It's well worth watching Doug Demuro's review of both the BMW i3 and the Tesla model 3. It will give you a quick understanding of why BMW is behind the 8 ball right now with regard to EVs.
The videos are a great and fun overview of all the little details that you might not know unless you're an owner, but it serves better as an addon to a more thorough review elsewhere of the actual driving technology and experience. SavageGeese, Remove Before Race, Carfection are good channels to follow.
It's more to say he doesn't spend a month living with a car so it's usually surface level details like a weird UI rather than explaining how the transmission affects the fuel and comfort in daily commutes.
I would be more interested in Randy Pobst's opinion on handling and performance, but Doug is certainly equal to any other bog-standard auto journalist.
However, his opinion is usually based on a few days of driving and using the car, and does not reflect how ownership of the car will actually pan out. He attempts to take this into account with his "daily doug score". But by no means is this entirely accurate, and is more so a reasonable estimate based on the manufacturers history, that model, and consumer reviews.
I generally take his analyses as "This is what I thought after driving the car for a few days" and is based on his opinion, his preferences, and his thoughts. I would take his opinion into account for a rental car, but not so much when it comes to owning a car for its lifetime.
He generally owns luxury cars or sports cars that are out of reach for most people, and I'm sure he has spent a lot of money on them (although it may be worth it if they appreciate in value). He has a different need in cars than I, and probably than most people.
If they could make the economics of scale happen, they would rather prefer something like lohc as energy carrier.
http://www.framatome.com/customer/liblocal/docs/KUNDENPORTAL...
Its storageable hydrogen, so its the natural product of decentralized renewable energy production. It has not recharge time, no battery decay. Only problem is- there is nothing but the car-industry who wants this.
Tesla revealed they currently recycle the packs.
Use packs can be repurposed as house batteries for grid stability.
The data shows the battery lifespan far exceeds initial forecasted length.
1 litre of LOHC => 2 kWh
Cool? Except:
1 litre of Petrol => 9.7 kWh
(according to this: https://greennav.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/how-much-energy-in...)
I don't know about the accuracy of it, but I found this:
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/fuel_comparison_chart.pdf
...and it says that 33.70 kWh of electricity is the equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline; since 1 litre is about 0.26 gallons - that's close to the other number (off somewhat though; 8.76 kWh instead of 9.7 kWh).
Regardless - it all seems to point to that either the tanks in a car would need to be 4-6 times larger - or the engines have to change in some manner to deliver the same level of performance with less energy - or something like that. Probably a combination of both.
I'm making the assumption that the LOHC would be carried on-board the vehicle, as that seems (?) like it would be safer and easier than carrying around compressed hydrogen (embrittlement issues, migration issues, consumer aversion perhaps). I don't know, though, if LOHC is more or less dangerous for consumers to handle like gasoline, or if the dehydrogenation process can be done on-board a vehicle; the paper doesn't go into such detail. It does safe it is safe to store and transport via normal methods, so it sounds like it might be ok in that regard for consumers.
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19496773.pdf
Well according to this paper lohc still has a better energy density then batterys and we would loose the recharge waits. Also existing infrastructure could be reused and it allows the indefinite storage and transport of renewables, if created at source with no additinal conversion loss.
As far as i know there are several varieties in research - with one condensend form (which isnt liquid- sorry im not really a expert on this) - beeing a factor 10 energy denser.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09268...
I think this one is the paper.. I can not say how serious these technologies are driven. The trad car companies have a lot to loose when the car is reduced to 4 engines and a steering wheel.
I still think lithium ion batterys have some use- as birthing help to alternatives, who would otherwise be stuck in development hell.
Batteries currently have better effective energy density than hydrogen ironically given how heavy the tanks need to be to contain the metal embrittling escape artist that is hydrogen. Yet the traditional auto manufacturers bizzarely seem to have decided to make hydrogen their hill to die on.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Markus_Reuss/publicatio...
Not enough room? You can build a floating solar panel, that just ships over the ocean, generating charged LOHC which then is collected by a automated ship.
PS: If you look at the references of this paper you can see the BMW research that is referenced.