6000 words and no technical arguments of why hydrogen is viable or not.
The case for hydrogen-powered cars
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hydrogen [...] is basically not present in nature. I am probably misunderstanding the whole "most abundant element in the universe" thing. Can you explain?
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 int…
thank you for the excellent explanation!
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#43The 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?
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Since pure battery electrics will always have lower operating costs (if the hydrogen is produced from electricity and not oil/gas) 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.
http://periodictable.com/Properties/A/CrustAbundance.al.html From that link platinum is 3.7E-6, others [Li, V, Co] are O(2E-3), or more, by percentage of Earth's crust.
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.
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#45The 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…
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.
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#46The 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…
This only works if you live in a house or an apartment that has electric car outlets installed.
Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#47The 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…
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Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#48The 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…
This only works if you live in a house or an apartment that has electric car outlets installed. Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.
I'd assume that public parking will eventually be equipped with chargers.
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#49The 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…
This only works if you live in a house or an apartment that has electric car outlets installed. Most apartments have no place to plug in your electric vehicle.
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.
Re: The case for hydrogen-powered cars
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.