> an unimaginably vast opportunity for electricity distributors. They're going to get ALL THE GAS STATION BUSINESS in the next generation.
This isn’t at all obvious. Putting aside the fact that it’s not exactly obvious when non-ICE cars will take over the majority of the market from ICE cars (I wouldn’t bet on it happening before my yet to be born children get their drivers licenses), it’s definitely not obvious that electric cars will be the ones to do it. I’ve driven both battery electric cars and hydrogen cars, and hydrogen cars offer a far superior driving experience. Charging an electric car simply sucks. It’s also not clear how you’d expect to manage charging stations at scale. It take 75 minutes for a full charge on a Tesla, nobody enjoys waiting that long for their car to charge, and the amount of Superchargers you’d need across the country/world would be insane if a majority of cars were electric. Hydrogen cars don’t have that problem, and they don’t have the same hard constraints on range.
You can say that hydrogen car tech, or the infrastructure, isn’t there yet. But it’s not there for electric cars either. If you want some evidence that hydrogen cars have serious potential, Elon Musk described them as “mind-bogglingly stupid”.
You're making some odd assumptions about how people drive. The average daily mileage on a car is about 30 miles. This means the vast majority of cars, the vast majority of the time, not only don't need a supercharger, they never need custom charging infrastructure at all, they can just trickle-charge off of a 120V outlet.
Really, you're looking at a specific use case (long-distance road trips) and generalizing. For trips under 200 miles a Tesla doesn't even need a supercharger either.
> nobody enjoys waiting that long for their car to charge
Honestly, I enjoy not being in my car more than I enjoy being in my car. Does anyone really enjoy being in a car for 12 hours straight without three to five 30 minute breaks? I've certainly done it but I honestly think it might not be a bad thing to have a car that prevents me from doing that.
You’re making some incorrect (though I guess understandable) assumptions about why people buy cars. If people brought cars for the use case you’ve described, then you’d expect the top selling cars in the US to be small ‘city’ cars, or at least high mileage sedans. But it’s not, 4 out of the top 5 selling cars in the US last year were SUVs [0].
People don’t buy cars that suit their most common use case. They buy cars capable of fitting any use case they might conceivably need it for over an average period of 6.5 years [1]. Its a pretty safe bet that most SUV owners don’t use their sports utility features, but they buy them anyway. The risk alone of being caught at a charging station for an hour or more, or the impracticality of longer trips is a major anti-feature.
You’re also missing one of the core value propositions of owning a car. For as long as cars have been sold, the freedom to get in your car and drive any place you want to at any time has been a core part of the value prop. For BEVs, it’s the exact opposite. You drive the car on terms set by the battery and your ability to charge it. That’s why range is still considered a significant constraint, even on BEVs that get 250-300 miles (10x your number of average daily drive). People simply don’t buy cars to meet 99% of their needs, they buy cars to meet 100% of the needs they know that have, and often a number of other needs that they don’t currently have, but think they might have at some point in the future.
And all of that is before you get into the issue that a lot of car owners don’t have off street parking, or live in places like apartments where they may not be able to install chargers.
Hydrogen has a few issues of its own which are slowly, but surely tipping the scales in favour of BEVs, namely:
1. The fuel is relatively expensive and will be for the foreseeable future.
2. Likewise the fueling stations.
3. Not to mention the vehicles themselves - this is true for BEVs as well, but while it's possible to make a cheap BEV, the same doesn't hold for hydrogen cars due to the cost of tanks, pumps and plumbing.
4. A hydrogen station's failure mode is a giant fireball.
Sure, hydrogen wins on charging time now, but that advantage is diminishing.
Meanwhile battery tech is getting both better and cheaper. Who knows, perhaps the next gen of EVs, arriving around 2025 will have ranges comparable to what a normal human being can stay behind the wheel without rest?
Due to the current efficiency of electrolysis, hydrogen could easily become less expensive than gas. Which is already quite cheap.
BEVs were equally expensive when they first came onto the market. There’s no reason to think hydrogen cars won’t be able to match them on price in the future.
A gas stations failure mode is also a giant fireball, so is a BEV and ICE cars failure mode. We seem to be doing fine despite that.
I’m not predicting that hydrogen cars are going to replace BEVs. Just that they obviously have the potential to do so, that they better align with the existing value propositions of ICE cars, and that to say the future is 100% confirmed BEV is simply wrong.
> Due to the current efficiency of electrolysis, hydrogen could easily become less expensive than gas.
I did the math and while it's possible, it's still not the case today. Even worse - hydrogen is more expensive per mile driven.
> There’s no reason to think hydrogen cars won’t be able to match them on price in the future.
I'll give you one then: expensive parts in the form of platinum catalysts and generally higher complexity, since all hydrogen cars which don't rely on combustion of hydrogen are actually hydrogen-electric hybrids with a buffer battery - something necessary due to the low power density of fuel cells.
> A gas stations failure mode is also a giant fireball
But would be rarer if we had enough cases to compare. Petrol being a fluid doesn't combust as easily - its NFPA flammability rating is 3, while hydrogen's is 4.
Sure, natural gas is also highly flammable, but has less than 40% of the energy density.
AmericanChopper, you're really out of touch with the realities here. BEV sales are above a million a year and growing rapidly. According to the experts falling battery prices mean that in another two or three years the sticker price for a BEV will be equal to an equivalent ICE for many classes of cars, and sales will skyrocket. Charging structure is growing rapidly.
On the other hand, hydrogen car sales have been stuck around 10,000 a year, and there is no prospect they will expand in the future to anything significant.
The reason for the difference in sales is BEV's are just way better. You know, when it first became clear a few decades ago that we needed to get off of fossil fuel cars, hydrogen seemed like a good idea and lithium-ion batteries were really poor in terms of capacity and cost.
But since then batteries have improved tremendously, but hydrogen cars much more slowly. And every year that goes by battery cars get further ahead. The future clearly belongs to BEV's.
What makes you say the infrastructure for electric cars isn't there? The most important factor is the infrastructure that the consumer needs to deal with. A 220v adapter costs a couple grand to install at your house, which is small in comparison to a new car. The electrical grid expansion is abstracted from the user so isn't really factored in.
The trick is to get a « dryer socket » installed in your garage. Not an « EV » plug, otherwise the price goes up like flowers or a limo when you say « wedding ».
And watch thunderf00t’s videos on how stupid lithium ion battery cars are, where he goes off on a tangent about how hydrogen cars may be better in energy density terms but there’s nothing that would make him go near a pressurised hydrogen car from a safety perspective.
My guess is the first hydrogen car fireball in a city or gas station location will do worse things for hydrogen PR than the first self driving car running someone down did for self-driving cars.
What happens to hydrogen in the used car market? Electric risks you batteries that hold little charge, diesel risk a visible dripping fuel leak that won’t burn if you drop a match on it, hydrogen leak risks you an invisible gas cloud building over your car that turns into the Hindenburg at the static zap of you touching the door handle.
Everywhere already has electric infrastructure, and fancy new batteries like (vanadium redox flow?) can help grid long term storage and balance and electric power can easily be created and transported by solar and wind; nowhere has hydrogen infrastructure and it can’t easily be created or transported and by the time you’ve built that up and compressed enough hydrogen to be useful or chilled enough to a liquid, you’ve spent lots and wrecked its overall energy efficiency.
I’d more expect someone to come out with a fast charge 15mile graphene (or other panacea magic words) “battery” which handles commutes and hybrid with li-ion for longer journeys than hydrogen to get big within 30 years.
Even more compelling, BMW i3 has lithium ion with a petrol generator range extender, and that seems the perfect combination of short range electric with the option of topping up at any gas station for quick refuels, it completely solves the electric range problem - with a smaller simpler cheaper “engine” not coupled to the drive wheels. I don’t know why other makers haven’t offered that, but BMW are dropping it as an option because range is good enough now. But it’s a better fix than hydrogen - fits current infrastructure and driver understanding.
Volkswagen is going to be pumping out the all electric ID3 from 2025 in Volkswagen quantities. Not an electric conversion of a gas model, an all electric design. That’s my marker for “electric cars are mainstream, unquestionably”.
You can, but the Lithium Ion can't gather invisibly around your car, it's not at high pressure waiting for a structural weakness to start escaping, it's not known for causing Hydrogen embrittlement in whatever's containing it, and it's not just about the most easily ignited material going like Hydrogen is, it's often water cooled to keep it more stable and electronically monitored in a way that can reduce current draw from possibly weakened cells, and it's easier to reinforce against damage because it's not pressurised, and if you can get away from the fire it's not a gas which can spread out around you. And Li-Ion batteries have less power density than Hydrogen and Hydrogen burning takes half the reaction fuel from oxygen in the air.
There's more which can go wrong, needs less to happen for it to go wrong, gives off more energy if it does go wrong, looks more spectacular (scary) if it does go wrong. This image [1] is Toyota's own video of what happens if the Hydrogen tank is safely vented, a five meter high flamethrower.
Over time, Li-Ion batteries lose charge capacity, so there's incentives to replace them with new ones. What would happen to Hydrogen tanks in a ten year old car, would you trust one? What would it take for you to trust one?
It's not that it can't work, or nobody is trying, but I'm siding against it. I think anything with high pressure is unlikely to become mainstream, and anything with high pressure Hydrogen even more so.
I was taking thunderf00t's comments on that as a chemist who claims to have worked with Hydrogen enough to be afraid of it. I don't know how fast natural gas disperses, but gas leaks have blown up houses, and cars are often in indoor garages and parking lots, workshops and occasionally car ferries, shipping containers, Eurostar train carriages, etc. which would contain gas more than the open air.
This isn’t at all obvious. Putting aside the fact that it’s not exactly obvious when non-ICE cars will take over the majority of the market from ICE cars (I wouldn’t bet on it happening before my yet to be born children get their drivers licenses), it’s definitely not obvious that electric cars will be the ones to do it. I’ve driven both battery electric cars and hydrogen cars, and hydrogen cars offer a far superior driving experience. Charging an electric car simply sucks. It’s also not clear how you’d expect to manage charging stations at scale. It take 75 minutes for a full charge on a Tesla, nobody enjoys waiting that long for their car to charge, and the amount of Superchargers you’d need across the country/world would be insane if a majority of cars were electric. Hydrogen cars don’t have that problem, and they don’t have the same hard constraints on range.
You can say that hydrogen car tech, or the infrastructure, isn’t there yet. But it’s not there for electric cars either. If you want some evidence that hydrogen cars have serious potential, Elon Musk described them as “mind-bogglingly stupid”.