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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.
Isn't driving on a tank full of hydrogen like super dangerous?
Isn't driving on a tank full of hydrogen like super dangerous?
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.
The future of transportation seems likely to be a mix of electric, hydrogen, and diesel, depending on the use case for a long time to come.
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.
Fast 'charging' seems to be the big one. Also for larger engines (like trucks) you should get lower total weight compared to batteries.
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?
* There isn't a fuel distribution system. The reason BEVs work is because everywhere has power, setting up power distribution is generally just plugging into the local grid.
* Hydrogen escapes any container it's placed in. That's a pretty hard thing to deal with. Most approaches have looked at chemically binding hydrogen to something in order to keep it from escaping, but that, as you can imagine, is expensive. The other option is onsite electrolysis, but that's rather expensive to pull off.
* Speaking of electrolysis, while we can get hydrogen from many sources, the one we are likely to actually use isn't electrolysis but rather natural gas and oil. Why is that? Because electrolysis is inefficient (about 20% efficiency IIRC edit I recalled incorrectly. Electrolysis has a ~70% effciency).
So you have a hard to store fuel, without a distribution network, that may be coming from fossil fuels anyways. -So why do major companies like Toyota love hydrogen? Because it doesn't require them to make any major changes to their fleet. You can get a lot more miles out of the basic combustion engine design and you don't need to retool all your product lines.- edit I was wrong, looks like most hydrogen vehicles are fuel cell based.
Now, that isn't to say that hydrogen has no place in the future. I think because of it's energy density hydrogen will likely play a role in the airline industry. It may even be possible that hydrogen ends up finding a place in long range shipping. However, hydrogen in a consumer car is, IMO, DOA. BEVs already exist as do their charge networks.
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.
(Also, governments have nothing to levy special taxes on if cars run on your wall plug.)
Of course, this is all conspiracy theories and speculation. I have nothing to back this up.
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?
Isn't driving on a tank full of hydrogen like super dangerous?
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 a…