat? Eating is more dangerous than that. We can't just live in a bubble. There is never perfect safety in anything you will do in life. You'll always have to make risk/reward trade offs. Historically nuclear shows the safest option. > Nuclear waste is difficult to deal with. Our current strategies include finding a secret underground cave, and hoping no one accidentally stumbles onto it. Not to mention we have no plan for dealing with widespread use of nuclear power and the waste that would produce. You seem to be uninformed of how these work. If you care to learn more I suggest reading here[0]. I bet you're also overestimating how much waste there is. Let's look at the total waste of decades worth of France[1] and Russian[2] waste. That's the entire amount of waste since the nuclear programs started till now. France also recycles most of its waste which greatly reduces the rate of waste. Storage also doesn't have to be as long as you think. We tend to have a few orders of safety in nuclear safety. You're also not being fair in your comparisons. You're acting like strip mining and dredging for rare earth materials isn't doing crazy damage to our environment too. Pretending that these also don't pose a significant waste problem as well. Like the previous response, there is a waste tradeoff.
> Where I get uneasy is how quickly SmarterEveryDay seems to have > switched from a YouTube channel about explaining things into a > YouTube channel about stoking "Big Tech" fears as a way to sell > apps. The latest video is title "Is Your Privacy An Illusion? > (Taking on Big Tech) - Smarter Every Day 263". This has been a trend with YouTube science communicators and educators for a while now. They're getting hired by companies to basically produce an ad in the style of their regular videos. Physics Girl did a video in cooperation with Toyota praising Toyota's hydrogen powered test car, telling her audience that hydrogen as a passenger car fuel has a future while ignoring the fact that every car manufacturer including Toyota has given up on it and favoring Lithium battery packs instead. [LINK] It was an odd move from her to hype Hydrpgen cars but her audience caught on to it quickly in the comments. Which prompted her to make a follow up video: this video where she's trying to save what's left to save for the hydrogen cause. Veritasium did it too. In which Derek Muller created nothing short of a propaganda piece for driverless cars and not even just an ad for the Waymo service in particular. [LINK] This gives me the same vibe as those doctors promoting cigarettes smoking against coughs in the 1950s and 1960s: Here's a professional often someone who is highly regarded as being objective and impartial who is basically leaving out crucial information to push something either a pro
Concept vehicles are really nothing more than a marketing effort. They don't represent an actual plan to produce any of these vehicles. Toyota has a single production BEV, which is due to be released "Real Soon Now" in the US, and next year in Australia. But they're only going to make about 7,000 of them[1] this year. They are still heavily pushing their fuel-cell vehicles, along with FUD about how BEVs will cause the electric grid to melt down if everyone owns a BEV and all plug it in at once. For example, this Toyota-sponsored video series from Diana Cowern (Physics Girl) is full of FUD and half-truths about BEVs, while neatly side-stepping the reality that all the cheap sources of Hydrogen are from LNG. [2] [1] [LINK] [2] There's a whole bunch of videos in the series and it's too long for me to go through and pick out individual quotes, but these two videos are IIRC the main ones: this video [LINK]
Physics Girl just made a video comparing hydrogen fuel cell and batteries. The weight to energy ratio makes it extremely clear to me that there is a place for both. As far as blue hydrogen vs. green hydrogen I don’t know the details. this video