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Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

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Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#11
post #3

It doesn't say anything about the size of the tank, which seems a little weird. Technically you could break that record by adding a bigger tank. Does anyone know what this means: "It purified 449,100 litres of air on the journey – enough for 33 adults to breathe in a day." Why is the car purifying air while driving? Is this a side effect of hydrogen powered cars?

You don't want your fuel cell chemistry to be contaminated. The fuel cell needs oxygen from the air.

That's also why it's so light, since in H2O, 90% of the weight is the oxygen.

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#12
Since “tank” isn’t a unit of measure, I suppose anyone could trivially break the record with a larger tank.

From the article:

> The Nexo consumed 6.27kg of H2

For comparison with the other production H2 cars:

Toyota Mirai: 5.6kg

Honda Clarity: 5.0kg

Seems like a promising technology. My understanding is that the current blocker is infrastructure. It’s hard to pressurize up to 10,000 PSI, so many facilities are only able to refill to 60-80% capacity.

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#13
post #3

It doesn't say anything about the size of the tank, which seems a little weird. Technically you could break that record by adding a bigger tank. Does anyone know what this means: "It purified 449,100 litres of air on the journey – enough for 33 adults to breathe in a day." Why is the car purifying air while driving? Is this a side effect of hydrogen powered cars?

I guess that’s marketing speak for an F150 doing the same journey would have produced that much impure air.

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#14
post #3

It doesn't say anything about the size of the tank, which seems a little weird. Technically you could break that record by adding a bigger tank. Does anyone know what this means: "It purified 449,100 litres of air on the journey – enough for 33 adults to breathe in a day." Why is the car purifying air while driving? Is this a side effect of hydrogen powered cars?

To make a fuel cell work, you need an external oxygen supply for the chemical reaction. A cleaner oxygen supply with fewer particles make the fuel cell work longer, therefore Hyundai added an air filter which filters out fine particles before passing it on to the fuel cell.

(I'm not an expert, but this is how I understood the process.)

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#17

I have an acquaintance who has made a substantial fortune from energy focused startups (including a battery tech one) and is now working on another hard tech startup and they are very critical of hydrogen as a fuel. I’ve had superficial conversations with them about it but could never get a sense of their fundamental arguments. Is hydrogen a non starter or are they just protecting their investments with FUD?

The arguments I’ve seen have specifically been about hydrogen in the context of EVs (specifically almost always as a way to dismiss EVs).

- The trade-offs work in favor of EVs, hydrogen has a similar distribution problem to gasoline (fueling stations).

- Hydrogen requires production somehow, electricity we already have the grid and people can charge at home

- The things hydrogen is good at (lighter weight than batteries, faster refueling) are starting to become less relevant as battery and charging tech improves.

- The argument that you need an equivalent charging infrastructure isn’t really true since you only need that for long tail long range trips (and also we have that now).

The reason I personally dismiss people talking about hydrogen or supporting it (Japanese automakers) is it ignores the obvious current success of EVs in addition to the arguments above and it often feels like a disingenuous argument in bad faith. Specifically, someone is anti-EV and bringing up hydrogen as misdirection to make some EV thing harder to implement.

The success and market uptake of hydrogen vs. EV seems to be empirically obvious at this point. I suspect because EVs could get over the chicken/egg charging infrastructure issue because early adopters could just charge at home (and most trips are short range).

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#18
post #2

It's not quite clear from the article, but is this a stock Hyundai Nexo or was it modified to add more fuel tanks? The stock range of the car is 413 miles or 664km, so how exactly was this new record achieved?

It says in the article that it consumed 6.27 kg of hydrogen and the standard tank is 6.3 so I would say that it was not modified.

Re: Hyundai Nexo sets new world record 887.5 km travelled on single tank of hydrogen

#19
post #16

What is the appeal of a hydrogen car vs an eletric car? The range appears to be similar, but being able to charge at home is so much more convenient.

Hydrogen cars usually are electric cars. The main advantage to the owner is being able to fill the tank in minutes, and to society as a whole is being able to manage the H2 generation process to align with supply and demand on the grid.
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