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Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

> "one hydrogen cartridge is assumed to generate enough electricity to operate a typical household microwave for approximately 3-4 hours."

So, let's oversimplify and say that a typical household microwave consumes 1200W continuously. That's about 4.8kWh over 4 hours.

Given current Lithium battery energy densities (18650: 200Wh/kg) then you'd need 24kg of lithium batteries to supply the same amount of energy.

The cartridge Toyota has developed manages to do this for 5.5kg. Not bad, but not a paradigm shift, considering you have to build a logistics network to refill the cartridges.

> In its press release, Toyota acknowledges that most hydrogen is made from fossil fuels and so not exactly green. But it thinks that it'll be generated with low carbon emissions in the future, and that the cartridges could help with some of the infrastructure issues.

If we could all stop shilling for "Green Hydrogen" that would be great. Batteries can be charged today from low-carbon sources, and the electric grid is already present in most places you'd drive an EV, and certainly more places than have a preexisting hydrogen cartridge distribution network.

> However, Toyota seems to be pitching the cartridges for personal and home use, but it's not yet clear what you'd use them for.

In a world where Lithium batteries exist and the technology has far more R&D investment, what would you use these for? Why is Toyota still throwing cash into the hydrogen money pit?

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This seems to be an effective distribution model for propane, and it would be a lot easier to make Hydrogen accessible by this model than building out a dedicated gas-station like network.

It's also good to diversify the alternatives to fossil fuels. It's not clear that there are sufficient accessible deposits of lithium and other raw materials to meet the demands of electrification of everything via lithium batteries, and the vast majority of current lithium supply is controlled by Chinese businesses. So it's prudent for a company the size of Toyota to be investing in this, even if the technology is not currently competitive with batteries for automobiles.

One area where I could see this being useful is in construction. Being able to swap out a fuel tank and just keep working seems would be a huge benefit over having to let heavy equipment sit idle for hours to charge, and that's assuming there's access to the electric grid onsite.

> It's not clear that there are sufficient accessible deposits of lithium and other raw materials to meet the demands of electrification of everything via lithium batteries

Yes, it is clear. It’s one of the most abundant elements in the earth’s crust and is common in brines. Can also be extracted from seawater for less than current market spot prices.

Oh please, lithium "mining" might sound great, but there's a lot more to car batteries than lithium. Cobalt, which is essential for the longevity of a battery, is mostly mined by "artisinal miners" (2/3 of world's production). You know, poor people handling toxic substances to separate ores, and probably being paid less than this post cost to make. Not only that, most deposits are in geopolitically unstable regions / being explored by authoritarian regimes.

deposits in the earth != production capacity

if the increase in demand outpaces the increase in supply, you'll see a price squeeze, regardless of how much salt remains in the oceans

if someone goes and outlaws internal combustion engines, for instance, you may see demand increase quicker than supply can catch up

Clearly, but that’s a short term constraint, not a medium to long term constraint. The short term constraints on hydrogen are way worse, and hydrogen already has massive industrial demand that is being met virtually entirely by fossil hydrogen. If green hydrogen production was a slam dunk and we just needed storage, etc, then we’d already been using massive amounts of green hydrogen industrially instead of, like, 1%. (Note that in the US, 41% of electricity is clean.)

Construction is one space.

Another would be extreme cold environments. Most lithium battery packs I'm aware of in cars can be permanently damaged if they get too cold internally. In many cases there is a special heating element to prevent this by drawing just enough power to keep the battery in a safe temperature range. But I'm certain there are still edge cases.

The case everyone seems to ignore however; 'Developed' countries are just barely getting their act together with public charging infrastructure on the whole. Barely. What about all of the still Developing countries?

My stab-in-the-dark guess is that Toyota and Honda hope that at scale, Fuel cells will not be much more expensive than ICE vehicles. i.e. a Mirai and Camry if made in same numbers, would maybe be 1-2k away from each other in price. In that scenario, Hydrogen makes sense in a lot more places, even if it is not an ideal solution.

Hydrogen and BEV charging can easily go hand in hand, too, as hydrogen charging station is most profitable with on-site electrolyzers (which nicely bypass huge chunk of transport problems).

And while this cartridge is not super useful for cars (my understanding is that hydrogen charging been already done to high usability level) it does increase options for disconnected operations that presently have to use fossil fuels.

> The cartridge Toyota has developed manages to do this for 5.5kg. Not bad, but not a paradigm shift, considering you have to build a logistics network to refill the cartridges.

It may not a paradigm shift for cars but definitely a game-changer for aviation. Right now, there are a few experimental light aircraft powered by batteries can manage 20-30 minutes in the air. Quadruple that and you have something that's actually practical transportation.

AirBus has already indicated that hydrogen is their future for sustainability. At least one startup has a plan to have off-site (somewhere other than the airport) filled containers that are plugged into the aircraft instead of a normal refueling.

Electric aircraft have demonstrated flying for over an hour, and several hours is feasible.

No point in these compressed hydrogen things for airplanes. The weight is just too high. Hydrogen aviation only makes sense with cryogenic hydrogen storage IMHo, and only for very long duration

> Electric aircraft have demonstrated flying for over an hour, and several hours is feasible.

With massive downsides. Sure, liquid hydrogen probably makes a lot more sense for a plane than these things. But I don't think "only for very long duration" is true at all.

> The weight is just too high.

did OP not just point to a 4x increase in energy density?

This is not a 4x increase in energy density. It’s functionally the same as high end lithium ion.

And yet aviation technology professionals who presumably know more than either of us have decided that hydrogen is the future for general commercial aviation, not electric craft.

I am an aviation technology professional.

Clearly not, if you believe that lithium-based batteries have anywhere near the energy capacity for large aircraft.

The 5kg is for a target prototype. They haven’t achieved that, and it doesn’t include the protector or valve. 5kg for 3.3kWh (they claim 3.3kWh per unit, not 4.8kWh)

Meanwhile, the best prototype lithium ion cells are in the 400-650Wh/kg range, in other words identical on the high end.

What’s the point of hydrogen again?

Hydrogen alone clearly has more energy density than batteries. The question is how much hydrogen containers would reduce that advantage. So far hydrogen at least has the benefit of speed of refilling. In some applications, like aviation, hydrogen could bring benefit of reducing mass with spent fuel, something which batteries don't do.

I think 5kg containers for 3.3kWh is a good number, especially comparing with batteries, which had recent decades of targeted development. At least the technology is nowhere near of clearly losing to alternatives. "Green hydrogen" can definitely be obtained without generating CO2, the questions are elsewhere.

Hydrogen fuel cells were developed in the 1830s (concept developed in 1801), commercialized in the 1930s, and the first hydrogen fuel cell vehicles were developed in the 1950s. Was used in NASA’s Gemini program. Rechargeable Lithium ion is relatively new, having started development only in the 1960s and in modern form not until the 1980s, being used for practical applications only starting in the 1990s.

I know all of that and still would consider efforts which went into recent batteries technologies as more targeted and supported by industry, than similar for hydrogen-based power transformations.

1200W are the highest power ones. I'm gonna guess that when they say "common microwave", they mean 800-1000W, which is what food packaging uses (and what people actually have), so that cartridge is likely 3kWh. It doesn't include a fuel cell, so you can't just plug it in like a battery.

So it's 5.5kg, plus a fuel cell vs 15kg for a battery that doesn't need extra parts to produce electricity. Also, can't recharge on common infrastructure, cost is not mentioned, etc. Overall a slight improvement that's practically useless. That's hydrogen in a nutshell for you.

The average household uses 893 kWh per month. At your 4.8kWh per canister, that is 186 canisters per month, or six canisters per day. This is useless for typical home usage.

I don't think anybody is arguing that homes should run off hydrogen canisters that are clearly intended for use cases like light vehicles or perhaps a small generator, or that homes should run off hydrogen in general (though this could be useful in off-grid contexts with large supply tanks similar to the propane tanks used to supply heating and cooking gas in many rural American homes).

What do you envision they meant by "household applications" then? Every large appliance in your house has its own hydrogen fuel cell and takes these cartridges to run for a few hours, then you drive to the hydrogen store in your ultralight car that goes a couple dozen miles on a cylinder?

In my home in the southern US, I'd need ~13 canisters per day due to cooling needs at my current consumption. I could probably ration them and use ~5 per day in case a hurricane hits, and then I'd have about 2ish days of emergency power, but who wants to store explosive gas in their home? I've bought propane cylinders at the store and gotten leaky ones. At least propane doesn't combust unless it hits an ignition source.

Please don't say you wear long sleeves in an air-conditioned room.

Ha no, at the office building yes, but we keep our A/C around 75F during the day. I'd go warmer but the interior humidity gets really bad if I let it go too high.

If we could all stop shilling for "Green Hydrogen" that would be great.

No, we cannot and should not, because that is part of a healthy discussion.

Yes, in a neutral environment everything can be discussed and its a "healthy". The problem is that hydrogen was used as a discussion poison. It uses up air and blocks talking about the important stuff. You cannot discuss every crackpot idea for everything always.

I am tried of it. It only got traction in the first place because it was something that seemed to work "like people are used to" ie. tanking fuel at a fuel station and at the same time needed "development". This made it a nice way to show your car company was hip and with the times and at the same time didn't mean you actually had to build the things since more development was always needed. Battery powered cars were always too easy to create into whatever disapointing lackluster form they had at that time in history.

For me unless you preface that you have an interesting use case for hydrogen or solved one of the fundamental inefficiencies in getting hydrogen and using it then I am not interested in hearing about it. Especially in combination with personal transportation.

Oh and Green Hydrogen functionally does not exist. Ditto Blue Hydrogen (as in that CO2 sequestering probably doesn't work). That leaves grey Hydrogen from steam reforming and that how hydrogen is made from natural gas creating a lot of CO2. Shilling for Green Hydrogen basically means Shilling for grey hydrogen and that is the worst.

I have some hope that pyrolyse will be used in the future instead of steam reforming because it seems you actually can sequester that carbon it creates but its less efficient by a lot vs steam reformation and emitting CO2.

...every crackpot idea for everything---

Uh, yeah, ahm, I'm gonna go ahead and sort of disagree with you there.

Yeah, it's crackpot at this point. Hydrogen is a dead end. Accept that and embrace the future that's already here: electric

"Crackpot" is a huge exaggeration for "costs more than non-green, so nobody wants to invest".

Especially when those costs could be hugely shifted with a single tax on emissions.

> Why is Toyota still throwing cash into the hydrogen money pit?

The cynic in me believes there are incentives for automakers not completely and immediately abandoning fossil fuels, but instead enabling a slow transition. Hydrogen allows for this while batteries do not. I'm not sure what these incentives might be, but a gradual transition off of fossil fuels always seems to come through in Toyota's marketing materials for hydrogen.

As I understand it, it's geopoloticial. Japan, the country, is making a big bet on hydrogen. I may be getting the details wrong - but Japan is less independent under an EV transition; it makes them more dependent on foreign metals in order to produce cars; and they would be forced to compete with china (and likely lose) on those metals. Hydrogen doesn't have the same problem.

I think this is the case for both Japan, and the western world in general. Like OP has stated, in one of the replies below, Toyota isn't new to electric cars and they aren't stupid.

If current events are anything to go by, we shouldn't bet on energy resources of others. If we truly want a greener future, and the world itself to be in a better place, why should we make the same mistakes again?

I understand how common a "battery" is nowadays, and how great of a solution they might seem. After all, they are readily available.

But we shouldn't kid ourselves. Where do these materials come from? What conditions are those miners subject to? Is it really wise, to add that much weight to a body in motion, both in terms of safety, and energy efficiency? Wouldn't we enable authoritarian countries to strangle others again, by further rewarding favorable geographical locations? Or, further reward colonial powers, that have taken over Africa, again? I mean, Congo has 80% of cobalt resources (needed in high density batteries, LFH cobalt-free batteries have about 50% of the energy density found on their cobalt based counterparts, which means a low 0.16kWh/kg density) and China owns the majority of the mines there. Look up the Sicomines deal.

I know this post might sound cynical, and perverse. But really, I don't really think this is the way forward.

Toyota and Honda are big into hydrogen. I get the feeling that both have some reservations about lithium batteries. Given the diverse power programs of both companies, it might just be hedging their bets.

It always puzzled me that Toyota was one of the pioneers in Hybrid engines, but were very hesitant to offer full electric cars. They are very good at making money (yearly net income of 20-25 bln US§), so I would really be interested on what calculations they made their decision.

I'm in the same boat. I think they have made a very deliberate calculation and are one of the companies that has the data to make said calculation. I assume they aren't whimsical or stupid, so I would really like to know what Toyota is thinking.

Honda is a bit more understandable since airplanes look to be going to hydrogen and they make airplanes too, but not that much more really. I assume they have some very good reasons.

It's more likely to come through government somehow. I recall reading something weird about Japan telling auto makers which tech to explore, but I forget where.

Actually the opposite; Keidanren is a group of companies that lobbies heavily.

Batteries are anything but "green". The environment costs of extracting and recycling lithium would be astronomical if we ever get to the point where batteries are our primary energy source instead of oil.

It is a mystery.

Theories: - Their engineers didn't think batteries were practical back in 1992 (reasonable). But by the early 2000s, batteries started to prove themselves, and fuel cells continued to struggle. But now those engineers from 1992 are in charge, and refuse to admit they've spent their career traveling a dead-end road. - They have some deep insight into other uses (trains, forklifts, jet-skis?) and need to build out the tech, and cars are their home. Germany is similarly stubborn about hydrogen trains too.

My money is on face. Toyota has spent too much money, and can't change until some senior people retire.

>24kg of lithium batteries to supply the same amount of energy. [..] The cartridge Toyota has developed manages to do this for 5.5kg

You'd also need to add the weight of the element that converts the hydrogen into electricity no?

The problem with batteries is charging time. My sedan goes roughly 400 miles on a tank of gas, and filling up to go further takes in the region of 5 minutes. With an electric car, you're looking at maybe an hour to fill it up to that range, even with a supercharger. (Note that electric cars don't even go 400 miles on a full charge, so this will take multiple charges to do.)

If you need to go further than a single charge, well, hydrogen may provide faster charging times than electric will.

I spend a ton more time waiting to "recharge" my ICE than I do my EV, its not even close. If you're going to go by time waiting, my EV wins out by hours a year. Compounding that a several years and its essentially a day or two of my life saved by not having to pump gas every week and a half.

When trips are drive-to-work-each-day, and you can tolerate charging at your house overnight, the wait times for an EV charge are not an issue.

When your trips are drive-across-the-country, so you need to recharge multiple times en route, that's when it starts becoming substantially harder to find something else to overlap with your need to recharge. Even just doing Midwest-to-Mid-Atlantic drives, I'd complete my lunch pitstop (including eating, filling gas tank, and emptying bladder) before an EV charge could fill up again, even discounting the fact that the lesser range of an EV means I'd need to squeeze in another charging pitstop uncomfortably early to overlap with dinner.

I think you cover it, but from elapsed time, the average consumer use is mostly commute or errand based with the occasional (or weekend trip).

What this means is that if you fill gas 1-2x a week to handle the average 20 mile commute, you've saved 10 minutes because the refill of the electric is at home, with little effort.

Now you bank that 10 minutes every time you take any one way <~200 mile trip with electricity at the ends.

If you're doing regular multi region drives you are not average, you're likely in the top 1% of consumer long range trips.

To add, the longer and "more often" stops are healthier for you and your passengers; very few cars have a less than 200 mile range now, and if you're sitting for that period of time, moving (or at least not sitting) is a good idea to prevent deep vein thrombosis, the longer the better.

> When your trips are drive-across-the-country

Good thing I do well less than 1 of those on average every year, along with practically every other passenger car in America.

Is driving from San Diego to New York City really a common thing people do here? Is that what the average driver does on a weekly basis? Is that really what we should be targeting our cars to do?

Coast to coast is very uncommon. San Diego to Seattle, or New York to Miami would be much more typical of a once per year road trip.

If I were to add a NY-Miami-NY trip once a year to my life, and try and do that in a single shot, that would add ~4 hours of charging time round trip. In reality you wouldn't do that in a single shot (20 hours of driving each way!), you'd probably break it up into two days each way and thus have at least two low charge->100% in there "for free" time-wise. This would cut out an hour or so of charging wait time, so really probably closer to 2ish hours of charge time. On a 40+ hour round-trip drive.

EDIT: This is with a Hyundai Ioniq 5, not my current Mach E. The Mach E doesn't charge as fast as this most recent generation of EVs, so it would be a bit over 4 hours each way in the Mach E. However, if my plans for a car was "go on a yearly road trip", I would have probably bought an Ioniq 5 exactly for this reason. Personally though I'd probably just fly for either of those distances instead of spending 20+ hours in a car each way. Which is why the standard range version of the Mach E is perfectly fine for me.

> In reality you wouldn't do that in a single shot (20 hours of driving each way!)

That depends, one person probably isn't doing that in a single shot, but a three people driving in shifts might.

Your mistake is thinking that an EV needs to fill up during road trips. That is very rarely the case unless you get one with a low range. California to Houston, we filled up once during the entire trip. Once.

Los Angeles to Houston is a 1500 mile drive. There are currently no EVs capable of making that drive with a single recharge.

and?

They (somewhat reasonably) took "filled up" as "times charged". I did originally, but then when that distance was pointed out I got you meant you did a few smaller charging sessions and only one big to 100% charging session to make the trip.

If that's not what you're suggesting then that was not done in any commercially available EV in the US today. Even starting closer to the California border like El Centro and only making it to fringes of Houston like Katy is ~1330 miles, so ~665mi a leg. No generally available EV in the US has that range. So I take it you did a number of like 10-60% or whatever charge jaunts.

Even then though, if you were to sum up all of those shorter charging sessions you probably had to recharge your car a total of at least four charges energy-wise. If you get 300mi of range on a full.charge, 1,330 / 300 = 4.4333...

Yes, you got it right, the “natch must be claiming to have a special car” is a bad take.

It’s more just that it really, really matters time-wise that the car is not charging up to full on any given stop, because that means the charging stops are significantly faster.

People who latch on to the idea of judging EVs on their time to get “fully”‘charged are going to get such a distorted idea that they will never believe current EVs could be a good option. But, they would be mistaken.

Yeah, there's a bit of complexity around it and in the market today you could have two cars which both have the same "max range" but have vastly different times to complete a 1,200mi trip depending on a large number of factors. If you had two cars which state 300mi of range, one charged at 50kW and the other at 350kW, the 350kW car would win that marathon by a large margin. There's more to think about with EVs than just range, that's for sure.

That's just not true. That's just something EV owners say to themselves to justify purchase. I've seen a bunch of these longer drives on Youtube. They try to say, hey you can stop here and get lunch or wait 30 minutes and the kids can play a game. I watched a trip one person did and every time they stopped they went shopping in the Walmart (this was non Tesla chargers) or ate. That adds up. Plus you might not always be in the best part of town late at night. At the end of the day according to the Tesla trip planner it adds quite a bit of time on to basic trips. The other thing is these chargers might not be covered so you're out in the rain, or snow and the lots haven't been cleared. That just doesn't seem fun with 2 kids.

You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so. It's an anxiety I don't need.

Plus in my case I would have to get my Tesla towed 3 hours away with major issues. I now minor ones the traveling repair can deal with. A neighbor had a collision and didn't have his Tesla for 4 months. The facilities are so backed up. No one knows how to work on them except Tesla.

Electric is the future, but it's like 4 to 5 years out. Hybrid is good enough right now.

With ICE you literally pull of an exit, take 5 minutes to fill up and you're back.

> That's just not true.

Its objectively the reality I live with. I definitely spend more time pumping gas in my Santa Fe than I do my Mach E. A bit over 5 minutes every week and a half versus 0 minutes so far in my Mach E. 34.666 * 5 = 173.33 minutes of waiting, as a lower bound, in the ICE means just shy of 3 hours a year I spend waiting on my gas car. Meanwhile, the amount of time I spent waiting on my Mach E to charge last year was 0 minutes. This is objective and factual.

> You also have to think about the AC / heat, how you're driving, battery degrading after first year or so.

If you want to, you can stress about these things. I don't, I practically always have way more range than I need every time I leave my garage. Meanwhile I do regularly get frustrated about getting a low tank of gas and think "ugh, gotta stop by the gas station sometime on this trip, even though I'm in a hurry and would really rather just get to where I'm going".

You could also stress about things like AC or how you're driving in your ICE, these things impact your gas mileage and will impact what you spend. Which your per-mile energy cost is waaaaaaaaay higher in an ICE than an EV, so you'd think you want to conserve even more. Having a lead foot in an EV is a lot cheaper than in an ICE.

> No one knows how to work on them except Tesla

No one knows how to work on my Mach E than Tesla? Only Tesla can repair a Ioniq 5? That sure seeems strange to me!

If you regularly drive hundreds of miles at a time, then your position is fair enough. Very few people do that.

I and many people I know own an EV, and it is literally zero stress. In fact it's less stress than with my old ICE car, because I effectively always have a full tank in the morning. I don't even have level 2 home charging, but it's still a complete non issue.

I've done longer drives too, and I would describe those as "slightly inconvenient." In all honesty I sort of appreciate the breaks, but I know it annoys my girlfriend who likes to keep rolling. It definitely adds time, that's a fact!

But realistically owning an EV today is incredibly straightforward and stress free. I an everyone I know who has one would agree.

> I've seen a bunch of these longer drives on Youtube.

Cool, now consider that lots of people make very few longer drives.

They're not deluding themselves just because they use a car differently than you do!

Alternate solution: If you don't feel that that EVs are suitable yet for you to make road trips, you can still buy an EV for your daily needs and rent a gas-powered car for the occasional times you need to take longer trips.

That's YOUR experience, but that certainly doesn't translate over to an appt dweller who doesn't have their own garage to charge their BEV with. You better believe they WILL sit for a dang good bit of time waiting for their vehicle to charge.

That's a fair critique. It's certainly easiest for homeowners with a grange to do EVs. Eventually, market forces will make apartment owners who offer parking to also offer EV charging, but I think it would be reasonable for government regulations to require them to install chargers for renters who request it. Policy solutions are harder for neighborhoods where residents rely on on-street parking, as the municipality would probably have to install and maintain a lot of level 2 chargers, but this would still be worth doing.

In the mean time, if you're in this situation, I personally wouldn't fault you for getting a gas-powered car. EVs are still more constrained by supply than demand.

That was me up until recently! Infrastructure is good enough where I live that I can charge the car most times I go out for errands. I was able to make enough of my trips ones where I came home with more charge than I left with. Consequence was basically no waiting around, except on road trips. It was great! I charge at home now, which I'll happily admit is more convenient.

The majority of Americans live in single family homes. The majority of Americans can charge an EV at home.

Americans with single family homes aren't the only market in USA.

USA is not the only country in the world.

Other countries can have wildly different situation and setup, and in fact building home charging stations might be problematic for significant portion of future buyers that Toyota might want to grab.

P.S. A bit under 30% of worldwide Toyota production goes into USA - that still leaves a huge chunk of sales that might have wildly different needs to cater to.

A slight majority of Europeans live in single family homes as well. It's not like single family homes are something that only exist in America and the entire rest of the car buying world is "wildly different".

I realize not every car buyer can have their own charger at home, that's obvious. But let's not act like it's a rare thing for people to have the ability to charge at home. Over half of all households in Europe and US can probably add home charging for little cost. That's a ton of EVs to sell, an absolutely massive market able to be addressed now.

Seconded. I live in NJ, too, so any trip to a gas station usually involves waiting quite a bit for a human attendant to pump my gas. At least I don't need an attendant to charge my EV! I don't need to swipe a credit card, I don't need to wait for a pump spot to open, and I don't need to listen to ads playing on a tiny speaker. The EV charging routine is so much better in every way than ICE. Another consideration is that I always have a full 'tank' in my EV, almost every single time I drive. There is no consideration I'll run out of juice during my commute or errands.

Proponents of electric cars love to talk about daily commutes and charging at home over night and how they never have to "fill up", while either never leaving a 200 mile bubble around their home, or pretending they're okay with paying an extra $1k+ to rent an ICE car for road trips.

As someone who does not have a commute and mainly owns a car for the 600-2000 mile road trips I take _at least_ every ~6 weeks. I'd much prefer a PHEV, which incidentally can drastically increase range while also handling the ~30 mile average daily commute electric-only quite easily.

The absolutism is tiring.

This is quickly becoming outdated. Fast-charging times of about 15 minutes are possible in the US with currently existing infrastructure and vehicles, and this speed is likely to keep improving as the tech gets better. And for the typical daily driving needs of most people, plugging in to charge overnight is sufficient, so you only need to worry about charging times in rare occurrences, such as when taking a road trip.

Not only that but for those five minute gas fill ups you can’t really leave the pump.

Maybe a 20 minute fill up where you can do other things at the same time isn’t that much worse.

> Not only that but for those five minute gas fill ups you can’t really leave the pump.

The part where you can't leave the pump shouldn't be longer than 1-1.5 minutes.

You should try timing it sometime. It usually takes me about 2-3 minutes to pump the almost 18 gallons of capacity into my fuel tank. Pumps in the US aren't allowed to go faster than 10gal/minute, lots around me seem to go much slower than that max speed.

Seems highly contextual. If I can charge at the grocery store - great. If I forgot to plug in last night and can't quite make the trip into work, 15-30 min is going to be a problem.

> If I forgot to plug in last night and can't quite make the trip into work

Assuming a 30 mile round-trip commute, I'd have to forget to plug it in 6 times before I would run into this issue my car with ~200mi of range.

I've had more times where I needed to be sure to stop and get gas before I head to the office than I've had times where I had to wait for my EV to charge before I head in.

Most commutes are 30 miles round trip at the high end. Given a capacity of 400 miles as was quoted above you would need to forget to plug in for over a week to have any issues.

Not having enough electricity to make it to work is akin to not having enough gasoline for most local trips.

Which car can be fully charged in 15 minutes? I've looked and cannot find one except some supercars that are way out of reach.

"Fully" is a bad metric for this, because charging on EVs tends to be extremely non-linear.

For example, let me approximate the numbers I had at a recent supercharger stop. It took me about 15 mins to charge from 3% to 60%. Then another 10-15 mins from 60% to 80%. Then another 15 mins from 80% to 90%. In general, for better battery life and to not waste your time, it is recommended to charge to 90% or below.

And that wasn't the most recent gen supercharger. At some, I had personally seen peak charging speed of 580+ mi/hr.

Here is how I reacted to this: “Damn…it took this person 40+ minutes to almost fill up their car”

I only do a full charge for a long trip. Normally, i just charge in my apt garage overnight or at work, and the car is already full every single day i wake up, zero time spent.

And if i am in a rush, i just charge at a supercharger for that quick 15 min charge to 60% and go along.

I guess I am just not bothered much by taking a short break after multiple hours of driving. And the costs being much cheaper than gas (about $17-18 for full tank at a supercharger, virtually free at my apt building or work) kinda helps.

It’s just a mental shift us non-EV owners need to make. Starting every day with a full charge has value for sure.

You cannot charge fast past a high state of charge, mostly because you don’t want to overload the battery cells by having a too high voltage.

Cars that charge that fast to 100% either do not care about not destroying the battery, which makes sense in a racing context without sustainability concerns, or the 100% reported by the battery management system is a lot lower than the maximum state of charge possible.

That’s why you cannot find common electric cars that charge to 100% in 15 minutes. But you will find some that can charge fast for 15 minutes and that’s what matters.

This and the sibling comments seem to prove the (grand)parent's point though; you can "charge fast" (apparently to 60-80%) in 15-30 min, which leaves you with a less-than-full-distance capacity in a longer time compared with an ICE which is "5 min and full capacity." That doesn't mean that electric cars aren't good, but it means they are slower (less distance, more down time) - this is good enough for most local traffic situations, though.

With "local traffic distances", my ICE has been slower overall. I spent ~3 hours on "charging" time driving around town last year, while I've waited 0 minutes waiting on my EV.

That's 3 hours of downtime with my ICE, 0 minutes of downtime with my EV. Which one resulted in more downtime again?

You have commented this on a handful of subthreads, but I feel like you're missing the goal of the argument. If you want "instant recharge," gas wins. I understand that charging overnight will work in most cases, I understand you have a window of perhaps as much as two weeks to find a single night to do it, etc. Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

In most cases having a battery will get you from A to B without issue - same on a tank of gas. When it won't, you will spend more time waiting on the battery to charge, which is a tradeoff that is probably still worthwhile for the vast majority of people.

I was specifically talking to their statement of "local traffic distances". Is >200mi "local traffic distances" to you? That's a long drive to me. "Local traffic distances" to me means maybe 60 miles round-trip, max. Most EV's can handle "local traffic distances" without having to stop and recharge.

> Similarly, for the sake of argument, I could keep a gas pump in my garage to fill up at night, which would mean I had "0 minutes of downtime" as well.

You literally couldn't unless you were massively wealthy or lived on a farm or something along those lines. You probably wouldn't be able to secure the permitting to have that much gas on site at small residential lot. It would also be a pretty big headache managing the gas delivery contracts for such a small amount. It would be a huge hassle getting it delivered to your home. Realistically, you couldn't get as much convenience at your home assuming you lived in a statistically average suburban/urban single family home.

Meanwhile all it took for my EV was to install an outlet, <$200. No crazy permitting, no massive storage tanks storing hazardous liquids, no managing additional delivery contracts needing to get big fuel trucks to pull up near the house to deliver gas, no EPA inspections for that storage tank, etc.

“fully” charged is a red herring, and foolish in practice.

Ok, which car can charge to 300+ miles in 15 minutes? I can fill my car in 15 minutes and get another 300+ miles.

Obviously you can't do that, and no one is arguing that a "full tank" type EV fillup is as fast as it is with an ICE vehicle.

But as an EV owner, long (like multi hundred mile) trips are the only time I would ever do that. Otherwise it's just frequent top ups while I'm at home or doing errands or whatever. So from my perspective the time to charge to full is kind of a red herring unless you are someone who regularly does like 300+ mile trips.

Well, I am someone who regularly does 300+ mile trips and I currently have a hybrid but they are not great on highways (for obvious reasons). Time of charge is a big component of my next buying decision.

Time of charge is fastest if you have some headroom in your range. In other words it’s a lot faster to charge to 80%, as charging slows as you get higher. Keep that in mind when buying so you don’t make the mistake of buying lower range.

Fair enough! I think in general this topic gets brought up too much since most people do drives like that rarely if ever, but if you do then an ICE vehicle or hybrid might still be your best option.

Try 9 minutes, one stop, to get from the bay area to LA. It’s not as fast to fill as a smelly ICE car, but it’s not too shabby at all and a lot more fun and safe to drive. The numbers are contrived.

>If we could all stop shilling for "Green Hydrogen" that would be great

why? A Green Hydrogen company that builds infrastructure to make ship and sell GREEN Hydrogen is a good thing.

Hiding your energy source under the guise of "clean energy electric cars" is the bullshit we should stop shilling. Any other color Hydrogen marketing is just the same bullshit shilling as well.

Green Hydrogen goes a long long way towards fixing the institutional issues we have with greenwashing.

Whenever something is measured in some strange unit that would make even the English system blush, you know it's not that great.

Cartridge distribution network is just like Amazon, right? It already exists.

> Not bad, but not a paradigm shift,

So P100D (100kWh) needs 20 cartridges, or 110kg, instead of nearly 500kg of Li-ion battery. 400kg savings. The comment means you probably know nothing about vehicle dynamics. Or too accustomed to dull handling of heavy pickup trucks.

Look at how huge those cylinders are. Sure you're saving some weight but now the entire cabin is full of these cylinders and you're strapping a few to the roof.

If a car gets 3.5mi/kWh, then to drive 200mi from these you'd need about a dozen of these. And that's assuming they're talking 1200W microwaves and not 800-1,000W, which IMO when people say "a typical household microwave" ~1kW is what I imagine.

>Why … hydrogen money pit?

Maybe because hydrogen is infamously corrosive.

And that means they can build a huge maintenance business if consumers are gullible enough to adopt the technology.

can we stop shilling for green electricity? we know batteries are not charged from low carbon sources today

> we know batteries are not charged from low carbon sources today

Have you got any grid-scale "green hydrogen" projects with a higher energy efficiency than existing grid-scale renewable energy projects (solar, wind)? Because unless you do, "green hydrogen" is dead on arrival in any market.

> can we stop shilling for green electricity?

No, because we already know how to make grid-scale low-carbon energy.

Show me grid-scale "green hydrogen" and I'll retract my criticism.

This might be one to watch: Massive green hydrogen hub in Utah wins $504M federal loan guarantee (*)

Course this could end up like Concentrating Solar Power plants and end up on the wrong side of the cost-benefit equation, but I'd argue it is still worth a look.

(*) https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/hydrogen/massive-green-...

It was interesting to read about efficient electrolyzer - https://newatlas.com/energy/hysata-efficient-hydrogen-electr... .

You need to think of batteries/the electric network like an interface. We can eventually replace the electric backend with better and better sources over time without needing to change the cars, but gas will always be stuck being as polluting as it always has been. Retrofits for gas / diesel cars/trucks are few and far between.

Why can't this argument be made for hydrogen

I think there's definitely room for hydrogen, but the interface analogy falls flat for hydrogen. It's not like you can just drop in another fuel type into a hydrogen car after it's produced? The strength of electricity is that the backend is agnostic. It can be hydro, nuclear, sun, or some other future fuel. Hell, you can could run electricity using hydrogen if you wanted.

oh yeah, I meant the hydrogen production source could be changed from not green to green. Exactly if you have extra green energy you can just produce hydrogen with it.

Yeah, that's totally reasonable. I have a friend that has a Mirai and it's really really cool. We just need to build out more infrastructure.

This is HIGHLY regional. In New Jersey, half of the power generated is nuclear, and in the west, hydroelectric dominates.

We have a number of hydroelectric dams around the country, so it depends on where you are I guess.

Batteries for electric cars need to be made of elements mined out of the earth which I hear is expensive and not great for the environment. Idk why hydrogen isn't practical as a fuel over gas.

Batteries are largely recyclable and lithium does not need to be consumed constantly by a battery. Most modern Li-Ion batteries in cars have useful lifespans of a decade or more and they're getting better.

With this you need to make a ton of these cartridges and then have a big delivery infrastructure to ship them around that uses a ton of power, way more than is consumed by the power grid shipping energy from a power plant into a battery.

EV Batteries can be recycled, but finding a place that WILL is an entirely different proposition. Granted California just recently started (*), but that doesn't do a hell of a lot of good to someone in Michigan, Missouri or New Mexico.

As far as Batteries lasting 'decades', you won't get far with that argument when talking to Nissan Leaf owners who are having to replace their 9 year old batteries after 150K miles (**)

I'm all for EV's, but proponents should remember EV's started somewhere too, with lots of the same skepticism thrown their way (expensive home systems to recharge their batteries, the cost of recharging networks, cold performance, etc...) As I see it, there's way too much of the same talk coming from the Battery EV crowd when they talk about Hydrogen.

(*) https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/electric-vehicle-battery-...

(**) https://driving.ca/features/feature-story/the-big-looming-pr...

Nissan Leaf batteries have some of the worst designs for a car as they're air-cooled instead of liquid-cooled. There's really little comparison of the quality of those packs compared to practically every other EV out there.

> expensive home systems to recharge their batteries

It cost <$200 to install a NEMA 14-50 outlet in my garage and the charger was included.

> the cost of recharging network

I've spent ~$225 in charging cost to drive my EV ~8,200mi so far (8200mi / 3.5mi/kWh * $0.096/kWh). A 25mpg car (seems about normal for a crossover) going that distance would use 328 gallons of gas (8200mi / 25mpg * $3.50/gal). If we just say gas was ~$3.50 on average over the last year, that means I would have spent $1,148 in gas driving the same amount. Even if you were to amortize the entire cost of the outlet install in the first year of driving (which, I mean, you wouldn't, that plug will be fine practically until the house gets torn down), you're still talking ~$425 versus ~$1,148. And that's just the first year of ownership, this difference then compounds even more every year after.

Tell me again about how expensive $225 is compared to $1,148.

BEV Replacement costs: A 2020 Greencars report stated that a battery (66 kWh) for the Chevrolet Bolt battery costs roughly $16K USD. Similarly, GreenCars states that a Chevy Volt (16 kWh) costs roughly $4000. BMW i3: 22kwH, 8 year warranty, ~ 16K USD (various sources).

Oh, I agree that replacing a full battery like the Leaf is rare, but the costs are what the costs are. Accidents happen, and the costs aren't small, regardless of the reason why it's being replaced.

> the cost of recharging network.

Great, I'm glad your BEV is that inexpensive to charge. However, how much did that charging STATION cost? Recent estimates for Tesla's are in the neighborhood of 250K USD each. I'd argue that they are getting built, and the economics are there, otherwise they wouldn't be built. However, when BEV's first started coming out you better believe the costs to develop that network of BEV stations was widely discussed (esp. irt who would pay for them).

My point is that a lot of similar BS arguments are made against Hydrogen by BEV fan bois. I've no issue with the point that Hydrogen isn't here TODAY, and that some of the issues it faces are large. But to argue (as too many have done) that any investigation into Hydrogen is a waste of time, and that BEV's are the ONLY solution is both short-sighted and wrong.

> Accidents happen

And, accidents are covered by insurance, so not really a big worry to me. 100,000mi is like $11,000 in energy cost difference. Add a grand in oil changes, a couple of grand in other maintenance that I wouldn't need, and you're probably at $14,000 saved to make up for potentially needing a new battery at that point, so maybe about break even if your battery goes bad faster than expected. But maybe rebuilt batteries are cheaper in 8 years, who knows.

> However, how much did that charging STATION cost?

I already mentioned it, just shy of $200.

> Nissan Leaf batteries have some of the worst designs for a car as they're air-cooled instead of liquid-cooled.

Older Leaf models are worse than >2015-2016 models. They switched to a more heat tolerant and stable battery chemistry.

I would avoid them though in very hot climates like Phoenix or Las Vegas.

Yeah they can be recycled which is big. But I think we're headed into a world where we just need a whole hell of a lot more lithium then we're currently using. If all cars are eventually replaced with electric cars, that's a lot of batteries.

Also, standardized cardridges could be swapped at fuel stations (which was the original business plan of Better Place, in case anyone can remember). Also, this would allow a service to charge cars parked in areas of high population density with a lack of charging stations. Cardridges could be handled like jerrycans, making range anxiety a thing of the past.

THere are meny potential use cases where green hydrogen would make sense, even if people with calculators will tell you differntly.

I can charge my car anywhere that has electricity, which is essentially everywhere. I was able to charge my car to 100% while on vacation off of a regular wall outlet, dozens of miles from any gas station.

Hydrogen is useless at this point. I don't want to have range anxiety with ICE/hydrogen and worry about jerrycans/cartridges. I want the confidence that I can refuel literally anywhere.

Yeah if we could pop in hydrogen cartridges like batteries that'd be ideal. Currently hydrogen cars are fueled up like gas cars which limits their range. I don't know why they don't have replaceable cartridges.

Even though hydrogen is abundant in the universe, it’s actually fairly hard to capture on earth. Most hydrogen comes from fracking ironically

I believe it, but it's possible to get from water if you use electrolysis. But it's probably a high electricity cost. You'd be paying a lot of energy to make the energy more transportable in the form of hydrogen.

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