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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

We've known fuel cells are a terrible tech for cars for a while.

http://insideevs.com/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-hydrogen-fuel-cell-...

"Where does hydrogen sit in this equation? Currently, filling up hydrogen costs $12/kg at the moment in California. This is roughly in line with the actual cost of hydrogen - a bit on the low side if you want to commercially exploit one of those expensive filling stations, but we can safely assume that if hydrogen were ubiquitous, the price is roughly in this order. This will get you about 60 miles, so your cost is about $0.20/mi. An electric car costs about $0.06/kWh to fill up, and drives 4-6 miles on that charge. That's about a cent per mile. Yes. A 20-to-1 difference in running costs. This isn't percents change, this is orders of magnitude."

http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/12292/hydrogen-follow-u...

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I've worked on hydrogen fuel-cells, and I wasn't particularly enthused by them. However, passing off a competitor (Tesla's Elon Musk) trashing the competition as a factual "we've known" reeks of fanboyism and idol worship.

Its not fanboyism at all. How many Model S vehicles are in the wild? They can charge almost anywhere, have range above 250 miles per charge, and have a Supercharger network that's fully operational. (And that's only the Model S, I neglect the Leaf for the moment even though there are for more in the wild, regardless of their range)

How many fuel cell vehicles are in consumer hands? Can they charge at home? Do they have a nationwide refueling network?

Pointing to existing state of affairs as an argument why this is ever more efficient is to deny the existence of progress, which is clearly wrong.

Current advantage of electromobiles on the market over hydrogen cars is not important.

It may be in general case, but Musk earned the trust for being precise and honest - so it's more like listening to the opinion of a proven specialist in the field (with a staff full of experts behind him to call him on his mistakes).

Nailed it.

Musk is known to make predictions which fail and to make announcements which are either false or misleading.

Musk does a lot - but says even more, and some of what he says robs him of trust.

He seems to have a typical engineer problem with underestimating time, but at least is not trying to bullshit anyone; even in his "misleading" announcements he's straigth and to the point. You can see that he honestly does his best to deliver. It's a refreshing quality.

May be he doesn't know something? Elon several times praised Merlin engines - which are certainly quite impressive. But he seemingly omitted some other rocket engines which were technically even better.

He's very good in delivering - and delivering a lot, but I think he still promises even more. And that's not too typical for engineers.

I'm assuming Toyota and it's engineers aren't stupid. So why were they pushing for Hydrogen if it is apparently so unsuited to powering cars?

I was asking myself the same question since some years, too. I just googled for some minutes and the only realistic reasons why they prefer hydrogen over elctric I found were: more range than electric and quicker refueling than electric. And both points are highly questionable in my opinion. So unfortunately I didn't found any rational explanation why they prefer hydrogen.

With the assumption that hydrogen is indeed "Fool cells", some possibilities for why Toyota may still be pursuing it (not necessarily in any order. Largely listing for discussion and for thinking about later in more depth). 1) Japanese govt. incentives are sufficient to push Toyota and other Japanese companies to try and make Hydrogen work. 2) It's a conspiracy between car companies and oil companies (I don't see how this can work because I don't see how car companies benefit.) 3) Car companies don't like the fact that EVs have lower maintenance, because a large chunk of their profits comes from maintenance and repairs. 4) Car companies are basically behaving like Blackberry after the iPhone. Their current model works, and being incumbents, they find it hard to imagine a world that does not work like the current one. 5) EVs would be too much of a revolution and they would essentially lose all their incumbent advantages. FCV basically follow the same model and so they allow incumbent car companies to better fend off new entrants than if EVs became popular (I find it interesting that all the new entrants are EV manufacturers or rumored to be making EVs (Apple)).

Any other ideas?

Personally, I think #s 4 and 5 (both of which are basically blindness caused by incumbency) are the biggest factors. This is bolstered by this Toyota quote in the article:

    “You may think 35 years is a long time,” Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. “But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary.”

The way Japanese manufacturers seem to be the only ones who are so uniquely focused on hydrogen, however, seems to indicate that Japanese policy is also playing a large role.

Also: even if fuel cells won't be needed for most vehicles, i could see how it would fit heavy equipment, trucks, etc . And maybe that all that will be left from their industry and they're just preparing for that?

Unfortunately, hydrogen doesn't have the energy density required for trucks. They'll need to move to natural gas or biodiesel until batteries catch up.

Are you sure ? there's a startup working exactly on hydrogen storage for trucks: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2011/04/18/asemblon-forging-a...

> Cryo-compressed hydrogen stations cost about $2.1 million apiece today, while Asemblon figures that stations using its form of hydrogen fuel would cost about one-tenth as much.

Even if you get the cost down to $200K for a cryo-hydrogen fueling station, you still need to make the hydrogen from natural gas (which you could just burn in the first place) or from electrolysis (which is terribly inefficient).

You'll see natural gas truck powerplants long before you see hydrogen versions. Natural gas fueling stations are very inexpensive and straightforward where there is natgas infrastructure already run.

Yes, but long term will natural gas be used, instead of clean alternatives?

Until a clean alternative can be found that can provide the energy density heavy trucks require.

Nat gas is state of the industry tech:

https://www.freightlinertrucks.com/Trucks/Alternative-Power-...

This seems similar to how focused the American car companies in the 90s and Oughts seemed on Hydrogen Fuel Cells: a lot of it just seemed to be perverse market incentives, including Government research grants, to build proofs of concept HFC vehicles with no actual practicality. That said, at least it doesn't seem to be all Japanese manufacturers as thus far Nissan seems to be fairly transparent that they are focused on electric vehicles.

One theory is that Japan's methane hydrate resources [1] give them the opportunity to become at least energy independent, if not a net energy exporter. For a traditionally resource-poor nation, this is an attractive prospect, but it requires the adoption of hydrogen as a fuel, so the Japanese government is strongly encouraging it. Another theory is that Toyota has done the math and decided that they can't compete with China on EVs (e.g., see [2]) and so are looking for a different game to win.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/business/global/japan-says...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-23/china-won-...

The comparison made here is misleading -- both hydrogen and electricity have heavy storage systems that make up a larger fraction of vehicle weight the larger the range of the vehicle is, which is a problem both have compared to gasoline. So, comparing how much distance per unit of the energy source a vehicle gets based on a vehicle that only has storage to get a single-digit number of miles on a fill-up for one source vs. one that has storage for an order of magnitude more for the other source is not an apples to apples comparison. Scaling up to similar range would make the comparison substantially worse for electric.

That's not to say that Hydrogen isn't more expensive than electricity for the utility provided when you consider actual use in powering motor vehicles, but the comparison made here is quite poor and can only be seen as deliberately misleading (since Musk clearly is not innocently ignorant of the scaling issue it ignores.)

I appreciate the polite response! Let's assume weight isn't an issue, as it drastically contributes to vehicle stability due to having such a low center of gravity (From what I've heard from Model X engineers, its damn near impossible to roll).

* Distribution network: Hydrogen filling stations are expensive. Very expensive. There are very few of them. Electric vehicles can be charged from any 120V outlet, although 220V+ is preferable (Model S owners in a pinch can charge at RV campsites for a few bucks when there are no superchargers around). Tesla's Supercharge network covers almost the entire US (they will complete their buildout in 2016).

* Conversion efficiency: Hydrogen, unless produced from methane/natural gas, will never be as efficient as straight charging an electric vehicle. You can charge your electric car with solar panels on your roof, or an electrical grid that gets cleaner by the day as coal is phased out (and natural gas will phase out as wind and solar begin to dominate generation).

* Range: Batteries are getting cheaper stupid fast. We're already ~5 years ahead of the curve. The failure scenarios are very safe (I'm using Tesla's titanium plate armored pack as the example) compared to a Hydrogen storage failure. Could charging happen faster? Sure. But needing a ~5-10 minute turnaround on your vehicle's fueling is an edge case; the vast majority of owners are going to charge at home overnight, at their workplace, or at Superchargers (or other non-Tesla high current charging stations).

Hydrogen is dead on arrival for mobility.

Compared to gasoline though- $12 will get you about 3 gallons, which in many vehicles will get you about 60 miles...

But this is more of a comparison of next-generation fuels. Gasoline is only included in the post to provide a baseline comparison that people can easily understand.

Sure, but IMO they are most interesting to compare in a context of what they each offer over conventional (gasoline) fuel, rather than versus eachother. Otherwise we leave out the context of where we are coming from today.

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