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Future of Cars: Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Or Electric?
cartechboy writes: "Back in 2010, Toyota and Tesla teamed up to develop electric cars. That partnership gave us the RAV4 EV electric crossover, but it seems as though that will be the only vehicle we see from that deal. The partnership will soon expire and Toyota has no plans to renew it. Why? Because Toyota believes the future is in hydrogen fuel cell cars, not battery electric vehicles. We knew trouble was brewing when the RAV4 EV failed to set the world on fire when it came to the sales floor. Then Toyota and Honda announced plans to debut hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as early as next year. Add it all together and the writing was on the wall. Is Toyota right? Are hydrogen fuel cell cars the future, or is it missing the mark?"
When you travel across the country and you don't know what kind of service station you'lll find along the way, diesel always wins. No alternative fuel even comes close to the reliability and availability of diesel engines, and that's not changing anytime soon.
So many advantages to hydrogen. It automatically increases the fuel tax by leaking, and further by requiring active cooling to keep hydrogen contained. It's expensive to produce and transport, so it doesn't threaten oil companies with lower fuel costs. It's plentiful, so you can use tons of other fuels to separate water into hydrogen.
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Exactly Hydrogen requires wasted resources to create a new fuel cycle (good for capitalists I'm sure). Electricity is agnostic. It is simple (AC motor), and requires less 'special handling' and transport.
Hands down straight up electricity...just that pesky problem of are our batteries good enough yet?
I think so, but apparently Merrica needs 300+ mile range day to day.
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Hands down straight up electricity...just that pesky problem of are our batteries good enough yet?
Let's add some facts to the discussion...
Electricity also involves losses in transmission and transformation.
Battery charge/discharge is only ~85% efficient under moderately realistic conditions: http://www.pluginhighway.ca/PH...
Electrolysis is reported to have efficiencies up to 80%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Line losses for electricity are in the 10% or greater range (the figure for Canada is almost 40% due to the amount of power we get from relatively remote hydroelectric facilities). So electricity and hydrogen aren't too far off-base with respect to losses.
The weird thing about hydrogen vs electricity is that while hydrogen's energy density is great per unit mass, it's volumetric energy density is terrible given any reasonable storage technology. So while Li-Ion batteries have 10% of the specific energy density of hydrogen, they have almost equal volumetric energy densities: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
And it is worth noting that hydrogen's volumetric energy density is 20% that of petrol, so to get the same range you'll need a fuel tank that's five times larger. Advanced storage technologies can help, but not all that much.
Hydrogen also suffers from handling issues (embrittlement) and is extremely explosive. Natural gas has a relatively narrow range of fuel-air mixtures (about +/-5% around the 50/50 mark) where it will go bang rather than just burn. Hydrogen goes bang from about 5% to 95% mixture.
So while batteries have their issues, hydrogen is so clearly not a competitor that it's curious that Toyota is going for it. On the other hand: prediction is hard, especially with regard to the future.
This is the great thing about capitalism: it encourages people to explore those avenues that look utterly wrong-headed to the rest of us, and sometimes... they are right, and we are wrong. No centrally planned economy of any kind has ever been able to figure out how to do that (nor yet to deal with the problem of corruption that is endemic in human societies of all kinds, including capitalist ones.)
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All reasonable points...
Offer the Chevy Volt for $20K and they could sell half a million of them a year...
At $35K, it is a non-starter...
It begins and ends there, all other arguments are really academic...