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Comment by yessql | Hacker News Reader

It's the batteries. Tesla has a big lead over other OEMs in battery cost. This is obvious in the energy storage space.

Also, if some new battery tech comes out, then Tesla will get their hands on it, being half the world's battery supply.

Plus alternates. Toyota is pushing strongly for Hydrogen. And if petrol station chains are forward thinking they will encourage this too. Electric is too easy to make the petrol station redundant.

If I was Caltex/Shell/BP/Exxon etc I would be forming a group to drive support to hydrogen, both via govt and manufacturers. Should consumers largely go electric not many people will turn up to their shops any more.

It is going to be difficult to make money with hydrogen filling stations; both liquid and compressed hydrogen come with huge challenges in terms of transportation and storage.

Petrol stations will not make much money on electricity if they install chargers, but they will sell a lot of food to customers waiting to charge, even "supercharging" is quite slow..

Food/waiting thing is a good point but I imagine the bulk of people, if electric, will charge overnight and rarely need out-of-home power.

According to wiki the cost to put in Hydrogen fueling infrastructure would be about 20% of electric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_station

That sounds like one of those "alternative facts". After following the cite trail from Wikipedia, it was apparently something someone from the hydrogen car industry said at a conference. No further cite or info on what exactly they are counting in that figure.

This cannot be true, unless there is a new way to store hydrogen which is completely revolutionary.

Cost difference does seem counter-intuitive but not an expert. I also wonder if rather than transporting hydrogen around they could make it on site from piped water. Not sure if electrolysis of water has scale benefitsm of mass producing hydrogen then trucking around. That could reduce cost of transport... but then that would be much the same as electric anyway with the inevitable energy loss on conversion...

EV chargers are much cheaper to operate/install than gas pumps; and gas pumps should be less expensive than hydrogen filling stations, i.e. something does not add up here.

It's very expensive to keep hydrogen cool enough to stay liquid, but it's not exactly cheap to keep hydrogen compressed in massive tanks that always leak either. Moving it around is another problem, I find it extremely unlikely that this costs less to operate than electric infrastructure, which is static.

Hydrogen doesn't really make much sense to me. It's hard to work with so if you've got a bunch of it laying around why not combine it with some CO2 frozen out of the air to form methane, something you can pack much more densely in tanks and which won't tend to leak through so many things? You'll produce CO2 when you burn it but no more than what went in to creating it in the first place. Some back of the envelope math says you're losing about 25% of the energy in the Sabatier process to do that but it makes all the transportation and storage of the fuel so much simpler.

Because it isnt about the science. In most jurisdictions if co2 comes out the tailpipe it isnt "zero emmissions" regardless of the overall numbers. There are also other non-carbon forms of pollution that any ic engine must address (no2 etc).

> Tesla has a big lead over other OEMs in battery cost.

Do they though? How come GM was able to shop a reasonably priced Chevy Bolt as a competitor to Model 3?

I realize that in car manufacturing GM is a leading brand with economies of scale working for it, but in electric battery world they're a nobody, so I'd expect them to pay close to market price, no Gigafactories and all?

Do they lose money on Bolts?

Yes, they lose money on bolts or at least break even. I'm trying to find the source on it but from what I read the reason they are making the bolts is to get ZEV credits that'll offset their larger & more profitable trucks and gain experience in building electric cars so if (when?) they have to compete head to head with Tesla on a larger scale that they'll have the knowledge to do so.

I don't know if it's all about ZEV credits, those have dropped to "pennies on the dollar" nowadays, so would be more efficient just to buy them on the open market (which GM still does) http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-trump-decision-on-e...

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