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Toyota Scion IQ Electric Car To Launch In 2012
Mightee writes "Toyota officially announced at an annual dealer meeting in Las Vegas that the all-electric Scion iQ will be launched next year in the United States. According to Toyota, Scion iQ can only go 50 miles on a single charge. Because of this, it will be facing tough competition from 73-mile Nissan Leaf and 85-mile Mitsubishi i."
If they price it right (ie: much cheaper than a leaf) then I'd consider it. My commute in the morning is 10 miles each way, plus add 10 miles for a trip to the grocery store and this car can take care of 90% of my driving needs. I already own a mini-van with a trailer hitch so I am covered for long trips or for towing or carrying stuff.
What will the range be like after 5-10 years? And what if it's a really cold winter day? I have to heat the cabin somehow.
This is my main problem with all-electric vehicles. You never really know how much range you have. And if you live in a cold climate like I do, gasoline engines are really quite efficient in the winter since the "waste" heat is not wasted at all; it heats the cabin.
It doesn't matter. Conversion from electricity and water to hydrogen and back can be very efficient.
And yet almost nobody does it. Most hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels.
The problem with electric cars is energy storage (batteries), and hydrogen can be stored more easily than electricity.
Actually hydrogen storage is fraught with problems. And not just "oh, but we can fix that" problems. It is more like hydrogen is just not very convenient. For example, hydrogen has a nasty habit of slowly breaking down metal (embrittlement). There's much more room for improved battery technology than there is for hydrogen storage and transmission. Besides, we already have the infrastructure to deliver electricity to every home. What's the point in introducing the hydrogen middleman?
Yes, gasoline is a flammable liquid with a high-ish vapour pressure at room temperature and pressure...
Hydrogen is a gas at room temperature and pressure, and an extremely low density one at that (in fact, you'll struggle to find a less dense gas - it's the lightest element, but exists as a molecule, still helium is more dense, the next closest).
What the GP was mentioning was the assertion that pumping liquid hydrogen at a filling station would be "safe and easy" (in comparison to gasoline). Liquid hydrogen is a cryogen - that boils at -252C (-450F), so not only is it a) very energy intensive to liquify (either by pressurising and chilling, or just chilling), it will furiously boil when pumped up out of the dewars you keep it in.
The only real way to "safely" store it (without having to consider cryogenic issues like venting, ice build up on the outside of valves and pipework, extensive lagging and bulky dewars etc, is to store it as a compressed gas.
The problem with that takes us back to density: it has a very low energy density, so you need very high pressures to store lots of it (ie, enough to give you similar range to gasoline).
You certainly won't be pumping it as a cryogenic liquid out of a fuel pump into your car in the same way you currently pump gasoline, and to think that liquid gasoline and liquid hydrogen are broadly similar in safety (in terms of the precautions and risks involved in storage, usage and handling) as you suggest with your flippant and uninformed statement that starts with a sarcastic "wow" is just laughable.
The major research right now is "how do we increase the energy density?" - we had effective hydrogen fuel cells back in the 60s - we sent them to the moon on Apollo, but they had to be fuelled with LOx and LH2, which was hazardous, but handy since they were using millions of gallons of the stuff anyway to power the rocket engines themselves, bleeding off a little to run the fuel cells was just a bonus. We simply can't do that in a consumer vehicle, so we need a way to carry enough hydrogen to make fuel cells really worth it, hence research into new polymers that can "absorb" it like a sponge, or new materials that enable us to make higher pressure storage tanks etc.