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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?"
It's much simpler.
I think it will come down to which infrastructure is developed first. If Toyota can develop a means to distribute hydrogen before Tesla can figure out how to distribute electricity, then hydrogen will win.
Considering the difficulties Edison has had with DC power, maybe Toyota will win.
"We knew trouble was brewing when the RAV4 EV failed to set the world on fire"
I heard that some of the Tesla cars have set the world on fire...
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.
Why not Zoidberg? I mean both. I can't imagine hydrogen fuel being cheaper than charging at home within the next 20 years. But with hydrogen fuel cell you can have a relatively quick refueling for extended driving. Something like a hydrogen/electric plugin vehicle would be the most appealing to me.
let them in and see which one is preferred. A decade with both hydrogen and pure electric competing ought to make for a hell of a lot of innovation in both sectors.
My bets on Elan Musk. At this point I really just want to throw my money at him and shout "just do something awesome with it."
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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The energy efficienty of fuel cell powered cars is abysmally low in comparison to electric. Infrastructure is almost non-existent and requires major investments. Hydrogen is very leaky and requires very high pressures for storage. There is a decent electric car already mass produced: Tesla Model S. I know that the batteries are pretty expensive, and energy density needs improvement, but for the sake of keeping our planet in better shape, I hope electric beats hydrogen.
The reason the electric vehicles aren't taking of has a lot to do with price (although there is also a legitimate concern about range between charges). But the price is a major factor, especially in an economy where the middle class (the lion's share of all car purchases) continues to get squeezed every time we look the wrong way. Seriously, let's look at price -- even the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt (plug-in hybrid) are $40,000 vehicles. And electric vehicles go up from there -- up to the Tesla Roadster in the six figure range. The average American doesn't even spent $30,000 on a car, so the price range of these new vehicles is still in the realm of the rich for toys and games. And to be honest, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are going to be priced in that same $40,000 and up range as well, so we won't be seeing those in the mainstream anytime soon. Henry Ford had it right back in the early 20th century. If you want your product to be adopted in the mainstream, you need to pay your workers enough to afford the product to be worth owning. They haven't done that yet, and until they do, we won't be seeing electric of hydrogen fuel cells in mainstream life anytime soon.
pissing all over themselves.
Why not Zoidberg? I mean both. I can't imagine hydrogen fuel being cheaper than charging at home within the next 20 years. But with hydrogen fuel cell you can have a relatively quick refueling for extended driving. Something like a hydrogen/electric plugin vehicle would be the most appealing to me.
Indeed. I don't know if anyone is even considering this option, but it sounds brilliant to me.
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How about a combination? I can fully imagine that for a large part of the population (or for that matter area) an electric car would be absolutely great...... if you are close to the grid. When it comes to storing energy then maybe a pressurised canister of hydrogen will do the trick better if your not close to the grid or have no time to charge for a few hours. I can even imagine that we will see some kind of hybrid a.k.a. hydrogen storage/fuel cell for the "rapid deploy" and then a battery combined with it which can also be charged from the grid. Drive train and technology stays the same, it is only the energy generation (Fuelcell with hydrogen storage or Battery) which changes
It also seems to me like it would be possible to engineer one vehicle with a replaceable identical voltage/amperage battery pack or fuel cell.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Right now most R&D is going into the generation of electricity. That is all well and good as we need to replace fossil fuels. The issue with the new technologies are two fold; time and space. Sure one could generate most the the electricity needs of the world using solar cells in the Sahara desert. The problem is that it does not help users in South America or when it is night in the Sahara. Storage and transmission become issues neither of which are easy or cheap to solve. Electric cars add to the issue in that when you plug a car in your are effectively adding the electrical equivalent of a small house to the grid. Add millions of cars and the grid could collapse. By using hydrogen fuel cell some of the load can be removed from the grid.
Links as I find them
Ford/Ballard partnership in 2007 to build plug-in hydrogen/electric
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Flying!
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
That's easy. You just have to run it at very high temperatures.
Wikipedia page for one of the hybrid concept/prototypes
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Electric in the short run is more economic than hydrogen because the technology is here and developed. One of Hydrogen's problems is the embrittlement of classic construction materials. So exotic materials need to be researched and made. The production of these materials at first will be expensive, but as time goes by, the materials will get cheap. An example of a piece the hydrogen car needs is the gas tank. The gas tank needs to be able to hold pressurized hydrogen in an exotic material, but other than that, it is just a gas tank. Compare this with a battery array. In the long run a gas tank is going to become cheaper than a battery array, but in the short run, electric cars are there already.
Hydrogen is refillable. Hydrogen stations only needs electric and water. People will have them at their own houses. People who want to make a hydrogen refilling station will have a low barrier to entry. There might even be people who get solar arrays to help produce more hydrogen for their gas stations. So hydrogen is poised to be the more economical car in the long run (like 10-20 years if research keeps going).
Electric will always have the advantage of regenerative braking though. So it is possible the future hybrid cars might be Hydrogen + Electric anyway. Unless maybe its possible to make your own hydrogen on the fly with the electricity made from regenerative braking.
God spoke to me
The best way to get hydrogen is through a process called "Hydrocarbon Fractionation" or steam reforming. Both of which produce large amounts of CO2 which is a green house gas. Natural gas is often used in the process but you can also use coal (Hello Koch brothers!). And when hydrogen is burned it produces a large amount of H2O vapour which is a greenhouse gas. That is why I call it a scam, it does nothing to improve the global environment or remove the dependence on fossil fuels while adding yet another layer of inefficiency to the energy to transportation process.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Did you see the movie? The oil companies and other incumbents want it dead. They bought all the patents they could get their hands on for the components of electric cars but the much of the proverbial cat was already out of the bag. However, they already own just about everything related to hydrogen fuel and it's pipeline. So they're pulling out all the stops to kill the electric car.
Tesla's cars actually have a decent range. The only issue is charge time since it can take an hour, when using one of their chargin stations, to get the battery to full when comepletely drained. They are working to get that down to 30 minutes however.
Meanwhile it looks like Toyota's Hydrogen system is also hybrid.
The same hybrid technology at the heart of the Prius but with hydrogen and fuel cell stack.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
2) Electric does not have the PR problem of the Hindenburg.
3) Hydrogen has everything else going for it. It is A) lighter, b) short refueling time, c) does not have recycling issues, d) does not have charge/discharge cycle limit d) zero energy loss from temperature (cold batteries lose energy). Hydrogen is the objectively better system if we were designing from scratch. But the infrastructure advantage that electric battery cars have is huge - the hybrid cars just made that worse.
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Yes, they're[plug ins] cleaner than hybrids, but they still depend on electricity ...produced by dirty fossil fuels... hydrogen fuel cells are, for now, the greenest of many options,
Hydrogen has to be cracked from complex molecules using...wait for it...electricity, so no, fuel cells aren't any greener than plug-ins. I suppose one could argue about whether the manufacture of fuel cells causes less pollution than that of batteries, but I expect it's pretty much a wash. I think the economy and convenience of recharging at home trumps hydrogen's greater range and shorter refueling time, and eventually battery technology will narrow those gaps.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Nissan is also planning a hydrogen/electric hybrid
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Germans beat us all to it, and called it the Zeppelin.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Nissan has been researching fuel cells since 1996
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
What we really need is some seriously big, efficient capacitors.
Quote from that page:
In January 2013, Daimler AG, Ford Motor Company and Nissan Motor Co., Ltd., under the Alliance with Renault, have signed a unique three-way agreement for the joint development of common fuel cell system. The goal of the collaboration is to jointly develop a common FCEV system while reducing investment costs associated with the engineering of the technology, and deriving efficiencies through economies of scale, and will help to launch the world's first affordable, mass-market FCEVs as early as 2017.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
So many advantages to hydrogen.
Ha Ha!
Or it would have been, had your idea of hydrogen not been from sometime around the 50s.
Expense of generation has been coming down for a long time. Ease of storage has also been improving steadily.
If Toyota thinks the future of electric cars is hydrogen, you are pretty ballsy to say you disagree with a company dedicated to understanding the future of transport... how can you be so sure they are wrong? Might it not be that your own understanding of the technology around hydrogen is seriously lacking/
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I believe they are correct
What is the median? Averages drift upward. The lower $30K is considered the start of the luxury bracket, it has the top end models of the mass produced sedans and coupes from likes of Ford, Toyota, and Honda.
The average used car sells for $9-10k (Maryland statistics for 2014; the new price matches your numbers). There are twice as many used car sales as new car sales.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In the long run a gas tank is going to become cheaper than a battery array, but in the short run, electric cars are there already.
So a hypothetical gas tank is hypothetically cheaper than an existing and very real battery? Curious argument you have there. How about we just plug in a hypothetical Mr. Fusion while we are at it? I frankly disagree with how you are framing the issue given the lack of cited evidence.
Hydrogen is refillable. Hydrogen stations only needs electric and water.
If you already are delivering the electricity, why not just put it into a battery and use it directly? (presuming the battery has sufficient energy density)
Electric will always have the advantage of regenerative braking though.
Electricity has a number of advantages. It is independent of the fuel source. Electricity can come from coal, oil, gas, nuclear, hydro, solar, wind etc. Electricity also is compatible with other types of motors. You can have a gas-electric hybrid, a diesel-electric hybrid, a fuel-cell-electric hybrid, etc. No other energy source can do that. We do not have the technology to use hydrogen directly (requires pressure and/or cooling tech beyond current economic practicality) and there is no near term likely prospect for a practical hydrogen based fuel.
1) As it's under pressure, requires a bulky tank for storage, partly negating the "lighter" advantage
2) It's very difficult to store and transport.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Is it worth having a diesel car all the time just to cover that edge case
Great milage and torque are not edge cases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Toyota made a decision that works within their existing car infrastructure. Think about it. The car will still have a fuel tank, and will still run an internal combustion engine.
There will be no "range anxiety" and you won't have to worry about replacing the entire battery pack after 3000 charge cycles.
They are going to have to start forcing gas stations to carry hydrogen as well, the way some places carry diesel and kerosene, but that's not *their* problem, is it?
The advantage to hydrogen is that they can still continue to make cars "as is" -- hell, they can even make hybrids too, a Hydrogen Electric Prius is sure to be in the future, without changing much about their existing factories.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
No, a $40K vehicle is NOT out of the reach for most of the population, but what you get for $40K buying EV vs. buying gas, is massively different.
You can get a lot more car for your money buying gas than buying EV, that's the problem.
$40K buys you a top of the line minivan or SUV, it buys you an entry level luxury car... A Chevy Volt? Give me a break, that is a cheap $20K compact car with a fancy battery in it.
Hydrogen fuel cells ARE electric. It's a way to store a lot of electricity in a small space, and be able to recharge in two minutes. The electricity from the fuel cell powers the electric motor.
Perhaps you meant "toxic and expensive batteries with a short lifespan, that takehours to recharge s are simpler"? That's debatable. The design of each is actually very similar. The main difference is that a fuel cell has a filler cap, while a battery has a charging circuit to charge the fluid while it's in the battery. Fuel cells allow the fluid to be charged (separated) outside the car, so you don't have to sit there waiting for the charge. You just pump pre-charged fluid in.
Hyrdogen Fuel cells do not eliminate the majority of gas stations and the distribution network that support them.
EV's eliminate > 90% of gas stations and all of the supporting infrastructure.
The Fuel Cell lobby group is strong and well backed.
Interesting research paper from Cardiff University
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Both hydrogen and electricity COULD be produced from entirely renewable sources, although in the interim the hydrogen will come from natural gas (steam methane reforming), just like the electricity. The difference is that hydrogen fuel cells scale better to larger vehicles, pickups, heavy duty trucks, etc. A battery electric long haul big rig doesn't make any sense because the batteries just get too heavy.
It also seems to me like it would be possible to engineer one vehicle with a replaceable identical voltage/amperage battery pack or fuel cell.
yes. just make the module swappable.
and it doesn't just sound possible but the logical way to go about it. the whole article with it's "electric vs. hydrogen" sounds silly because of this - since the electricity is used to run an electric motor(though one could combust it in an engine too but that would be silly for various reasons).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The book "Reinventing Fire" looks at both technologies. It gives electric the headstart but sees fuel cells as catching up in about 15 years or so. http://www.rmi.org/reinventing...
The average used car sells for $9-10k
Which is irrelevant in this discussion. Any proposed new electric or fuel cell vehicle will be sold as a new car so the only relevant comparison is with new car prices.
Look - at the end of the day, these are both electric vehicles. The only difference is the method of storage of the electricity. One company is looking to a battery that directly stores the electricity, the other to hydrogen which is converted into electricity via a fuel cell.
The biggest problem with direct-charge electric is there is no infrastructure for charging the cars. This is the high challenge Tesla is trying to tackle using its Supercharger strategy. The good thing is, the distribution and production infrastructure for electricity already exists everywhere in the world.
The problem with hydrogen is worse however. Not only is there is no hydrogen refueling infrastructure (and the existing gas one can not be re-used for hydrogen, at all) - there is also nowhere near the distribution and production infrastructure needed to make the hydrogen and move it all around the continent.
To me, this is why hydrogen is at a large disadvantage, no matter how much faster the refueling is.
They used a previous generation vehicle as the mule, which was much less desirable, did not offer Quick Charge capability, screwed with the $7,500 federal tax refund on leases, and generally did everything they could to insure that they would not sell one more than the minimum 2,600 they needed to fill CARB requirements. It is no secret that Toyota hates EVs and will do anything they can to squash them!
There is a great article in our local online newspaper written by a guy who is a consultant. He compares electric vs. hydrogen fuel cell technologies, and it turns out that it's way more ineffecient to create the hydrogen for the cars to turn into electricity than it is to just use the electricity as electric cars do now. http://www.noozhawk.com/articl...
Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
Both hydrogen and batteries are essentially means to store electrical energy. Electricity is used to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. Methane can also be used to produce hydrogen in some cells, but you may as well burn it to produce power.
The real issues are energy density and ability to safely store the energy. The energy density of hydrogen sucks, so if you want decent range you need big tanks and/or high pressures. And hydrogen, being such a small molecule, diffuses readily through most tank wall materials. Oh, and there aren't many hydrogen refueling stations because there aren't many hydrogen cars, so you have the chicken-and-egg problem to overcome.
Battery technology is a bit better in energy density, and electrical transmission infrastructure is already (mostly) in place. The trick is the proper interface. Battery technology is improving with experience and there are fewer hurdles to overcome in order to use them effectively. Batteries can blow up and burn, as can hydrogen and even gasoline. Gasoline car fires do occur but considering how many vehicles are out there it is a pretty rare event.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I think Toyota is planning to debut hydrogen cars in Japan, not in america.
With the recent news that they'll be renewing nuclear generation there. Producing hydrogen should be much easily done at the plants.most of the energy to split water can come from thermal, making it much more feasible. Also I don't think Japan has such great oil reserves so switching to a non foreign dependent energy source is smart for the country.
With respect to Hydrogen, the U.S. lies between the 2 largest reserves on the planet. It's renewable, and the cost is less than recycling lithium batteries. Maybe Tesla can drive from San Yesidro,CA Vancover,BC? I can get Hydrogen where ever there is water; lets try that for a lithium battery.
Right now the infrastructure and tech involved in both just isn't "there" yet.
The result are pathetically limited vehicles in comparison to the entrenched petroleum ICE market.
Battery tech needs to go up in power density at least an order of magnitude and find a real fast-charging option (as having to swap out battery packs is ridiculously wasteful).
Hydrogen fuel stations (and electric recharge points) need to come out of the lab and trial environment and start building stations all over the place.
It's nice if there's one path across a country that can be driven for a given vehicle type. But that leaves 99.999%+ of the rest of the country fucked with regards to alternate vehicles.
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THANK GOD!!!
Hydrogen fuel cells might become viable in the future, who knows. That doesn't mean we shouldn't develop the technology, but in the meantime, we need alternate energy today, and you can buy and drive an electric car now. I plan to look closely at electric cars for my next vehicle. By the time (5-10 years) I'm ready for another, if fuel cells are available, I'll consider those too, but they don't help me now.
No nation is going to build an entire network of H2-dedicated pipelines and other infrastructure, so any sort of mass fueling of H2 will come from electrolysis (consumes freshwater and is expensive for power) or (most likely) reformation of natural gas piggybacking on the already-existing NG infrastructure.
So, how efficient would an H2 fuel cell vehicle be per mpg equivalent worth of reformed H2 from natural gas? How much is the net fuel cost per mile?
Now, IMO a more promising path would be using solid-oxide fuel cells that accept hydrocarbons directly, but IFF they can get at least 16-20kWh out of a gallon of gasoline, its volume and mass are comparable to an I4 or V6 engine, and the cost comes down to 5-10 cents per Watt.
Toyota and Honda may be right, but the author of the article fundamentally doesn't understand Hydrogen and Electric:
We agree that battery electric vehicles, like are -- like hybrids -- a messy middle step between combustion engines and fuel cells. Yes, they're cleaner than hybrids, but they still depend on electricity, which is, in many cases, produced by dirty fossil fuels
Hydrogen is also produced by dirty fossil fuels! Hydrogen, like Electric, is only ask clean as where you got it from This is such a fundamental misconception, it invalidates the author's entire point.
Electric cars are the purest, simplest, cleanest, most efficient form. Hydrogen is only even considered because it might have a higher energy density and faster refueling time than electric. But Hydrogen is the messy middle step, not electric.
Hydrogen vehicles these days are series hybrids with a PEM fuel cell and Li battery pack. Think of a Volt but fuel cell instead of ICE.
Cars will be fueled next on Compressed Natural Gas. Why? Because there is a cheaper option that doesn't weigh a lot or take up lots of space.
Hydrogen is decidedly NOT efficient to produce. The cheapest way to make it right now is to reform natural gas (releasing CO2 in the process). Don't even think about electrolysis to get hydrogen, not even remotely cost effective or efficient Not to mention that the infrastructure needed to distribute H2 doesn't exist. It also is difficult to pack enough H2 into a tank to get enough energy inside to go very far unless you liquify it, but that requires cryogenic temperatures which are both dangerous and expensive. As nice as hydrogen sounds, it's not going to happen anytime soon.
Electric power (battery powered) is closer than hydrogen. The distribution infrastructure exists for the most part. Electricity is not hard to produce, even though we generate the bulk of it from fossil fuels. The problem with battery powered cars is that batteries are heavy, expensive, discharge quickly and take a lot of time to charge. You might get 100 miles out of a charge, maybe even 200, but eventually you are going to stop for a charge or replacement battery pack. If the temperature is high or low, your battery won't last nearly as long. The infrastructure for remote charging or battery swapping doesn't exist so distance anxiety is a real issue for electric car owners. Batteries are usually really large, compared to the equivalent tank size for gasoline. Batteries are not as inefficient as Hydrogen, but they still have serious issues.
Compressed Natural Gas suffers from fewer problems. The distribution infrastructure exists with natural gas pipelines nearly everywhere. In some areas CNG stations already exist. If you have NG in your home already, you can compress your own fuel for about half of the price at the station. Existing engines are easily converted to CNG with little loss in power and run cleaner and longer on CNG. If you convert correctly you can burn either CNG or gasoline/diesel. Tank size needs to be bigger than gasoline but most cars usually have the space available, trucks almost certainly do. Many fleet operators (taxis and such) already use CNG. But the biggest advantage of CNG is that it's cheap when compared to the other options (and gasoline/diesel for that matter). Not to mention that it is nearly 100% domestically sourced (at least in the USA).
So, the next adopted motor fuel will be CNG, not hydrogen or electric.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Okay, first off hydrogen fuel cell cars are electric. They just don't use a conventional battery.
Second, hydrogen fuel cell cars are not remotely competitive. Batteries are better and they're terrible.
Electric is just marginally competitive with gas and even then only in certain circumstances.
Someone is boundless going to tell me something great about hydrogen... but the problem is that its logistically difficult to move around, it escapes from any vessel you put it in especially under pressure. And ultimately you have to get the gas by pouring electrical grid power into some sort of electrolysis machine. And where is the grid power coming from? About half of it is still coal. So... by all means... get your green car and accomplish nothing.
We need fewer of these flash in the pan solutions and more ACTUAL solutions.
We need municipal power storage. Something more reasonable then deep cycle batteries. There are some places that pump water from a reservoir to a higher one to store power and then run that water through a hydroelectric dam to recover it. So far the most scalable power storage system we know. But we don't have enough of those. We need to look at flow batteries.
Once we're storing renewable energy electric cars will ACTUALLY have an impact on carbon emissions. Until then... irrelevant.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There's still a lot of improvements that can be made to the good old internal combustion engine. Both batteries and fuel cells are much more expensive - they may come down (slowly), but the efficiency of combustion engines will keep going up, thus maintaining the gap.
Rrrright... And you have an ingenious system that takes in water, then uses road signs "Oxygen molecules to the left, Hydrogen molecules to the right" and Bob's your Uncle.
Any idea how much energy it takes to split water? Care to explain where that energy will come from?
Hydrogen is a potential energy carrier, not an energy supplier.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
EXACTLY. Was hoping someone had pointed this out - a Fuel Cell car IS an EV - it just uses a fuel cell to produce the electricity, instead of batteries. Everything else is basically the same. So let's get electric done right first, then worry about swapping out batteries for a fuel cell. And that's what the manufacturers should be aiming for - a module approach, make a battery-module and a fuel-cell module and make them swappable....there was an announcement of some small EV maker planning on just that...but what should happen is Tesla & Toyota get together on it...
All hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are essentially H2-electric hybrids. Not only because a fuel cell produces electricity, but because HFCVs also incorporate sizable batteries.
A fuel cell can't be readily throttled, and making one that's powerful enough for acceleration demands is expensive and space consuming. A battery is used for peak power demands and to buffer the fuel cell so it can operate at a more consistent, more optimal output. As a bonus, the battery also allows for regenerative braking.
=Smidge=
The issue, of course, is you're dragging around both a bunch of heavy batteries and a bunch of hydrogen fuel cells, making things less efficient.
It's chicken/egg problem. A good analogy is natural gas-powered vehicles. There's a spot about a quarter-of-a-mile from my house that sells natural gas for cars. Really handy. The next closest one is about 10 miles away. Not so handy. The next one is about 15 miles in the opposite direction. Again, not so handy.
If you have an NGV, you need to plan your refueling, unlike gasoline, which is everywhere.
Until/unless you have a large batch of hydrogen stations around the country, it's not that useful to carry around a bunch of hydrogen fuel cells. And if there are a batch of hydrogen stations around, why do you need to carry around a bunch of batteries?
"The average American doesn't even spent $30,000 on a car". Discuss.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Diesel baby, all the way.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
With fracking natural gas is going to be cheap for the next decade or two at least. It is the obvious cleaner, cheaper and more secure alternative to gasoline and diesel.
and further, pretend you have the option to purchase a volt at 40k or something like a used focus (or for the pedantic twits, any decently new, used economy car) at 10k. that 30k price difference equates to more gasoline than you'd ever conceivably use.
Buying a Volt/Tesla/Leaf -- to break even with a used car you'd have to drive the EV/hybrid for quite a bit longer than the car is likely to last.
It equates to spending $40k to save $10k in gas. OR it's greenwashed feel good smugness, hard to tell.
You can't fight Toyota anymore. They will always win any contest they invest in. They haven't lost at anything in the past 20+ years, and they aren't about to start now. It doesn't matter if the technology is an explosively bad idea, they will convince us that we need it and that everything else is a bad idea.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Even though a handful of owners of the original NiMH RAV4 EVs still rave about them, the vehicle has always struck me as rather an odd duck. Until and unless the price comes way, way down, the market for battery EVs consists of the environmentally conscious, and what environmentalist would want to drive an SUV, the quintessential symbol of profligate waste, self-importance and environmental degradation?.
which is $24,000 according to some blog postings with no supporting links. I couldn't find any better number with Google.
I bet the average new car price includes some $100,000+ outliers, so it's hoisted significantly above what the middle-class car buyer pays.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
> Have they managed to come up with a liquid hydrogen storage medium then?
Yes, and its volumetric energy density is significantly better than a lead-acid battery. It has more hydrogen per volume than H2 liquid hydrogen, too. My car uses such a liquid. For every two or three hydrogen atoms, just add one atom of carbon, ending up with C7H16, C5H10 or similar.
I also have some other mostly-hydrogen liquid fuel on my desk here, C12H22O11. It works very well when boosted with just a tiny amount of C8H10N4O2.
Seriously, though, there are many liquids that can work in fuel cells, including C7H16, kerosene, and gasoline. Selecting one that makes the greenies and everyone else happy is a chore, but I don't see any to think that won't happen.
especially if the announcement from Power Japan Plus about a battery improvement hold any merit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Even better - make it modular. You can do city driving on batteries, then swap them for fuel cells before going on a long trip. That will also help with battery replacement, which will need to happen eventually.
It's Electric. Hands down. Hydrogen would be better, but with electric you can use an IC engine to charge the batteries via generator. That makes it capable of using both fuels on the fly. Can't do that with a fuel cell. Get to Texas where they've likely banned Hydrogen refueling stations and you're screwed.
Natural gas fracking is anything but clean.
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Not as sleek, awesome or expensive... but Ammonia fuel cells are getting pretty good these days. Ammonia is already produced across the planet as fertilizer by the ton. And it can be produced already using several processes from oil, natural gas, propane, biologicals and of course recycled sewage.
Ammonia has a higher energy density than hydrogen, is easier to store, and can be transported easily at 8-10 bars of pressure. Lastly, ammonia is the second most widely produced commodity chemical in the world.
Only downside, it's poisonous. On the upside, you can easily smell a leak at safe levels 1ppm. I think hydrogen would asphyxiate people if there was a slow leak, as it's odorless.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
Hydrocarbon fuel cells typically convert all that carbon into CO2, so what exactly would be the point? I suppose it promotes the development of the rest of the electric vehicle technology, but it doesn't get us off oil and makes for a substantially more expensive car.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hydrogen has a huge infrastructure problem. Ie., what do you do when you need some electricty to charge something? Reach over and plug it in. Vs. what do you do when you need some hydrogen. Uh, yeah, right.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Especially since hydrogen FCEV use electricity as the motive force anyway. With the cell feeding the battery and the battery feeding the motor, it wouldn't be much different than current plug-in hybrids. Except without the emissions.
The problem is (and has always been, IIRC,) the practicality of creating and transporting large amounts of hydrogen. Especially since hydrogen doesn't have the energy density of gasoline, so transporting it from hydrogen-making plants would be necessarily less efficient. (And home hydrogen generation is not something Fred and Ethyl Consumer will be able to deal with, not to mention the inefficiency of coal -> electricity -> hydrogen -> electricity again -> motive force.)
Many years ago, I thought the answer might be hydrogen fusion plants, which have enough efficiency to overwhelm the relatively low energy density of commercial hydrogen. The plant would separate the water, keep the deuterium to continue the reaction, and produce electricity, fresh water, hydrogen for consumer fuel, and free oxygen. But every forty years, practical fusion is just forty years away... I'm wondering if we'll be talking about practical quick-charge battery technology the same way in forty years.
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I can only think of 2 major issues that would need worked out:
1) once you stuff all the necessary parts in (hydrogen tank/lines, batteries, miles of electrical... stuff), will there be any room left for passengers and their luggage?
2) how will the weight of said drivetrain affect the mileage and performance of the vehicle?
That said, I think you're pretty spot-on here. The next step will be figuring out how to explain to the ignorant masses that no, they aren't hydrogen bombs on wheels...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The average American doesn't even spent $30,000 on a car, so the price range of these new vehicles is still in the realm of the rich for toys and games.
The average price of a new car in America is $31,252.
Averages can be misleading
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
We don't know. Both have a lot of issue that are being worked on.
Hydrogen is a pain to store, electric has limited ranges, and so one.
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It'd be nice if the EV-only range was better than 37 miles (75 would cover about 80% of my use cases, and I drive more than just a round-trip commute), but the idea that you can have a car that is pluggable electric but is limited only in range by the fuel in the tank is appealing.
I just don't know why they haven't put a diesel in the Volt.
How about this AC... hydrogen fuel cells produce electricity, they do not drive electric generators.
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With how easily hydrogen ignites, we might finally get cars that explode from crashes and gun shots!
I want a fuel cell that runs on a hydrocarbon or carbohydrate, not crazy dangerous/annoying hydrogen. And yes, we can generate hydrocarbons from electricity (only currently have no need to).
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When you consider Hydrogen comes from natural gas as does an increasing amount of our electrical power, I think you are barking up the wrong trees. So are you saying we shouldn't develop our natural gas resources and burn something else like coal, nuclear, or something else? I don't think that is a great idea myself, we need to stick with natural gas.
I think natural gas is the lessor of many evils, and benefits from being the best of the fossil fuel options in terms of how clean it burns. And I believe that this outweighs the environmental damage that may happen with fracking.
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For the purpose of this discussion lower income people don't matter as few buy new cars in the first place, their adoption will be when EVs enter the used car lots. $40K is actually in range of a rather large (U.S. at least) population. While it may or may not frustrate your budget it's not a "for the 1%" price.
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I actually had a smiley in there that I accidentally removed, but yeah - gas wouldn't be the cleanest option.
The fact that gas, methanol, and ethanol all work in fuel cells does show that there's no reason we can't find a variety of liquids that work in fuel cells. Not that any of those is ideal*, but they are POC - they prove that liquid fuel cells are entirely plausible. Now we just identify the best liquid for any particular set of priorities.
Given a catalyst that isn't uber-expensive, putting gasoline in fuel cells COULD work really well for two reasons.
First, it would fix one of the two major drawbacks of electric vehicles like the Tesla - range. Specifically, the WORRY about running out of battery. The Tesla already has an electric motor. If you added a small fuel cell that could power that same motor, Tesla owners would know that they'll never be stranded. They could always gas up like any other car. No worries about distance between charging stations, or being unable to visit a dying relative 350 miles away because the car has to charge overnight. They can just run the last 60 miles on gas WHEN NECESSARY. This without adding a gasoline engine and all of it's supporting systems.
The other thing is, in THEORY gasoline exhaust is nothing but water and CO2. A conventional engine, where the chemical reaction consists of exploding thousands of times per minute, doesn't resemble theory. There are many more pollutants generated. A gas or gasohol fuel cell could be much cleaner than a gasoline engine. Also, fuel processors promise to make gasoline fuel cells much more efficient than gas engines, too - potentially cutting fuel use in half. That would be incredible if we could cut fuel usage in half. Of course, so far those are just claims by the companies making the processors. Solyndra claimed some wonderful things too.
Sadly, Toyota is as wrong about hydrogen cars as Thomas Edison was about alternating current. There are two enormous problems with hydrogren. First, it is expensive to produce from either water or natural gas due to the wasted energy that is released as oxygen or heat, respectively. Second, storage of hydrogen on a mobile vehicle (or anywhere) is very difficult and requires either very high pressure containers or complex and costly adsorption systems. Electric vehicles are obviously the future, either standalone or combined with hybrid electric/internal combustion motors.
I would suggest you not look up, but there is this thing called the "Sun", and it's on and spewing out energy all day long. Now, there is this process called, "Electrolysis," it separates the Hydrogen from the Water. Fortunetly, the waste product of that process is called "Oxygen"; I think of it as waste gas excreited by plants. Existing gas stations would be an excellent place to set up this stuff. Just like when we went from Leaded Fuels; good times, good times.
Those numbers are going to vary all over the place since not all coal is equal let alone boilers, generators plus whatever is in the transmission chain. Even time of day could give you a percent or more of change (warm aluminium or copper transmission wire increases in resistance with temperature - over 100km or more the losses add up). Thus it's only worth it in terms of ballpark numbers, and even then you could be connected to cheap hydro. Then it's only a fair comparison if you add in the entire gasoline supply chain and you'd be amazed how much waste is in that too. For example, Nigeria gets nearly all of it's electricty from burning the gas from oil wells that was just flared off until recently. Since that is also an energy supply chain with a lot of variables nobody bothers to seriously compare the crude oil to fuel and coal to electric vehicle energy chains in the sort of detail you are asking for. It would just be messing around inside the error bars.
Electric cars have 96% storage efficiency
Irrelevant compared to the factors for the user like range and refuel time. Gasoline is inefficient too; yet most people use it. Who cares if Hydrogen is also? It's abundant beyond measure.
We'll benchmark new advantages in fuel against electric vehicles, not hydrogen.
We'll see what people actually end up using en masse. You, random internet commentator, have one idea. Toyota, who actually makes cars, has another. Hmm.
I don't care, I'm just happy it's all going electric. But I cannot ignore the stupidity and ignorance around the fact that nothing around battery driven electric cars scales.
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You are looking for something in a niche that hasn't been filled yet. Scale up to something that carries 400 tons and you'll find an electric truck that is economic to run :)
Why carry your power source around at all?
Public transportation in many cities use overhead power lines. Just make that standard and cars can be much lighter==much more efficient.
It could make ethanol useful for more than drinking or as an gasoline additive.
The whole premise of this article's question is very suspect, it's presenting a binary choice which is already misleading, and then the two choices overlap which just seems ignorant.
If cars are electric then we can use whatever we got to generate electricity, coal, natural gas, solar, wind, nuclear, all of the above.... and be able to switch to whatever as better electricity generating technologies come online
In my view the answer has to be both for the intermediate to long term future. Electricity for the shorter distances/commute and hydrogen based electricty (via fuel cells) for the longer distances. In the light of the future energy mix to be mostly or entirely renewable an often heard concern is about the large fluctuations of wind and solar energy and the related under- and over-capacities for the grid. If eventually more renewable energy supply were available than needed most of the time, the excess could be used to produce hydrogen and store or distribute it. Your car will even become your backup home power supply if a storm has disconnected the power line and you are waiting for the utilities company to fix it. On the other hand that probably means less ice cream consumption during power outages...
Electric is simply to inefficient to collect-produce-transport-distribute-convert-convert-convert, and in the end it necessitates highly active infrastructure. Perhaps in the heart of a metropolis that can work, but it might as well power bicycles in that environment.
Hydrogen, as many have said, sucks in the practical convenience of transport. Everything's pressurized, nothing's stable, and it's constantly trying to get away.
I'm a Mazda fan. I like the idea of making the car more and more efficient to the point where in can run on less and less gasolene. At some point, it'll be so efficient that it won't need such a purely refined fuel, and could wind up burning anything -- like orange juice.
With less-refined fuels be required, there are oh-so-many-more options available, including solid fuel components.
So that's my distant-future foresight: two cubes that ultimately get crushed/melted/dissolved/vapourized into something that combusts. Transporting stable and solid fuels in incredibly easy; there's effectively no direct loss during transport; and there's zero active infrastructure to maintain. If it's stable enough, you could leave giant piles of it by the road, and just run a vending box, like the old curb-side newspaper boxes.
Batteries halve in cost/kwh & kwh/kg about every 10 years. DC fast chargers are legit--Tesla can already charge at >5 miles/minute (120KW, planned increase to 135KW) with a rapidly growing charging infrastructure. Hydrogen refueling is just not enough of an improvement (neither is battery-swapping BTW--which always sounded ridiculous to me).
New economies of scale are starting to kick in, lots of new battery tech in the pipeline. Government regulations for 55mpg+ is only realistic with hybrid or full electric cars. It's already way cheaper to operate an electric car than a gas car--think about that. People who own electric cars love them. The Model S was named best car in the world by about a million publications.
We are just waiting for the gap in capital cost (vs. a gas car) to narrow and then it's game over for combustion driving. For those of you who haven't lived through a technology revolution before--this is what the beginning of it looks like. Maybe 20 years until >50% of all passenger miles driven in the US by new cars are driven under electric power.
1. The Tesla recharges 180 miles in about 30 minutes, and getting better all the time. Other electric cars are catching up and there are emerging standards for DC quick charging.
2. Your driving pattern is not typical so it isn't at all predictive about the future of electric driving.
One explodes, the other doesn't. The end.
Or you could just run an ICE on alcohol or biodiesel. Not quite as efficient, but it does maintain the carbon-neutral qualities.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
The average American doesn't even spent $30,000 on a car, so the price range of these new vehicles is still in the realm of the rich for toys and games.
The average price of a new car in America is $31,252. A $40,000 vehicle is not remotely out of reach for a large percent of the population.
A Volt is $35K - tax credit ($7.5K to $9K depending on the state). So the actual cost of buying a Volt is less than the average cost of a new car.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Just think of all the people who depend on gas, from the moment it's pumped out of the ground, until it reaches the gas pump: refineries, transportation, station employees, etc. If you can recreate this with Hydrogen, you might make it easier for the industry to shift.
With electric cars, you destroy this whole industry from all angles. All those truck drivers, station employees, refinery workers. Hell, most of the roadside restaurants would probably go out of business.
But, any of today's thermal central pollutes less than the same amount of cars producing the same amount of energy, the cost of electric transportation is way less than moving all that energy in liquid form even accounting for the loss of power on the way. So, yes, electric cars are the way to go if we want to pollute less or if we start by making all those processes to generate & transport hydrogen cleaner, we can have the best of both worlds.
You are right about the lower end of the market, i.e. the Leaf, but the Tesla is much better value than other similar luxury cars. Ignoring fuel costs entirely it is still cheaper than an equivalent Merc or BMW, and arguably better equipped if you want to play top trumps.
Plus with an EV you get other benefits, like being able to use car pool lanes and never having to visit the petrol station.
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What you can have is a mostly electric hybrid. Instead of the current hybrids with a petrol engine plus electric system, the whole car is an electric car with a fuel cell added. Normally, you'd operate purely electric. But those 2 or 3 occasions per year when you want to drive 500 miles you'll use the hydrocarbon fuel cell so you can also run regular fuel too and have the quick refilling times.
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Electric cars still use hydrocarbon fuel in power stations, have a limited range and are slow to recharg.
Hydrogen powered cars can refill quickly and use Hydrogen produced by Offshore wind farms.
Offshore wind farms can produce electricity for peak demand and off peak use sea water hydrolysis to make hydrogen or even carbon neutral hydgrocarbon fuel by combining it with Carbon from CO2.
While technically dual fuel I run my current car on almost entirely on LPG and I'm a big fan. It is massively cleaner than diesel and better than petrol. Performance with modern ECU engines is good. However it is still an interim solution because it is still a fossil fuel and is therefore carbon negative.
Hydrogen fuel produced from sea water by off shore wind turbines using surplus off peak power will replace it in the long term future because it is CO2 neutral.
http://www.hydrogen.co.uk/h2/o...
Improved battery technology will improve range. Solar panels on the roof won't help (much), but in-road charge cables might; public electricity infrastructure creates its own problems, since electricity is a private venture. If the batteries store 1000 miles, charging may be irrelevant: you'd park at a hotel and charge overnight, because who drives more than 1000 miles in one day?
Hydrogen ultimately comes back to fossil fuels, at which point we should just stick with fossil fuels. Propane provides better efficiency and easier storage than hydrogen.
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Don't they know that water vapor is the worlds number 1 green house gas - not CO2?! Don't believe me? Check out Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas)
The sole reason Fuel Cells are coming to the market is either they make or break it.
I have a deeply rooted opinion that Fuel Cells are much like Nuclear Fusion, it was never meant to come to the market, at least not until we run out of petrol (hydrogen) or coal (fusion).
But let the Electrical Vehicle vs Hydrogen Fuel Cells war start, I bet 10 to 1 the EV will win, and the results will come before 2025.
Electricity can be (and usually is) created by burning coal at a power plant. Therefore electric vehicles are just a scam and "do nothing to improve the global environment or remove the dependence on fossil fuels while adding yet another layer of inefficiency to the energy to transportation process." You can generate the electricity in more eco-friendly ways, but you can also generate hydrogen in more eco-friendly ways, including using solar panels to generate electricity and use electrolysis to produce hydrogen. Arguably you can create diesel fuel in eco-friendly ways as well.
You need to seperate the 2 issues - generation vs storage medium. I can understand your issue with relying on Fossil fuels as a source for your energy and your desire to use alternatives (although I think you need to gain a deeper understanding of the true cost of those alternatives). However, you shouldn't let that pervert your analysis of the various storage mediums.
not unless it's the Toyota Highlander :)
I think there is room for both kinds of cars in the future. Pure electric cars make sense for urban areas where the typical trip length is short, but make poor replacements for gasoline vehicles in sparsely populated rural areas or for long road trips. Hydrogen cars work for those use cases, but are poor choices for dense urban areas because of the explosive potential of the fuel. Hydrogen tanks in cars will need to be REALLY well sealed, and those seals will need to maintain integrity for the life of the car.
Energy density doesn't matter... Once people experience what an electric car can be like they just won't want anything else. Instant torque, faster and better handling than anything else on the road, roomier, safer, basically maintenance free, always has a "full tank" when you leave the house, costs almost nothing to drive, single-foot driving with regen braking...
They'll get cheaper soon and they will be everywhere.
10 kg of Plutonium will blow your petrol head away.
--
If we'd listened to all the people who'd said it couldn't be done there's be no fusion power stations or cities on the moon.
Hydrogen takes a lot of energy to produce at present and has very little energy per unit volume. It's little different than a battery, except with more loss although you can carry more of if. Electricity is limited to range, heavy, and expensive batteries. At present, neither are practice for all around driving. H2 is fairly safe with spills rapidly dissipating. If you only do short drives, electricity is practical and relatively inexpensive. For trips, recharge takes far too long
Or if you want to breath anywhere near a large number of vehicles and there isn't much airflow.
That's why California was pushing for the things in the first place FFS. That's why even China is taking them seriously. That's also why an electic SUV is low on anybodies list. They are heavy things and the pollution impact is spread out unless idiots are using them as shopping trolleys in congested cities.
Since the losses in the delivery chain have reduced it actually is an energy improvement over many gasoline/petrol engines even if not a challenge to diesel yet. In terms of pollution reduction it is a massive improvement due to it being relatively trivial to do at large scales instead of being a heavy thing to carry around at small mobile scales - plus the pollution tends to happen at the top of a stack way out in the countryside instead of stuck under a temperature inversion layer in a city for weeks.
The fuel for hydrogen fuel cell is bi-product of burning fossil fuels. So its still dependent on a disappearing non renewable fuel source . Eventually when gas prices become to high, mass transit system and bicycles will become the way of the future.
There are some fair points in there, about how it is easier to make a large power plant clean than millions of small ones in cars clean.
As for SUVs, you should come to Texas, you might be shocked driving around how many pickups and SUVs you'll find in parking lots here.
Look at the number of minivans sold and how many companies make them, then look at the number of SUVs sold and how many companies make them.
The market has spoken, customers prefer the SUV over the minivan.
You can debate replacing Chevy Sparks and VW Jetta TDIs with Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs all you want... I suspect it would actually help more to get my 12 mpg truck off gas than to replace a 32 mpg car with electric.
The infrastructure/re-charging/re-fueling is one of the things holding back these new techs. It would roll out twice as slow if two separate new infrastructures had to be built.
Until you want to get some distance away from the grid.
The offroad vehicle I was driving in the 1990s (Suzuki Seirra - may have a different name where you are) would be almost trivial to convert into an electric car due to low weight and plenty of space under the hood, but range issues and the fashion driven desire for something big mean that people want a Land Cruiser luxury edition or whatever the US equivalent is instead of a little electric offroad tractor with a passenger compartment, or even a bigger bare bones version. They want to be surrounded by tons of crap low strength steel mostly there for ornamental purposes. Move that with batteries and you won't get far.