Batteries are neat, but I'm not sure they scale.
Also much of the weight is carbon and oxygen. LiFePO4 also (obviously) is substantially iron and phosphorous.
Li-Ion battery production had been growing at double-digit percentage for decades. I think they've proven you wrong many times over.
Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%. I, for one, am not interested in paying 3x per mile.
The Tesla Model S weights about 2100kg.
The Tesla Model S battery weights about 540kg.
This means that a 1500kg car is forced to pack an additional 540kg to be able to store energy. That's an additional 30% of the mass that you need to accelerate and brake.
People do care about that. In the very least, the battery mass is responsible for an effective drop in energy efficiency of around 30% just to cart someone around.
> Finally, electric cars charge at ~96% efficiency, while hydrogen is something like 40%. I, for one, am not interested in paying 3x per mile.
This claim has little substance and credibility. For starters, if you factor in how much additional energy you need to waste just to pack along a massive half ton battery, you'll eventually realize that the effective energy waste of a EV is not much different than the hydrogen one.
I mean, the point of a EV is not to have it parked on the driveway, charge a battery, and proceed to boast about how that was very efficient. Your goal is to move around, and moving that massive half ton beast of a battery along with you wastes a lot of energy too.
Also, battery efficiency is around 80%, which naively sounds a far improvement over fuel cell's lauded 40% efficiency. However, a Li-Ion battery weights half a ton and represents around 1/3 of a EV's mass, which also requires energy to be moved around. For reference the fuel cell of a Toyota Mirai is only 40kg, less than the weight of an adult passenger. Once you do your math you'll quickly notice the effective energy use is not that different.
And then there's the cost argument. The typical back-of-the-napkin figure for how much EVs cost to run is around 500€/year. Even if you bump that up to twice the cost, that price is eclipsed by the huge markup that you're already paying for an EV. I mean, a Tesla Model S costs about a century worth of energy bills before it even gets it's tires dirty.
Playing the frugality card with the current batch of EVs lacks any credibility and is, at best, being penny wise and pound foolish.
I think this is the wrong angle to look at the issue.
A 2100kg EV requires 25% of its total mass to support the energy storage, generation and transfer in order to provide a range and performance profile people are generally happy with.
What is the fraction for a new ICE vehicle with similar profile? The combustion engine weighs... how much? Then add the weight of a 60% full fuel tank to allow for roughly the average deadweight haul between refills. Then include the weight of the exhaust system.
And finally, we have to include the weight of the drivetrain. How much of the total weight in an ICE is dedicated to power transfer from engine to wheels? How much in a modern EV?
Energy storage and generation is only a part of the picture, getting it to the wheels is what makes a car actually perform its function. We should include these numbers to get a meaningful comparison.
It's not nearly as simple as that because electric cars have regenerative braking, and because the energy doesn't all go into acceleration. A lot (probably most, depending on how you drive) goes into wind/rolling resistance at a constant speed and that doesn't depend much on mass.
I'm still convinced hydrogen is scam greenwashing natural gas, though.
>> This claim has little substance and credibility.
The efficiency of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles versus battery vehicles is considered in some detail in this video [1]. The conclusion [2] is that, in the best case, the energy efficiency from power generation to road for existing or near future hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is about 25%, compared to about 65% for typical existing battery vehicles.
Mold in a petri dish grows at an accelerating rate, until it doesn’t
My conjecture is that there’s not enough lithium/etc in the world to store the energy the transportation sector requires
small cars, passenger trains, sure. but freight is a different animal. we’ll see.
Whether it seems crazy is evidence of unfamiliarity, not whether it is actually crazy. Is it really any crazier that continually pumping every car with juice made from literal fossils?
At least the battery is continually reusable — and at the end of its useful life, over 90% recyclable.
I have no idea what the CO2 impact would be and don't really care that much ("cutting CO2 will reset the climate to some state we like" sounds like wishful thinking and most of the talk in this space is ideologically coloured I don't even want to pay attention) but the improvement in urban living is going to be undeniable.
Don’t get me wrong, electric is much better, i’m only nitpicking since you said “eliminating”
There's also the idle engine rumbling noise while waiting at stoplights, which does not exist on electric cars.
When the pandemic arrived here back in March 2020, and nearly everyone suddenly stopped leaving their home, it was eerie: the air where I live (in the middle of a major urban area) suddenly smelled as if I was in a rural area. It was something I wasn't expecting to see so soon; I have for a long time been rooting for EVs to arrive and make the air quality better, but unfortunately EVs are simply way too expensive yet (so far, I only have seen an EV once, and it was an i3 with a range extender; and I do live in a major metropolitan area).