Water-injected 2.0-liter hydrogen engine makes 410 horsepower
motor1.com
motor1.com
It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable. Add a small regenerative battery pack or ultracapacitor and efficiency will increase further. Reciprocating engines seem quaint at this point.
Probably not, but it's hard to say really: Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced, whereas modern gasoline engines by Toyota seem to be ridiculously reliable. Reciprocating engines may seem quaint, but with so many decades of work and development, they (or at least some manufacturers) seem to have made them some of the most reliable mechanical machines ever devised. (Of course, this doesn't apply to all manufacturers; I wouldn't count anything by Chrysler here.)
What does seem quite clear is that using hydrogen in an ICE necessarily means a huge hit in efficiency because of the thermal cycle. Why anyone would want to waste time on this solution instead of just jumping straight to the fuel cell + motor drivetrain, I don't know. It's like having a cellphone company and making a fancy new flip-phone when everyone else is moving to smartphones.
That's news to me. Actually, I was impressed, given how new Tesla was as a company: several car executives have dismissed them as unlikely to make good enough cars "for a few decades."
Media distorts the negative experiences, but there are a lot of Tesla owners for which Tesla was the first car. And those people tend not to report issues because they don't have something to compare. I heard about people who could not take delivery of the car because the trunk was not closing and opening properly, and they had to wait for the service to re-align it on the delivery date. For someone who bought a car before, this is hard to accept as "normal".
The quality is probably improving daily, but I would not dismiss any complaints as exaggerated by the media.
Here in Dublin (the one in Ireland) there are a number of Teslas operating as taxis and you can see some of that as plastic parts break off or start making vibration noises as the car ages (and taxis age faster because they have higher duty cycles).
Any source for this? Electric motors are supposed to be more stable than ICE.
It's also highly toxic if the vapors are breathed in.
Did I mention it's also invisible when burning?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37836237
Leakage is one of many issues, but it's also not just solved by a special liner.
> solid technical reasons such as leaking through metal.
Where the heck did you read that.
H2 is such a tiny molecule that leaks out of everything making it a nightmare to try and seal pipework, and it will permeate (and embrittle) metals, namely steel.
It's idiotic to try and use it as a fuel. The money being wasted on H2 research should just go into purchasing more renewable power sources.
> could
I'll believe it when I see it.
If you are a little allergic to calling hydrogen blue or green, depending on how much greenwashing it receives, that might not be the best keywords to type in a search engine. But hydrogen should become a needed industrial step for the world's second or third most widely used commodity (it goes: sand, cement, steel, glass, gravel, petroleum, macadam, wheat…)
I’m not sure what’s #2 on the list of actual hydrogen uses, as most big potential applications could use an easier fuel to handle than a literal cloud of angry protons. It's often a good first step, though: ammonia, synthetic methane, etc.
Far down that list, there’s also a project to put hydrogen back into dirigibles, which I find very engrossing (and yes, the people working on that have heard of the Hindenburg), but it's less solid than making steel.
‘Sand’ caught me by surprise, my uninformed view was that it was just for glass
Both hydrogen and battery cars have the same obstacle to their take-up: infrastructure and range.
When there are as many recharging stations for hydrogen and electricity as there are normal petrol/gas pumps, those alternatives might finally be viable.
So if you're limited to fast charging, it is relevant how common the chargers are.
In my city the buses are electric and some have an hydrogen fuel cell.
how come there is not a single video of the engine in this announcement or in their youtube channel?