> Besides the battery, the biggest component(s) by weight is/are the motor(s). Current generation electric cars use still fairly heavy central motors with an actual axle to the wheels. Upcoming generations will use in-wheel or near-wheel motors that have almost no drive train associated with them: no transmission, no gearing at all, no weight lost to things that aren't necessary. This is one of the reasons electric cars can actually become lighter than traditional gasoline-powered cars; the chassis can be reduced because there are almost no driving forces on it anymore. Note though: this is an advantage of both battery and fuel cell electric cars!
Motor on the wheel seems so obvious but still no one seems to build such a car. I’ve asked automotive engineers about this and the answer I get is often:
Wheel based motor would make the wheel heavier and thereby increase rotational inertia which decreases acceleration and increases the required (kinetic) energy for a given speed of the car. I also heard that the increased wheel weight reduces the performance of the suspension.
I suppose another problem is the need for two (4 for 4WD) gear boxes, since electric motors are low torque, high rpm. The author says „no gearing at all“ but how is this feasible with an electric motor?
Increasing unsprung weight by putting the motors in the wheels will reduce the ride quality quite a bit.
You can make lower RPM electric motors that can do direct drive but they will loose efficiency, power and speed. At some point gears became better to reduce the RPM, even after accounting for gear loses. Even current electric cars really need 2-3 gears for maximum performance and efficiency, but they can get away with fixed gears which greatly simplifies things. One of the interesting things about the 4 wheel drive Tesla’s is that the 2 motor/gear assemblies are optimized for different speed bands so they can have the benefit of both without needing to shift gears, they just shift power from one motor to the other.
In wheel motors generally will only be done for low speed applications where a suspension is optional, just like airless and omnidirectional tires.
The one advantage of hydrogen cars, refueling speed, is not actually an advantage for typical driving habits.
A hydrogen car takes about five minutes to refuel. On a typical day, a battery car takes about five seconds to refuel: you plug it in and you leave it overnight. Sure, the actual charging takes longer, but who cares? You’re not involved.
On long trips, this reverses, but how often do you do those? Most people do a couple a year. You might lose a couple of hours waiting for charging there. Otherwise you’re saving minutes every week.
This is something I see people having a hard time truly understanding. They see that a car takes hours to recharge on a home 240V outlet, think “that’s a long time!” and stop there. They don’t realize that it’s a time saver most of the time.
Even if there was a hydrogen station on every corner, and the price was as cheap as electricity, I’d still never buy a hydrogen car. Who wants to visit a fueling station every week?
Apartments will probably eventually offer electric charging. It's a small investment, and they can turn it into an additional revenue stream (which they love) and/or can advertise it as an amenity that sweetens the deal of leasing there.
However, will they plenty of charging stations, so that you never have to worry about moving your car so someone else can charge? That seems doubtful. I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
I doubt they will if they have to pay for it. Apartment complexes, in my experience, hardly retrofit anything. The RE market is so messed up that complexes don’t have to do much of anything to increase their rent. What was there at time of build (be that the 1980s or 90s) is what you’re likely to get.
What the US needs is a political desire for New Deal type programs. Work still sucks outside of 2-4 (?) metropolis areas. Probably a large infrastructure project could get charging stations to the masses at the apartment level, and not much else.
One exception though could be a vast surge in oil prices. We’re talking 7$/gallon.
It is most certainly not a small investment. Especially considering how few it will benefit.
> I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
That's usually how it's done here. And the cost is not negligible at all, more than what I pay in gas each month. And on top of that you pay for the electricity of course. And I'd say that most apartments that even have parking associated with them you will often need to wait years and years to even get a spot (electric or not).
This. Until either home parking or office parking will offer any type of EV charging I'm not buying an EV car, it is not feasible now. I'm definitely not going to do this:
I second this. From experience, walking out of my house and driving off immedately with a fully-charged car is less trouble than going to a gas station.
Still, we're a two-car family and our second car is ICE (a Subaru). Gasoline is way more convenient than electric for out-of-town weekend trips. I take these trips frequently enough (more than once per month) that I don't want to rely on renting a car every time.
If people would be fully rational, then you would be correct. However, they are not (and shouldn't be imho, but that's another discussion).
Basically, it's about the ability or potential of going anywhere. I bought a car that technically has the ability to go off-road. The reality is that I probably never will. But it sure feels good to know that I could. Paid extra for it and all. Completely irrational, but makes me happy.
That's the reason that people worry about range and refueling time. It's not rational, it's just humane. We aspire to do more , see more and go further. Not all of us do, but it's a very human emotion. That's not a bad thing.
I agree with this when discussing EVs that just can’t practically do long trips at all. Rationally, you save money by buying a cheaper short-range EV and renting a car for trips, but I wouldn’t actually do that.
It’s different when talking about a good long-range EV with a good charging network. Not only are long trips practical, but the speed penalty is pretty small.
I understand what you're saying but I'm just not sure I'm prepared to wait at a service station for an hour or more to recharge my car.
Today I drove from the south east to the Lake District - a distance of about 400 miles. I made 3 5-10 minute stops en route for food, toilet and one for fuel. I found that once I'd stopped for 10 minutes I just wanted to get going again and get to my destination. I'm really not sure I would be happy hanging around a service on the M6 toll road for 1-2 hours because I needed to recharge my car.
I don't often do long trips, perhaps 2-3x a year, but when I do I really just want to get to my destination as soon as possible.
It’s not for everyone. If you really want to just go go go then it will be frustrating.
400 miles is pretty easy, though. In my car (Model S 85), I’d probably plan to stop once a bit past the halfway point for lunch. 20-30 minutes should get enough to finish the trip. That’s assuming I can charge at the destination. If you can’t, it’s tougher.
In a Model S 100D or a Model 3 LR, you could probably stop for only 10 minutes somewhere in the middle. They charge faster (especially the Model 3) and don’t need much extra to make that trip.
My time is precious. Long trips are for rentals if you have a full EV.
As an alternative I drive a Chevy Volt which has a gas run battery charger. While the battery only has a 50 mile range, the gas powered battery charger has about a 250 mile range
My point is that the EV is a net time saver over a hydrogen or normal car, so if your time is precious then it’s a win. The Volt may be even better in that respect, of course.
Only if you can charge at home, have a nice predictable commute, and don't drive too much. That's a sizeable market by itself, but far from what works for everybody.
Charging at home, yes, but driving over 200 miles in a single day is super unusual. I see no need for a predictable commute or not driving "too much" unless it's extreme.
Somebody living in Stockton and coming to clean SV's offices, or serve that nice catered food might be driving about that far. In saner areas of the US regular work commute is probably less, but there's a significant proportion of people who do not sit in the office writing code, but rather drive around doing things -- handymen, plumbers, cleaners, etc. etc.
Stockton to Sunnyvale is 80-100 mils one way. And I imagine working people who have to live in Stockton or Tracy because they can't afford living near work in SV probably aren't buying extended range Teslas. Most likely don't have any chargers at home either.
Someone like that probably can’t afford any EV with a range to even make that trip one way. Affordability isn’t really there yet. That’s something that’s also true with hydrogen cars and so has little bearing on the relative advantages and disadvantages of hydrogen and batteries.
True. Which is why ICE isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But if prices could be brought down (i.e. by mass production), fuel-cell/hydrogen vehicles would work, but electrics still would not.
Although at this time I do wonder what could possibly move one to purchase a Mirai.
Cost and range are closely related when it comes to batteries. A 500 mile range would cover almost everything, and should be practical before too long, and affordable eventually. Tesla’s new Roadster will have a 600 mile range, although the price is absurd.
BEVs are vastly faster to refill in many cases if you measure what really matters (driver waiting time).
If you look at the current state of things, hydrogen cars are even more expensive and are impossible to own in most of the country. That might change in the future but it’s hard to match the infrastructure advantage of having millions of “fueling stations” in the form of electrical outlets, and BEVs continue to improve as well.
Oh, no argument that hydrogen cars are ridiculously priced and practically useless (I guess that's why they only sell them in California).
As battery capacity improves, charging from a regular outlet will only take longer and longer. And driver waiting time is short only if you can charge at home and never care about going anywhere beyond the charging range. It does work for a large number of people, but is a non-starter for a large segment as well.
That's true if you never need to run errands after coming home, visit friends who live an hour away and don't have a charger, etc. etc. Let alone people who actually make a living by driving around.
If you don't have your own charger or access to a free one, commercial chargers aren't necessarily cheaper than gas either. Last time I ran numbers for my wife's plug-in, apart from free chargers (Volta or some municipal ones) putting in gas was cheaper.
Sounds fine. With a Model 3 LR, you could have a 100 mile commute each way, do 20 miles for errands, then visit your friend 50 miles away and return home before recharging. And I’m pretty sure 100 mile commutes are highly unusual.
2.2 million people is typical enough, I'd say... And it is fine, as long as you actually have somewhere to charge. Where I live (and that's SV, not exactly boondocks) nearest charging station would be 15-20 minutes walking, each way. Costs more than just using gas, too. People commuting 50+ miles would likely have even tougher time finding a nice charger, unless they have their own home and can charge at home EV rate.
So? “Typical” has nothing to do with how the absolute number compares to other countries. Do your not know what the word means, or are you just being extremely obtuse?
So, you're the one talking about "typical". I am pointing out that there is a rather significant market where current EVs are not workable (FCV would be, if they were reasonably priced, though). And that market really is larger than just people with long commutes. My commute is short enough, but I would end up paying more to charge than I pay for gas, and spending an 30-40 minutes each day just getting to where the car is.
If the autonomous cab future all the companies seem to be hoping for happens, the typical day may change. Not sure what that means for the ideal refueling technology.
I think hydrogen cars is a technology that kills itself.
Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas), and that a BEV is cheaper to assemble (less parts, less piping), the market for hydrogen cars is completely dependent on the price of batteries.
As batteries get cheaper, and rapid chargers get faster, the niche that hydrogen can occupy gets smaller.
The thing is, hydrogen cars are electric cars. It's possible some of them will even include a larger battery and become plug-in. So every hydrogen car sold will also benefit the development of better BEVs.
To me, this is a clear feedback loop that benefits pure BEVs. And where will BEVs be when hydrogen cars actually hit the market with significant numbers and models? What if 150kWh batteries are standard? What if 400kW charging is standard? What if the price is not much higher? These are all within reach. It's just a matter of time, and the hydrogen economy does not seem to be moving fast enough that its got time to spare.
But I fully support all subsidies and financial support for development of hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it won't be success in cars, but it could be in other fields.
The point is - it's neither one nor the other: Combining working fuel cell technology with batteries really gives the best of both worlds:
- Batteries are the most efficient in the long run and very dynamic at power release, but they are heavy (more than half the weight of Tesla's truck is the batteries), use lots of rare resources and take pretty long to recharge. It's getting better, but if you really want to drive a few thousand miles with short fuel breaks in an emergency, you can't.
- Hydrogen fuel cells suck at dynamic release, they really want to have a constant power draw. They're less efficient than batteries, but you can refuel quickly and don't have to carry the fuel weight with you all the time.
Taking all the technical challenges of storing hydrogen and making efficient fuel cells aside for the moment, combining the two technologies is really awesome in a way. You can get rid of two thirds of the batteries — and suddenly you have a car that's all of: easy to instantly refill, still dynamic to accelerate and overtake on the highway due to the batteries, but you also just have to dimension the fuel cell for average, not for peak power draw.
Considered the hydrogen is CO2 neutrally generated, it's really the optimum solution.
Current hydrogen fuel cells contain platinum. The tech inside the Toyota Mirai contains about 30g if I remember correctly. So, which earth element do you prefer to run out of? :)
We can literally sweep platinum off our highways, as Cody'sLab demonstrates[0]. Platinum is a catalyst in auto mufflers to change NOx molecules back to N2 and CO2. And a tiny amount flakes off as a gas-car drives. Sweeping a 10-foot section of heavily-used freeway shoulder netted them $0.55 of platinum. At this rate, there should be $1000 of platinum per mile of freeway shoulder.
Yeah, thats an interesting option. Still remains to be seen if that’ll actually be cheaper. Sounds like something that is harder to decentralize than electrolysis, which can be a downside. With electrolysis you can make the hydrogen on-site.
Lithium-cobalt is not the only chemistry. I’m optimistic about alternate chemistries in the long term. Especially now that the battery market is growing so rapidly. There are massive investments in research.
I doubt we’ll run out though. They’re not that rare. Besides, it’s a renewable resource, not a combustible one.
The prevalence in crust doesn't really matter, what matters is how much is actually in recoverable ores. Rare earth elements, despite their names, are actually reasonably common: about as common as tin or cadmium. Hell, cerium is more common than copper. They're called rare earth elements in part because it's hard to find a high enough concentration to extract and in part because they're so hard to separate from each other.
Things not so often mentioned in the Hydrogen vs batteries discussions:
- just fueling hydrogen vehicles requires an substantial amount of electricity for the compressors. An electric vehicle could drive at least 10% of the distance on this electricity alone. That is not counting the compression work at any the production site and when filling the trucks.
- distributing hydrogen requires trucks. In most places, the elecricity network is available.
- refueling with a hydrogen vehicle is faster then recharging. But you have to refuel them at fuel stations. Electric vehicles can recharge at home or any parking lot with outlets - more and more companies have parking lots with electrical outlets.
The charge rate on electric vehicles is very slow, though, unless you're using one of Tesla's superchargers (which aren't everywhere).
I think that, when people are worrying about charge time, they're really asking, "Will charge times mean that a 5-hour trip to visit Mom and Dad now turns into a 10-hour trip, or, worse, something that requires an overnight stay?"
Batteries are rapidly approaching the point most people will want to stop before their charge runs out.
~330 mile range is available today, which is pricy, but quickly dropping. The expected 50% battery price drop within 5 years is probably going to make 300+ mile ranges become standard and likely 600+ Mile ranges will start showing up. Further once you get into the 400+ mile range territory particularly charging say during lunch can significantly increase range without completely filling the battery.
I can see it charging sufficiently over lunch if you use a supercharger. And that will be great if you've got superchargers installed in the parking lot at the place you stop for lunch. But I wouldn't fault anyone for feeling like that's a pretty big "if". Especially if truck stop food isn't your bag of peas.
EVs don't have to replace ICE cars over night. Many people never drive long distance but commute every day. There will be a number of years where we have time to improve charging infrastructure. IMHO chargers for people in cities that don't have a garage are more important than superchargers next to highways.
The hydrogen infrastructure requires to be built from scratch. New fuel stations (of course they can reuse existing locations), the technology for fueling hydrogen is way more complex and very different to gasonly. New trucks. This is transporting very voilatile gas at about 1000 bar pressure. And it requires the trucks driving around, which was the main thing I was speaking about, while the elecricity flows over the existing networks. It also requires more truck loads of hydrogen than gasoline to supply the same amount of car mileage.
Not sure if hydrogen cars are the future. But at the least, for a few years, they will run side by side with BEVs. Definitely in the form of buses and garbage trucks.
That's why I'm currently quite fond of platinum as a speculative investment. Fuel cells require quite a bit of platinum. Yet platinum has rarely been cheaper relative to other commodities like gold. I think because the market is discounting a decline in diesel engines and maybe because of recycling. (Even though platinum has been more expensive than gold even before catalysts were common.)
In addition, platinum deserves to receive a geopolitical risk premium. 80% of the world's platinum is mined (at a loss!) in South Africa, which is prone to intense labor disputes and looking less attractive every day. And the next big producer is Russia. Yet above ground stock piles have declined in the past decade.
In the 1+ year that I've been in platinum, it hasn't been a success. The market just remains comatose. But we'll see :-)
Platinum is also something like 3 orders of magnitude rarer in the crust than gold. What it’s value needs is a use case. Gold appears in many more places than the one or two places platinum does.
Hydrogen has serious technical issues compared to batteries. It is very hard to store, easily flammable, can cause metal issues -- see hydrogen embrittlement and attack -- and is basically not present in nature except as a byproduct of fossil fuel extraction.
So you need to dump a bunch of energy in creating a very difficult to handle material. In comparison, battery tech gets 7-10% better each year and has the immense economies of scale of electronics, electric motors, and power electronics all driving down cost and increasing competition.
There's a reason oil and gas companies propelled a lot of this development.
Hydrogen the atom is very common but what is needed is hydrogen the gas i.e. molecular hydrogen or H2. Hydrogen is very reactive so it's usually always bound up, for example in water. Stripping off the hydrogen atoms into H2 gas is energy intensive.
Since it's so reactive, it's both a pain to handle and to extract unless you have a lot of natural gas reserves, where it's relatively abundant.
Or you find it in the interstellar medium but I mean good luck mining a nebula.
This seems kind of silly to me. I'm no expert but as far as I can tell, almost all the difficulties confronting electrics are known quantities that we make slow but steady progress on each year. Meanwhile this author is saying, that for hydrogen to be viable we just have to solve this one massive distribution system problem and we're good.
Isn't it kind of obvious which tech is more likely to overcome its impediments? Especially since problems that can be solved in small bitsized pieces is exactly the kind of thing big corporations are good at?
Hydrogen is a dream technology, but it comes with some caveats. Right now production tends to be linked to fossile fuels, either as a result of extraction, refinement, or from electrolysis powered by coal. Presently the only for this to scale and be green will be nuclear power, and the politics are poisonous around that in every way. It’s expensive to even try to build a plant, and without the political will to deal with the waste, it’s dsngerous too.
Then there’s storage of Hydrogen, which is manageable, but not trivial. Transportation is difficult, but again possible to manage given enough drive to make it work. Fuel cells also currently require expensive catalysts such as platinum. I don’t see any of these problems close to being approached, never mind solved.
This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don’t feel it has answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are anything, but.
> This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don’t feel it has answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are anything, but.
This is not really fair..
Batteries can be produced cleanly just as much as hydrogen. It's just a matter of chemistry, mining practices and cost.
Furthermore, batteries is not a fuel. It is not burned. It can be recycled or reused.
But I get what you mean. All in all this is a technological arms race, and it seems to me that batteries have a pretty big head start. Though it's not over until we get a battery that is made from cheap common elements that has 2-3 times the capacity of todays batteries. In the meantime I suppose hydrogen fuel for the personal transport sector has a chance.
There is no case to be made for hydrogen-powered cars. EVs are going mainstream full-power ahead. In 5 years there will be like 50 EV models on the market (already being designed right now).
I think we'll end up with enough "next generation" energy (renewable, whatever), that we'll be able to afford the inefficiencies in manufacturing "legacy", high-energy-density fuels -- and product precursors, e.g plastics -- where still needed. (Avoiding further extraction and all the pollution and environmental damage and unqualified and quantified future impacts.) And our overall carbon burden may be enough less (disregarding accumulated atmospheric load, in this arugment), that we can afford the corresponding limited amounts of exhaust.
So, for common transport, I don't know whether pure hydrogen still fits in. It hasn't scaled, and it's still more difficult to handle.
"Most H2 is created through a technique called "cracking," which involves splitting the methane molecule (CH4) found in natural gas into two H2 molecules and a free carbon atom."
You can generate methane from rotting garbage, cow dung and whatnot. Almost anything that rots. And some of it is now torched as the transport is too expensive from far away oilfields.
But here's and idea: burn that methane directly in fuel cell?
The only way hydrogen works as a fuel storage medium if you have more electricity than customers for it. In he Orkney Isles wind is used in this way.
Hydrogen does not fit into the more popularly imagined future where renewables creates electricity that is then stored in parked cars, to be used when everyone gets home and the solar has run out.
(In investing jargon, this is known as the "Death Valley Curve.")
All this time I thought it was a biblical reference but I guess it's actually about California. Everything's about California, really, when you get right down to it.
Stan Meyer tech has been ready for mass production for well over a decade. But it can't be released until the death of the petro-dollar slavery system.
Energy == Money == Power and currently the MIC has most of it. Decentralized production of energy is their biggest threat.
Part 1: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11470/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 2: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11493/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 3: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11556/why-fuel-cell-ca...
Part 4: https://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/11572/why-fuel-cell-ca...
> Besides the battery, the biggest component(s) by weight is/are the motor(s). Current generation electric cars use still fairly heavy central motors with an actual axle to the wheels. Upcoming generations will use in-wheel or near-wheel motors that have almost no drive train associated with them: no transmission, no gearing at all, no weight lost to things that aren't necessary. This is one of the reasons electric cars can actually become lighter than traditional gasoline-powered cars; the chassis can be reduced because there are almost no driving forces on it anymore. Note though: this is an advantage of both battery and fuel cell electric cars!
Motor on the wheel seems so obvious but still no one seems to build such a car. I’ve asked automotive engineers about this and the answer I get is often:
Wheel based motor would make the wheel heavier and thereby increase rotational inertia which decreases acceleration and increases the required (kinetic) energy for a given speed of the car. I also heard that the increased wheel weight reduces the performance of the suspension.
I suppose another problem is the need for two (4 for 4WD) gear boxes, since electric motors are low torque, high rpm. The author says „no gearing at all“ but how is this feasible with an electric motor?
Anyone in the knows can comment on this?
You can make lower RPM electric motors that can do direct drive but they will loose efficiency, power and speed. At some point gears became better to reduce the RPM, even after accounting for gear loses. Even current electric cars really need 2-3 gears for maximum performance and efficiency, but they can get away with fixed gears which greatly simplifies things. One of the interesting things about the 4 wheel drive Tesla’s is that the 2 motor/gear assemblies are optimized for different speed bands so they can have the benefit of both without needing to shift gears, they just shift power from one motor to the other.
In wheel motors generally will only be done for low speed applications where a suspension is optional, just like airless and omnidirectional tires.
> This is an extremely long, in-depth blog series, so I'll start by giving you a summary.
A hydrogen car takes about five minutes to refuel. On a typical day, a battery car takes about five seconds to refuel: you plug it in and you leave it overnight. Sure, the actual charging takes longer, but who cares? You’re not involved.
On long trips, this reverses, but how often do you do those? Most people do a couple a year. You might lose a couple of hours waiting for charging there. Otherwise you’re saving minutes every week.
This is something I see people having a hard time truly understanding. They see that a car takes hours to recharge on a home 240V outlet, think “that’s a long time!” and stop there. They don’t realize that it’s a time saver most of the time.
Even if there was a hydrogen station on every corner, and the price was as cheap as electricity, I’d still never buy a hydrogen car. Who wants to visit a fueling station every week?
I put gas in my car, probably once every 2-3 months without a work related trip...and that's with me driving about 70 miles a day give or take.
A hydrogen/electric version of the Volt instead of gas/electric would make a lot of sense IMO.
Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.
It takes longer, sure, but it's rare that my car will not be at 100% in the morning if I leave it overnight.
However, will they plenty of charging stations, so that you never have to worry about moving your car so someone else can charge? That seems doubtful. I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
What the US needs is a political desire for New Deal type programs. Work still sucks outside of 2-4 (?) metropolis areas. Probably a large infrastructure project could get charging stations to the masses at the apartment level, and not much else.
One exception though could be a vast surge in oil prices. We’re talking 7$/gallon.
> I suppose they could allow a monthly lease of a reserved charging station, though.
That's usually how it's done here. And the cost is not negligible at all, more than what I pay in gas each month. And on top of that you pay for the electricity of course. And I'd say that most apartments that even have parking associated with them you will often need to wait years and years to even get a spot (electric or not).
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=y&prev...
I don't see it changing without government/tax incentives for the owners, which won't be happening under republican leadership.
Still, we're a two-car family and our second car is ICE (a Subaru). Gasoline is way more convenient than electric for out-of-town weekend trips. I take these trips frequently enough (more than once per month) that I don't want to rely on renting a car every time.
Basically, it's about the ability or potential of going anywhere. I bought a car that technically has the ability to go off-road. The reality is that I probably never will. But it sure feels good to know that I could. Paid extra for it and all. Completely irrational, but makes me happy.
That's the reason that people worry about range and refueling time. It's not rational, it's just humane. We aspire to do more , see more and go further. Not all of us do, but it's a very human emotion. That's not a bad thing.
It’s different when talking about a good long-range EV with a good charging network. Not only are long trips practical, but the speed penalty is pretty small.
Today I drove from the south east to the Lake District - a distance of about 400 miles. I made 3 5-10 minute stops en route for food, toilet and one for fuel. I found that once I'd stopped for 10 minutes I just wanted to get going again and get to my destination. I'm really not sure I would be happy hanging around a service on the M6 toll road for 1-2 hours because I needed to recharge my car.
I don't often do long trips, perhaps 2-3x a year, but when I do I really just want to get to my destination as soon as possible.
400 miles is pretty easy, though. In my car (Model S 85), I’d probably plan to stop once a bit past the halfway point for lunch. 20-30 minutes should get enough to finish the trip. That’s assuming I can charge at the destination. If you can’t, it’s tougher.
In a Model S 100D or a Model 3 LR, you could probably stop for only 10 minutes somewhere in the middle. They charge faster (especially the Model 3) and don’t need much extra to make that trip.
As an alternative I drive a Chevy Volt which has a gas run battery charger. While the battery only has a 50 mile range, the gas powered battery charger has about a 250 mile range
Although at this time I do wonder what could possibly move one to purchase a Mirai.
If you look at the current state of things, hydrogen cars are even more expensive and are impossible to own in most of the country. That might change in the future but it’s hard to match the infrastructure advantage of having millions of “fueling stations” in the form of electrical outlets, and BEVs continue to improve as well.
As battery capacity improves, charging from a regular outlet will only take longer and longer. And driver waiting time is short only if you can charge at home and never care about going anywhere beyond the charging range. It does work for a large number of people, but is a non-starter for a large segment as well.
If you don't have your own charger or access to a free one, commercial chargers aren't necessarily cheaper than gas either. Last time I ran numbers for my wife's plug-in, apart from free chargers (Volta or some municipal ones) putting in gas was cheaper.
Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas), and that a BEV is cheaper to assemble (less parts, less piping), the market for hydrogen cars is completely dependent on the price of batteries.
As batteries get cheaper, and rapid chargers get faster, the niche that hydrogen can occupy gets smaller.
The thing is, hydrogen cars are electric cars. It's possible some of them will even include a larger battery and become plug-in. So every hydrogen car sold will also benefit the development of better BEVs.
To me, this is a clear feedback loop that benefits pure BEVs. And where will BEVs be when hydrogen cars actually hit the market with significant numbers and models? What if 150kWh batteries are standard? What if 400kW charging is standard? What if the price is not much higher? These are all within reach. It's just a matter of time, and the hydrogen economy does not seem to be moving fast enough that its got time to spare.
But I fully support all subsidies and financial support for development of hydrogen fuel cells. Maybe it won't be success in cars, but it could be in other fields.
There are other options. You can producte H2 directly from sunlight. https://setis.ec.europa.eu/setis-reports/setis-magazine/fuel...
And we might run out of Lithium. Or Cobalt. Or Vanadium. I doubt that we run out of Hydrogen.
- Batteries are the most efficient in the long run and very dynamic at power release, but they are heavy (more than half the weight of Tesla's truck is the batteries), use lots of rare resources and take pretty long to recharge. It's getting better, but if you really want to drive a few thousand miles with short fuel breaks in an emergency, you can't.
- Hydrogen fuel cells suck at dynamic release, they really want to have a constant power draw. They're less efficient than batteries, but you can refuel quickly and don't have to carry the fuel weight with you all the time.
Taking all the technical challenges of storing hydrogen and making efficient fuel cells aside for the moment, combining the two technologies is really awesome in a way. You can get rid of two thirds of the batteries — and suddenly you have a car that's all of: easy to instantly refill, still dynamic to accelerate and overtake on the highway due to the batteries, but you also just have to dimension the fuel cell for average, not for peak power draw.
Considered the hydrogen is CO2 neutrally generated, it's really the optimum solution.
What kind of emergency would involve driving a few thousand miles quickly? I can only see a few hundred (hurricane evacuation).
At those distances, why wouldn't you fly?
[0] https://youtu.be/v5GPWJPLcHg
Lithium-cobalt is not the only chemistry. I’m optimistic about alternate chemistries in the long term. Especially now that the battery market is growing so rapidly. There are massive investments in research.
I doubt we’ll run out though. They’re not that rare. Besides, it’s a renewable resource, not a combustible one.
From that link platinum is 3.7E-6, others [Li, V, Co] are O(2E-3), or more, by percentage of Earth's crust.
There are internal combustion engines that use hydrogen as fuel. A hydrogen powered car does not need to be electric.
- just fueling hydrogen vehicles requires an substantial amount of electricity for the compressors. An electric vehicle could drive at least 10% of the distance on this electricity alone. That is not counting the compression work at any the production site and when filling the trucks.
- distributing hydrogen requires trucks. In most places, the elecricity network is available.
- refueling with a hydrogen vehicle is faster then recharging. But you have to refuel them at fuel stations. Electric vehicles can recharge at home or any parking lot with outlets - more and more companies have parking lots with electrical outlets.
I think that, when people are worrying about charge time, they're really asking, "Will charge times mean that a 5-hour trip to visit Mom and Dad now turns into a 10-hour trip, or, worse, something that requires an overnight stay?"
~330 mile range is available today, which is pricy, but quickly dropping. The expected 50% battery price drop within 5 years is probably going to make 300+ mile ranges become standard and likely 600+ Mile ranges will start showing up. Further once you get into the 400+ mile range territory particularly charging say during lunch can significantly increase range without completely filling the battery.
These are probably easier to deploy and maintain than hydrogen tanks, right?
The physical and mental infrastructure for both of these are already in place.
That's why I'm currently quite fond of platinum as a speculative investment. Fuel cells require quite a bit of platinum. Yet platinum has rarely been cheaper relative to other commodities like gold. I think because the market is discounting a decline in diesel engines and maybe because of recycling. (Even though platinum has been more expensive than gold even before catalysts were common.)
In addition, platinum deserves to receive a geopolitical risk premium. 80% of the world's platinum is mined (at a loss!) in South Africa, which is prone to intense labor disputes and looking less attractive every day. And the next big producer is Russia. Yet above ground stock piles have declined in the past decade.
In the 1+ year that I've been in platinum, it hasn't been a success. The market just remains comatose. But we'll see :-)
-That's BS. Should say 30 min. to 1 hour. Hydrogen is a dead end. Toyota and Hyundai are only making hydrogen cars for the ZEV credits.
https://youtu.be/UOt9KF2fsdw?t=128
https://youtu.be/zC3zM9rrUT0?t=609
So you need to dump a bunch of energy in creating a very difficult to handle material. In comparison, battery tech gets 7-10% better each year and has the immense economies of scale of electronics, electric motors, and power electronics all driving down cost and increasing competition.
There's a reason oil and gas companies propelled a lot of this development.
I am probably misunderstanding the whole "most abundant element in the universe" thing. Can you explain?
Since it's so reactive, it's both a pain to handle and to extract unless you have a lot of natural gas reserves, where it's relatively abundant.
Or you find it in the interstellar medium but I mean good luck mining a nebula.
Isn't it kind of obvious which tech is more likely to overcome its impediments? Especially since problems that can be solved in small bitsized pieces is exactly the kind of thing big corporations are good at?
Then there’s storage of Hydrogen, which is manageable, but not trivial. Transportation is difficult, but again possible to manage given enough drive to make it work. Fuel cells also currently require expensive catalysts such as platinum. I don’t see any of these problems close to being approached, never mind solved.
This is a well written and comprehensive article, but I don’t feel it has answers to the central issues of scaling up the Hydrogen economy. On the other hand, Hydrogen can be green, while mass produced lithium batteries are anything, but.
This is not really fair..
Batteries can be produced cleanly just as much as hydrogen. It's just a matter of chemistry, mining practices and cost.
Furthermore, batteries is not a fuel. It is not burned. It can be recycled or reused.
But I get what you mean. All in all this is a technological arms race, and it seems to me that batteries have a pretty big head start. Though it's not over until we get a battery that is made from cheap common elements that has 2-3 times the capacity of todays batteries. In the meantime I suppose hydrogen fuel for the personal transport sector has a chance.
So, for common transport, I don't know whether pure hydrogen still fits in. It hasn't scaled, and it's still more difficult to handle.
You can generate methane from rotting garbage, cow dung and whatnot. Almost anything that rots. And some of it is now torched as the transport is too expensive from far away oilfields.
But here's and idea: burn that methane directly in fuel cell?
https://newatlas.com/platinum-free-methane-fueled-fuel-cells...
People are WAY too exited about that "only water vapor from the tailpipe!" -hype.
Hydrogen does not fit into the more popularly imagined future where renewables creates electricity that is then stored in parked cars, to be used when everyone gets home and the solar has run out.
All this time I thought it was a biblical reference but I guess it's actually about California. Everything's about California, really, when you get right down to it.
Heavy trucks, though...
Energy == Money == Power and currently the MIC has most of it. Decentralized production of energy is their biggest threat.