> You deserve to be hassled for this!

If being on HN causes you this much mental anguish that it justifies hassling people.

> So don't blame me if you get flack, for repeating oil industry lies from 30 years ago, which were not true even then.

I blame you giving me flak as you are giving me flak. I was not alive nor in other ways able to influence the behaviour of companies 30 years ago.

Basic math suggests if all H2 in a Mirai where to react with 02 ignoring the energy released when compressed is 340 kg of TNT. And unlike liquid gasoline or solid batteries gaseous hydrogen will disperse enough to almost instantly release all that energy with in a second of of catastrophic tank failure.

The inspections are necessary to ensure the intactness of the pressure vessel meant to prevent that. Yet if a Miria would get hit by a train at high speed or fall of a cliff even a perfect tank won't fail catastrophically and the slow release mechanism burning off hydrogen in a controlled flame over minutes would make no difference. The tanks are unsafe in these situation. Regular inspections are needed to detect damage to tanks because those would make them as unsafe in more and more common situations the worse the tank is degraded. Regular inspection are necessary, not just because of some good will of Toyota. As for how regularly i can not comment.

> they are doing so out of prudence, and correct procedure.

Procedure on hydrogen tanks is not procedure because it is. Procedures are man made and high pressure tank (and especially high pressure hydrogen tanks) have those procedures for safety reasons. I ignored your assertion that Toyota requires these inspections and cars lose their road worthiness (at least in the EU) if they are not performed because i am utterly unconvinced that Toyota developing hydrogen cars for decades does this to gain insight into the technology or out of goodness of their heart.

> So there is nothing to improve with the next model.

If you think there is nothing that can be improved with regard to safety hydrogen cars are doomed as dead end tech. If you think that less frequent inspections wouldn't be an improvement you are out of touch with reality. Either way you seem possessed by some really vitriolic memes.

Storing hydrogen compressed is a horrible idea unless you really have to (the Miria has to, due to volume constraints of cars). Due to the fact that a catastrophic tank failure even in a small tank for cars leading to a explosion you should not place grid scale tanks to things you care about such as other grid scale tanks. This negates any volume/area advantage of compressed storage of stationary hydrogen storage and just introduces a horrible failure mode. Just store uncompressed hydrogen on sorta leak proof caverns with sensors to monitor O2 concentration.

The reason why H2 didn't take of the nineties is cost, lack of range and performance and no obvious way to improve storage and lack of infrastructure. H2 combustion cars and busses would actually be worse for the climate then gasoline cars. For H2 fuel cell cars i am not certain. Government action could have made H2 cars competitive but it did not. Oil companies would have sold the hydrogen anyway but their refineries would have become stranded assets so it makes sense to implicate them in a conspiracy against H2.

The reasons why electric cars could take of is because for the rugged early adaptors the charging infrastructure was their home and car companies only had to service highways with charging stations where ever existing electricity infrastructure made it easy. All things oil companies could not sabotage. The transition happened when it happened because Tesla started to sell cars which beat the range of hydrogen cars of the 90s handedly and provided an omnipresent charging infrastructure (the normal grid) which didn't slow down travel to much on long trips (super chargers).