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I've been going in range-anxiety circles with my dad for over 10 years. He insists he needs a car that can take him hundreds of miles into the wilderness for camping. I ask whether he's ever done that. He says no, but he intends to.

He's 84.

EV manufacturers should offer the 500-mile-range vehicle, but as an option. Pay $X for a car with 250 miles range, and an extra $20,000 for another 250 miles range. Most people will look at that price difference and conclude that their need to drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.

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Exactly, range anxiety is mostly a psychological disorder at this point. People feel anxious. But there's no good rational reason for it.

I come from a small country where realistically, you leave the country before your battery runs out pretty much from any point in the country. Despite this, a lot of people who definitely don't leave the country very often feel very anxious about range. It's completely irrational. There's always the weird uncle who somehow has to drive hundreds of miles every day while never stopping for lunch, restroom breaks, etc. that has this imaginary need to do all of that without stopping.

It's the Netherlands, if you are wondering. And for those few people that actually live up north there in say Groningen and actually do want to regularly drive all the way down to Maastricht, that would be about 230 miles. And this is about as long as it gets in terms of journey length "inside" (the fastest route is actually via Germany) the country.

The point is that you can do that on a single charge with most decent EVs. Of course you'll need a charge to get back. And probably a few other things like a rest room break, stretching your legs, or taking care of whatever it was that caused you to drive that far to begin with. Great opportunity to plug in in while you do all of that. It's called destination charging.

I couldn’t convince my parents to get a plug-in hybrid Prius (to replace their old Prius) because it didn’t have a spare tire in the back. They ended up getting a hybrid Camry, which gets much, much worse mileage for their use case. It’s still pretty good in the grand scheme of things, but it was silly that they wouldn’t consider a car without a spare tire considering where they drive and that they have AAA.

On average I have a flat tire probably once every 3 years and if the difference is being able to change a tire with 30 mins of effort and be back to wherever I am going plus slightly decreased MPG vs waiting a couple of hours for a tow truck, being towed to a tire place, waiting a couple of hours for a new tire plus somewhat better MPG. I’d go with the Camry too.

>drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.

Which is why I think that once you get to a range of around 300 miles, the most important metric shifts from range to charge rate. None of us should probably be driving for more than 4 hours straight. But we also don't need those breaks to be an hour long. If we can get to the point in which 10-15 minutes of charging gives us 4+ hours of driving, then I think most serious complaints about range anxiety disappear.

Which is what hydrogen cars offer. An EV with very fast refueling.

What people are missing is that there is no reason that all cars must be battery powered. It's a weird myopia that is antithetical to Silicon Valley thinking, despite being widespread in SV.

Because hydrogen cars are less efficient, more expensive, more dangerous, and require more infrastructure than EVs. The speed of refueling isn’t enough of a justification to pursue hydrogen cars. They only really make sense if the raw materials for batteries become too scarce.

You are just repeating the marketing spiel of battery car makers. Of course, it would be very convenient for them if the problems of the competition are insurmountable and the upside totally pointless. There’s enormous incentive for them to convince people of that.

The basic problem here is that fuel cells EVs literally are EVs. They work in incredibly similar ways. Any sort of fundamental analysis would lead you to the conclusion that if BEVs are possible, then so are FCEVs. Any differences are going to be minor, not substantial. Also, a lot of the criticisms are just pure FUD, like claiming hydrogen is more dangerous than lithium (both are very flammable materials). And finally, battery car makers really want you to think that every single car in the future will be a BEV, with not a single exception. That’s a pretty crazy claim, and people should recognize how ridiculous it sounds.

A lot of driving is local, BEVs excel at that since people can charge at home. Hydrogen has a chance in long distance trucking and maybe aviation, where the lightweight energy density is a big win, although they’ll need to do something about volume for aviation.

Unless we figure out fusion, producing hydrogen is going to primarily come from hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas. For Europe, that means they need to get it mostly from Russia, and Japan has to boat all their supply of that in.

In recent news (past five years), Australia mining magnates have invested in doubling the current global hydrogen production via green means (no hydro carbons) and have formed partnerships with Germany (part of Europe) to supply hydrogen.

https://germany.embassy.gov.au/beln/hydrogen.html

https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/media-releases/growing-...

and other links from the Fortescue Metals sibsidiaries and other involved companies abound.

If they can do it, it might be a nice replacement for NG. Transportation of both is about the same (assuming it can only be compressed so much?).

Nuclear power might be ideal for hydrogen production as well (using excess of peak power to make hydrogen to store in huge tanks rather than charging a battery or pumped reservoir?).

You queried the economics.

Those involved are making bank on some 800 million tonnes of iron ore sales per annum shipped to China and hold leases on significant (as a percentage of global supply) Lithium deposits and Australian land in the millions of acres (a lot of sunlight).

They understand industry at scale, the use of automation to deliver volume, the draw of large economies to sunlight abundant areas for processing and refining, etc.

Transport is planned via Ammonia (hydrogen + nitrogen) - with an excess of sunlight and rapid improvements in domain of electrolysis making seawater as a basis economical, energy losses due to conversion can still be covered to turn a profit delivering bulk ammonia for fertilizer, power generation, and other applications to Europe.

FFI (offshoot of FMI (Fortescue Metals)) has a handwaving set of web pages:

https://ffi.com.au/technology/green-hydrogen/

and have lodged more detailed tech reports for their shareholders via the Sydney, London, and Canadian Exchanges (IIRC).

People are repeating the same kind of rhetoric that was used against wind or solar. That we will never have cheap green energy and the future will always be fossil fuels. Those claims are now the source of mockery.

Green hydrogen will be one of the cheapest energy sources available in the near future. It will be made from excess wind or solar and will cost nearly nothing to produce. This will be the next big fundamental error by anti-green energy skeptics.

It primarily comes from natural gas now because it is easy to extract from it. Refining via electricity alone is incredibly expensive (20-30% lost), and that is in top of 10% lost due to compression and 30% lost going back to electricity again (assuming a fuel cell vehicle). If the energy isn’t cheap (coming from natural gas), then how does this make sense economically?

BEV is attractive because electrify goes straight to the battery, energy is only lost once. But hydrogen can make sense for some applications given its weight (but it’s volume is a problem and compression only goes so far).

Same story as solar still. People accused solar of being too inefficient, but it got extremely cheap anyways. That is the upside of something with almost zero input cost. Hydrogen is the same.

BEVs need huge batteries to function. It is easy to see how that totally undermines the value of BEVs.

If you have a cheap source of hydrogen, sure.

BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable. Also, forget about having a frunk.

> BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable.

Wrong. Fuel cells and tanks will be vastly cheaper than batteries once produced at scale. They have very low resource requirements. They will likely match or beat internal combustion cars at cost. This is an unbeatable advantage compared to BEVs with any sort of range.

> A lot of driving is local, BEVs excel at that since people can charge at home

Some people can charge at home.

What does a battery weigh?

Do you know that conventional gas is delivered to homes around the country, currently, on a semi-annual basis to supply total heating needs, by truck?

The infrastructure is nill for fuel cell vehicles.

Battery vehicles will be wildly burdensome to the electrical infrastructure if widely adopted. Trucking via EV is currently completely unacheivable with the energy capacity available. No discussion of charging capacity. Also, it adds tons (actual tons) of weight to the non-cargo load

To be honest, I think I would just let this one go. Does your father, at 84, really need a new car anyway?

Believe me, I'd love to talk with my dad about something else. But if it's not the 1950s, getting a new car, or what my mom is most recently wrong about, he's not interested.

I think this is pretty much what they all do already? Seems like most manufacturers offer a "long range" version? Perhaps not 250 Vs 500, but certainly like 150 to 250 sort of order of magnitude

Take a look at http://ev-database.uk

right, businesses love opportunities to create market segmentation, and they seem to already do this to the extent it's reasonable with battery capacity. I think the limiting factor here is that the battery pack already makes up a large fraction of the total mass and volume of the vehicle. once you've designed a chassis and suspension suitable for a 500 kWh battery pack, it doesn't really make sense to offer it with half or less of that capacity. you can't offer it at the discount that people would expect.

I think you're making statements rather than asking questions.

Yes, but still not as long range as the longest-range gas cars. Tesla extinguished the "is it a real car?" questions by offering the 2014 P85D, which was briefly the quickest production car on Earth (though it cost $140,000). You don't hear anyone talking about slow EVs the way they did 10 years ago when Nissan Leafs were going 53 mph on highways.

If there were an equivalent EV but for range rather than acceleration, the discussion would no longer be about range. Charging time and availability would still be legitimate (but diminishing) issues, as sig points out.

My dad is exactly the same. Range anxiety!!! so I show him the map of level 3 chargers in north america and ask if he's driving to the arctic circle or something. Obviously not.

Now 'his friend' bought a f150 lightning and towed max weight 100km and it used 200km range! So his friend returned the truck right away!

The actual thing happening is proving that arguing with anyone is literally pointless. You can never convince anyone of anything. You can never teach anyone anything.

My father's 87 (88 later this year, he was born in 1935).

He still drives hundreds of miles here in Western Australia to maintain several sections on three different walking tracks (eg, two thirty KM sections on the thousand km long Bibbulmun Track [1]).

Tell your dad to pull his finger out and just do it.

[1] https://www.bibbulmuntrack.org.au/

The extra battery is heavy, you hit diminishing returns quickly, like extra fuel on a plane.

I have an EV and just cross some trips that we might want to do outside of our range. The big one is Seattle to anchorage which while possible using RV parks, isn’t very easy ATM.

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