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Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars

4 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
Cited on HN 4 times, 2021–2022, never outright recommended score 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

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.

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.

2 citations · 2 critical · Explainers · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@godelski Oct 2021 Cites it
on HN thread Nuclear Power in France
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> 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.
@emsign Oct 2021 Pushes back
on HN thread SmarterEveryDay's 4privacy can, and cannot, meet its goals
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> 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
@paranoidrobot Jun 2022 Pushes back
on HN thread European pension funds attack Toyota for not going ‘all in’ on electric cars
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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]

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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