What 2020 Would Look Like If Automakers Had Seriously Invested in Hydrogen | Hacker News Reader

What 2020 Would Look Like If Automakers Had Seriously Invested in Hydrogen

jalopnik.com

11 pointsaSplash0fDerp16 comments

Hydrogen is a junk technology. What is the easiest place to get hydrogen? Petrol and other hydrocarbons. Extracting it from water would take more energy than using existing fossil fuel. The tech was expensive, would probably stay expensive, and was pretty bad environmentally. Hydrogen is also really difficult to transport in the amounts needed to fuel fleets of cars. It died because it sucked.

Electric is simpler and less risky.

For automakers, the worst problem of electric vehicles is that maintainance/service is easy and they make more money servicing vehicles that from selling... but it can be fixed: 1- renting batteries (and still charging annual service fee). 2- renting whole cars by the minute using a mobile app.

The problem with Hydrogen is that's still an _explosion_ motor with a different fuel, and you have to develop a new kind of motor for it plus a way to store and consume the hydrogen cells safely.

Fuel cell

Most of the work done during servicing of modern cars is simply inspecting and testing mechanical parts for damage. EVs still have mechanical parts (brakes, suspension and drive train) that can wear out and fail. EVs still have brake fluid, coolant and oil which needs to be checked and replaced, but not as often.

If anything, I see it will be more profitable for automakers as they will continue to charge the same service prices as they do now for less and simpler work. Plus they can make up new maintenance like Toyota have done with their 'hybrid battery health check', which is a paid optional extra, but extends the battery warranty for one year.

Yep. Many people know that Hydrogen and Hindenburg start with the same letter.

There are no hydrogen wells. So you'd have to use a lot of energy to make hydrogen fuel in the needed quantities. And then (because it's such a light gas) highly-pressurized containers (collision-survivable) are needed.

Instead, use that energy more directly.

Question - what about using solar panels to fund the energy? i.e. a large solar farm

You sound like you work for the oil companies.

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Would you mind reading them and sticking to the rules when posting here?

That would include not posting personal attacks, not insinuating shillage, and not creating accounts for every few comments you post.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hydrogen is more than an automotive fuel source and can be used to supplement renewables with powering homes, generators/batteries and much more.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-fuel-basics

DIY hydrogen farming is also an interesting prospect for harvesting excess renewable production.

Hopefully we'll see more breakthroughs with technology to make it worthwhile.

Hydrogen is very inefficient compared to using electricity (more) directly via a battery. The fueling is relatively fast, in rare locales where the stations are available, but then fueling speed for electric vehicles is not an issue if it can be done at home and at fast chargers, which are highly available in many states of the US and a rapidly growing number of countries.

Yep,and as an engineer that's hard to imagine people that don't think of the efficiency as a primary feature.

Efficiency misses the point, it's convenience: a 3 minute fill-up instead of a 60m fill-up.

Convenience is being able to use a ubiquitous existing fuel distribution infrastructure, rather than traveling to one of a tiny number of stations. If your response is “well, that won’t matter once hydrogen fueling stations become common”, then you’ve identified the problem.

Since you mention a different point, let’s look at that.

When you charge at home filling up takes 6 seconds: 3 to plug in, and 3 to disconnect. Sure in between these two 3-second periods you have dinner and sleep, but you were going to do that anyway. It’s not taking any extra time. This is the normal case for most owners day to day.

Putting your priority of convenience first, I would take 6 seconds versus 3 minutes any day. So electric beats hydrogen by a factor of 30 on the metric you regard as more important.

But fast chargers aren't particularly fast. If I'm going on a road trip aiming for 800-1000 miles in a day (we do that 1-2x/year visiting family), we'd have to recharge 2-4 times (depending on availability of chargers). Waiting 30min-1hr is a pain, especially when it's more than once per day. We also need to plan our stops based on availability of chargers instead of stopping when we feel like we need a rest.

Electric is fantastic for around town driving, but it just seems so inconvenient for distance travel.

My personal experience has been much more positive than what you describe, but ok.

Hydrogen embrittlement and permeability - nuff said.

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