Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like a Real Car | Hacker News Reader

Honda's New Hydrogen-Powered Vehicle Feels More Like a Real Car

forbes.com

28 pointsradiorental51 comments

What on Earth is a "Real" car?

My electric car drives just like a real car - only faster, quieter, and with less pollution.

90% of the time, my car is parked at home or work - so it can fully recharge over 3-4 hours. At a rapid charger it will fill up in 30 minutes.

I still don't quite see the point of creating hydrogen, shipping or piping it across the country, storing it, and regularly stopping at speciality shops in order to purchase it. We already have a existing electrical infrastructure and the reality is that most people aren't driving 400 miles every single day, so don't need to be constantly refuleing.

What I infer from the article is that a real car has space for luggage, can be driven in cold weather, and is not "too heavy."

By those criteria, your electric car appears to be a real car.

> I still don't quite see the point of creating hydrogen, shipping or piping it across the country, storing it, and regularly stopping at speciality shops in order to purchase it. We already have a existing electrical infrastructure and the reality is that most people aren't driving 400 miles every single day, so don't need to be constantly refuleing.

Hydrogen allows the existing supply chain (ie centralized fueling providers) to survive. Electric vehicles causes it/them to die a slow death (think about those 170K gas stations across the US that aren't needed anymore).

You'll charge at home, possibly at work if your employer provides it as a perk, or at Superchargers when on the road.

EDIT:

Hydrogen refueling stations: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/images/facts/fo...

Tesla Superchargers (as of today; Tesla goes live with a new supercharge roughly once a week, although I've seen them move as fast as once per day): http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/images/superc...

> We already have a existing electrical infrastructure and the reality is that most people aren't driving 400 miles every single day, so don't need to be constantly refueling.

For the millions of people that rent in high density buildings and work in office buildings, there typically is no charging infrastructure available either at home or work. Sure, the buildings are wired to the grid, but putting enough chargers to support a volume greater than first-adopters is extremely expensive. In the office building I work in (40 stories), there are exactly two chargers to support approximately 1000 parked cars. In the building I live in, there are exactly zero chargers, and there are no wall outlets either. Not an uncommon scenario. I'm not arguing that hydrogen is the solution to this scarcity problem, just that the existing infrastructure isn't adequate either.

Infrastructure costs money. Does this mean it should not be built?

I didn't imply that at all. It isn't clear to me _what_ infrastructure should be built, given that there's not a solution that can service everyone currently. I think a case can be made for hydrogen being a better infrastructure play than extending the electric grid. It has some nice qualities, for example the ability (noted in the linked article) to be produced in a hyper-distributed manner.

I presume these people park somewhere? In the UK my office provides a bog-standard 240V 13A socket - that fully charges me throughout the day.

Installing 1,000 normal electrical sockets in a car park is a chore, but it's hardly the construction project of the century.

Just curious, how do you know that your car produces less pollution? The electricity is still generated and transmitted, so it is at least possible that the energy used to power your vehicle is worse for the environment because of its source. Also, did you factor in the impact that mining lithium has on the environment?

If you look at serious research on this (full life-cycle analysis) you find that a small electric car typically breaks even after ~ 60 000 miles, while something like a Tesla Model S breaks even after ~ 120 000 miles. Those numbers are from memory and for a European electricity mix, but I'm fairly certain they're in the ballpark.

> Just curious, how do you know that your car produces less pollution?

This data is available: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_08_01.html

Even in the absolute worst case, energy generation from fossil fuels at a power plant is significantly more efficient than the internal combustion engine, even after taking transmission and charging losses into account.

In reality, EVs tend to be sold in areas with high renewable penetration. And about 40% of EV owners have rooftop solar systems.

The biggest argument for EVs in general is that they are fuel agnostic. Transitioning to EVs right now means decoupling transportation from fuel, which means the fleet automatically becomes cleaner as we continue to build renewable capacity and phase out fossil fuels.

http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-car-emissions

Places like Detroit has coal fired plants.

As well as the other answers, when I charge at home the electricity comes from my solar panels.

Now, we can argue about the polluting nature of creating the panels - but I can turn a day's worth of sunshine into 80 miles of travel with no at-source pollution.

LOL. You must be living in a pretty happy plug in bubble. Which is great for you.

There are people living in apartment buildings, with no options to plug in anything. The best they've got is 110V and probably a talking to by building management if they plug in a car regularly without paying for the extra electricity that isn't billed to their own meter.

There are people who gasp work in buildings that don't have plug in infrastructure. We used to have a building that had posts to plug in hybrids and such, with a prioritized parking space, but we're not at that building anymore, and no one could use them anymore. They weren't 220V either, so it's more of a maintenance charge.

To get a 400 mile / 640km range, you're pretty much driving a Tesla. Not everyone could cough up the money, or even finance one that easily. And to charge up 400 mi on the mobile 110V on the NEMA 5-15 is a pathetic 133 hours. http://www.teslamotors.com/models-charging#/outlet

Or some of us live at places that has actual winters, where temperatures averages -20C, and can feel like worse than -40. Your charge drops like a stone in those situation, when you're out of that temperature ban. Not my words, this is from my friend who don't just own a plug in hybrid (which every weekend he has to find a free charging plug in the city to top up), but also a Li-ion battery engineer.

So yeah, you're right, a plug in electric car is a real car, if you're rich enough to at least finance it, rich enough to own a house to put in the wall charger, working in a good comfy job that has the luxury to consider green technology and weather that is basically never cold. i.e. Silicon Valley.

Some of us have friends that are 200km or 500km away. Last thing I'd want to do is to push a couple tons of metal and batteries out of the way on a highway.

Battery-electric is not practical for long-haul trucking, ships (which contribute a huge amount of pollution attributable to transportation), and heavy equipment. Hydrogen is a versatile, completely clean fuel, and it can be produced and stored in a distributed system without regional transmission monopolies.

Garages have a big problem: "Hydrogen collects under roofs and overhangs, where it forms an explosion hazard; any building that contains a potential source of hydrogen should have good ventilation, strong ignition suppression systems for all electric devices, and preferably be designed to have a roof that can be safely blown away from the rest of the structure in an explosion." (Wikipedia)

Hydrogen storage tanks tend to leak slowly. The molecules are so small that they diffuse through solid metal.

This is likely an absolutely stupid idea, but in a structure where ventilation isn't an option, what would be the impact of having a "pilot light" in areas where hydrogen accumulates? Essentially burn it off before it accumulates to the point of presenting a significant hazard.

Additionally, (perhaps primarily) if the molecules seep through a sealed tank, wouldn't they escape an overhang/roof with far more ease?

They tend to be pressurized in a storage tank, which will increase the leakage rate.

If the pilot light fails for long time and then is fixed, boom.

And if not boom, you're burned alive by an invisible flame.

> Hydrogen storage tanks tend to leak slowly.

This used to be a problem in the past, but from what I understand it's currently a solved problem. See e.g. https://www.google.com.ar/patents/US6787007

BMW's been developing hydrogen-powered cars for over a decade. One of their advantages is that the same engine could use either gasoline or hydrogen making it a much more practical car for a world in which there is not yet the same distribution infrastructure for hydrogen as there is for gasoline. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to get as much press as EVs which have both serious operational drawbacks (short range, long charging periods, etc.) and manufacturing costs (lithium batteries, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_Hydrogen_7

The energy efficiency is much worse for Hydrogen.

PS: It's actually significantly more efficient to burn crude oil and charge high mileage electric cars from that than instead of refining oil and then using an IC engine.

> PS: It's actually significantly more efficient to burn crude oil and charge high mileage electric cars from that than instead of refining oil and then using an IC engine.

That might be, yet burning crude oil produces a horrible amount of nasty stuff - sulphurous molecules turning into acid rain, radioactive trace elements concentrating in the exhaust...

Hydrogen cars are probably a dead end. Not enough benefit for the infrastructure costs required. I think the future options will be EV and synthetic gas. As batteries improve further, EV will have a lot of advantages. But it will only be available for those who have personal garages. For everyone else, it makes more sense to create gasoline instead of building an entirely new hydrogen infrastructure. There is already technology in early stages that can create gas from just electricity, water, and CO2 from the air. It seems refining that technology is a much better idea than trying to use hydrogen.

Wait - gas as in gasoline or some other gas (LPG?)

Gasoline - Audi is working on the technology http://www.audiusa.com/newsroom/news/press-releases/2015/05/...

The first version requires biomass, which means it has all the disadvantages of current biofuels. But their next goal is to remove that requirement. If they succeed, then they will have a process that only needs power, water, and CO2.

It's early stage technology and investment is probably very small right now. Why wouldn't it be when oil is so cheap. But someday the oil fields will start running dry and peak oil will truly come. When oil hits $200, $300 per barrel, the demand for this kind of technology will be immense. EV sales will increase dramatically, but many will be unable to use EV due to lack of personal garages (even Supercharger times are not enough if thats the only way to charge. And only Tesla has access to that, what about Leaf, Bolt, etc?).

A brand new hydrogen infrastructure doesn't seem to fit anywhere in the future. It's too expensive and the benefits are marginal compared to gas (a lot of legacy infrastructure) or EV (an entirely new paradigm using existing electric infrastructure).

Disagree entirely. Despite the fact that batteries are getting worlds better there are big wins for the environment when we eventually implement a hydrogen infrastructure. Batteries are an evolutionary win while hydrogen will be a revolutionary win.

You may also be interested in solar methane reforming and the like (at 70%+ efficiency from solar in to chemical energy out):

http://www.pnnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=981

http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/01/f19/fcto_webinars...

That's nice, but is there any real advantage to hydrogen over batteries, or have batteries at this stage left hydrogen in the dust?

Cost? Weight? Overall efficiency? No numbers are given for any of these, but they've all traditional weakpoints of hydrogen.

Hydrogen also requires a lot of fancy infrastructure, whereas batteries can be charged (slowly) practically anywhere.

One advantage is that you could refill your tank in a long road trip, hypothetically, if you found a hydrogen filling station, faster than you could recharge your electric car. But that's a rare use case.

Anything I'm missing? Or is hydrogen just a zombie technology?

You are correct. Hydrogen is dead technology for mobility.

It's even more dead because electric vehicles have a huge lead at this point. Tesla has released several working vehicles that are plenty capable enough for most people and has its network of superchargers in place. Other companies have already started developing competing options.

At this point, battery capacity will keep going up, price will keep going down and electric infrastructure will keep improving. I don't see hydrogen vehicles standing much of a chance now, in a few years even less so.

It is very hard for hydrogen to overcome it's 25% grid to motor efficiency [1]. It means that it will always be significantly more expensive per kWh delivered to a motor. However, the market may value quick refueling very highly.

[1] http://iqsoft.co.in/images/The%2021st%20Century%20Electric%2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Efficiency_of_leadin...

"According to the U.S. Department of Energy, fuel cells are generally between 40–60% energy efficient."

I feel like I'm reading a beauty contest gossip :) . Strong opinions, weak arguments...

> fuel cells are generally between 40–60% energy efficient

Which is reduced to 25% grid-to-motor efficiency when electrolysis and compression (required for practical energy densities) are taken into account. As illustrated in the linked graphic.

Electrolysis is assumed since other methods (e.g., methane reformation) generally generate greenhouse gases, but there has been some work on algae bioreactors [1] that might become economically interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_hydrogen_production...

I am surprised that it hasn't been mentioned yet: Elon Musk, who has some experience in this field and we can also assume has done the math, says that hydrogen cars are a dead end

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/02/12/3621136/tesla-el...

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/elon-musk-hydrogen/

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

Does Honda think otherwise, and if so, why?

In all fairness, Elon Musk makes electric cars - and, batteries - so he has every incentive to exaggerate how bad of a bet fuel cells are ;)

I know very little about this debate and what little I know makes me side with the electric car crowd. But Elon Musk has a hell of a horse in this race and thus his statements should never be taken as unbiased.

> Elon Musk has a hell of a horse in this race

Tesla is a recent entrant, so actually it may have been the other way around: Musk looked at all the horses, and worked out that there was a potential winner before even deciding to enter the race.

Compare with Honda, who have been making Internal combustion engines since the 1940s. If anyone has a pre-existing horse in the race, they do.

I wonder why they're using hydrogen instead of ammonia, which is like hydrogen except better in every way? Ammonia has hydrogen's good properties: not a greenhouse gas and doesn't produce greenhouse gases, doesn't cause smog, numerous production methods including electrolysis, easily transported in liquid form, can be used in fuel cells or in ICEs. However it doesn't embrittle, in liquid form it's actually denser in hydrogen atoms than liquid hydrogen is, and due to its agricultural applications there is already an established distribution infrastructure (in the Midwest, at least).

So, for cars this looks like a dead technology because batteries are probably going to win. What about airplanes? They won't be battery powered anytime soon?

I cannot navigate this page. 4 adsense ads at the top. scrolling broken, and a photo of the car in the middle.

I wonder how forbes test their stuff.

> I wonder how forbes test their stuff.

Probably, like any techie with a bit of knowledge, using adblockers...

Best case Fool Cell technology will be as good as battery technology is today.

"Extremely silly" according to Musk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo

I could imagine that a source of hydrogen could be medical institutions - after all, a hospital consumes large amounts of pure oxygen, and electrolysis provides lots of it.

Japan has been quietly developing Stan Meyer technology. Once they release it the only competition will be permanent batteries.

This is the real future for EVs. Quick refueling means you can actually take a proper road trip (at least when fuel stations are built), and it may actually be practical for a country like Canada (big, sparsely populated). Also it needs less batteries, which is likely to reduce its ecological footprint.

I thought the issue with H was transportation: a critical hurdle for new fuel technology adoption is safety (as seen in Tesla's quick and overprotective addition of an armored underbody on the Model S when a few stray stories of crashes caught flames in the press). Tankers of H hurdling down our freeways?

I feel like range anxiety on full-on EV's will dissipate in the next few years as we get to 300+ miles on a charge. After that, what's the downside?

> I feel like range anxiety on full-on EV's will dissipate in the next few years as we get to 300+ miles on a charge. After that, what's the downside?

For users? Nothing. For centralized energy providers? They're about to lose out in a huge way.

> Tankers of H hurdling down our freeways?

Perhaps self-driving and hydrogen cars are co-dependent technologies.

The dream expressed in the article would be to have high-pressure electrolysis to produce hydrogen on-site.

I won't disagree if you think that 300+ miles/charge will come first.

Electrolysis is a fairly inefficient way to produce hydrogen. If you've got enough energy to do electrolysis, then you've got enough energy to run a motor. The only technical reason you'd want to use hydrogen is that you can do combustion and long-term fuel storage. It would be valuable if you were using something like sunlight to produce hydrogen, since sunlight can't really run a car.

There's no reason you can't take a "proper road trip" with a Model S these days. Stopping for a break every ~3-4 hours isn't a huge issue and 120kw charging goes surprisingly quick.

Heck, when I was at a supercharger yesterday I barely had time to grab coffee before I had the 40% charge I needed to make the end of my trip.

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