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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?"
"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.
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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Hard to top the energy density in a gallon of gas
You need to multiply the energy density times the efficiency. A gasoline burning ICE has an efficiency of about 15%, an electric motor is over 90%. After that, you will find that the gasoline still wins on range, but loses on cost (excluding the initial cost of the vehicle). Battery technology is improving faster than ICE technology, so is likely to eventually win, as the battery production costs come down and the range goes up.
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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I agree with "try both". There are too many variables to pick a winner up front at this point. Electric has a lower infrastructure barrier of entry (we all have power outlets already), but hydrogen offers potentially more efficiency.
By the way, why not put solar panels on more electric cars? My car sits in the parking lot 9 or so hours in direct sun. It could power roughly 1/3 of my commute if the roof and hood(s) had panels. Some say the weight of the panels cuts into too much of the benefits, but what if the panels WERE the top and roof instead of being glued on top? I'm not a materials expert, so maybe that's where the bottleneck is. Expert anyone?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
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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...