daveo4porsche

ROFL - more expensive than gasoline per mile - and similar GHG emissions at the refinery to make H2 vs. burning gas in an ICE - yeah that's a huge win! {sigh}

earl pottinger

Here in Ontario Canada, off-peak power is $0.068 per kWh, so double the savings again if compared to gas or hydrogen.

Earl Colby Pottinger (Tesla, Bollinger, Rivian and other BEVs fan.)

MexicoBlueTurboS

The future of transport is hydrogen.

yvesvidal

The whole purpose behind Hydrogen was to keep the production and distribution in the hands of the same clique: the Oil companies!
It does not make any sense to use Hydrogen to power a vehicle: highly dangerous, expensive and totally impractical.

Yves

Adk46

The big problems with H2 are 1) it's a low density gas that is difficult to liquify or compress, and 2) it must be manufactured. Overall, the ramifications are now clear - compared to battery electric, hydrogen is a loser for cars. It's time as a useful distraction is nearly over.

But here's an idea: combine four atoms of hydrogen with one atom of carbon, which yields a gas that is much easier to compress. Actually, you don't have to manufacture this gas - it comes up out of the ground in many place! Yes, methane contains carbon, but only half as much as gasoline.

[It amuses me to look at things from different perspectives. A marketing person could come up with a way to sell natural gas with the slogan "Hydrogen you can use!"

daveo4porsche

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/insig...230522489.html

hmmmm

whiz944

The H2 station a couple miles from my house has been down for weeks. There is one a couple more miles away that is supposedly up occasionally. A friend of mine leases a Mirai. Saw him last weekend, and he was telling me about where they do and don't have H2 around the Bay Area. He constantly watches the web site showing availability, and when one of them shows green he heads over there ASAP. What a PITA.

For my part, I'd rather take a few seconds to plug my car into the grid in my driveway as needed.

daveo4porsche

1. hard to handle safely
2. complex to refine
3. generates GHG's at refinery point
4. normally fossil fuel based
5. expensive to transport and store
6. way less efficient well to wheel than BEV's
7. not actually that fast to recharge for back to back fill up session
8. FCV are expensive to manufacture
9. H2 based ICE's are still mechanically complex
10. and leaves the fossil fuel industries business model mostly intact along with environmental impacts
11. H2 isn't that cheap per/mile
12. it is zero GHG emissions at the tail pipe (H20 is it's only by product).
13. should be as fun to drive as a well designed BEV as it still has instant EV torque/power

seems like a slam dunk win to me - why aren't we all driving FCV's?

freqflyer

The Japanese Government is all in on Fuel Cells, one of the reasons hypothesized the Japanese automakers are behind in EV tech. Until lately , the Toyota and Honda have stated BEVs are not they way forward but fuel cell is. I guess reality of governmental regulations around the world and the lack of hydrogen infrastructure have them changing course with Toyota and Honda making big battery supply deals lately.

spdracerut

Studied fuel cells for transportation in grad school in the early 2000's. Toyota has been heavy in fuel cell development since the 90s. Long story short, I came to the conclusion that fuel cells are not a good choice for transportation use. Stationary power gen? Sure, but not transportation where it's low energy density is a huge problem. Storage is an issue being the smallest molecule in existence; it likes to leak past every seal known to man. Making it, storing it, transferring it, all not good for transportation applications.

My guess as to why the Japanese were/are so heavily invested? They were maybe thinking of using nuclear energy to generate hydrogen. They don't have much in the way of natural resources, so making hydrogen from water using nuclear power could solve one of their energy issues. Just a pure guess.

coffeeisgood

what is the difference between diesel fuel in California vs Nevada (or anywhere else for that matter?)
(assuming you filling up at a Costco or some other top-tier location, please skip over explaining any of the bio-diesel junk that should not be feed into our CD's)

AlexCeres

Hydrogen has already lost. BEVs are improving too quickly, and PHEV do a much better job as a transition for demographics that can’t adopt BEV yet with our current infrastructure.

plus, lawsuit in America ? lolz. Hydrogen would need congress to pass an immunity waiver like gun manufacturers. Go see South Korea. Stations keep blowing people up.

evanevery

The BIG PROBLEM with Hydrogen is that it REQUIRES an infrastructure to fuel vehicles.

EV's DO NOT require a charging infrastructure (contrary to what some would like you to believe). 70% of EV owners simply charge at home overnight. Much of EV's current success was built on home charging. I'm on my third EV (with the Taycan presumably being my fourth) and I've never even seen a public charging station.

If you have electricity, you can charge an EV. (even a 120V outlet) If you don't have a hydrogen fueling station you are done...

acoste

They don't have much in the way of natural resources (same applies to South Korea) and they don't want (and barely use) nuclear power after 2011. Japan is dedicated to decrease their CO2 emissions so they want to reduce the coal and natural gas imports. They can't rely on international electric power network since nor China nor Russia would be a reliable partner. Their plan is to import (more and more green) H2 instead. Compressed H2 and lyquified,cooled H2 are challenging to transport (although there are companies who are developing tankers for that) so other than these they are looking into MCH (methyl cyclohexane) and NH3 (ammonia). MCH can be used on the existing fuel transportation infrastructure as it doesn't need any cooling. It could be direct fuel for fuel cell cars. The only drawback compared to EVs is the well to wheel efficiency. But their theoretical energy storage potential is much larger than batteries (unless someone comes up with something like 4x higher energy density for them) so H2 can solve the renewable energy storage problem.

AlexCeres

and here I thought the BIG problem was re-enacting the Challenger shuttle at your neighbor station. Just ask Norway and South Korea how this has worked out.