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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the answer is maintenance. Maintenance is the primary reason I am not buying an electric. God forbid something trivial break and I have to spend half the remaining value of the car to make it run again.

My ridiculously cheap KIA won the top award for maintainability by JD Power the year it came out beating out the high dollar brands. I never have to replace anything on it except tires, the battery, and windshield wipers. If I did have to replace something critical, though, I know it would be cheap. The car is 8 years old too.

I know hydrogen has a far lower energy compression compared to gasoline, but the idea that its always clean, even cleaner than electric, is appealing. Its also appealing that it refuels quickly, like gasoline, which is another big turn off for electric.

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The data on EVs is that maintenance (at least on the drive train + battery) is not an issue, excluding air cooled designs like the Nissan Leaf which were doomed from the start.

But hydrogen fuel cells are also expensive to maintain and have been a huge maintenance burden, as they're quick to fail with contamination (and lots of other factors), leading to hydrogen trains being replaced by diesel trains.

Hydrogen can be clean, but it isn't and won't be for the forseeable future for the simple fact that it would be way to expensive. Almost all hydrogen today is made from natural gas and much less efficient than powering an electric car from a gas plant. But even if hydrogen was produced with electricity, due to the low efficiency it would be much dirtier than an electric car (And we're entirely discounting hydrogen leakage, which is much more potent at heating up the planet than CO2).

Hydrogen can also be fast to refuel, but it takes much longer than gas and often requires a long "time-out" after the last refueling. Hydrogen fuel stations are also very unreliable. With current EVs, 20%-80% charging in 20 minutes is state of the art, which should make charging times mostly a non-issue when this is also available in most "cheap" EVs.

I think it's not so much "maintenance" in stuff you're expected to do, the issue is when something goes wrong, the repair infrastructure isn't great. I.e. yea, the motor doesn't go wrong as often and there are less fluids, no transmission. But say, there's an issue w/ suspension or even the specialized wheel/tires, Tesla is notoriously bad at fixing these (such as, of all ironies, Ford dealerships have a brisk growing business in fixing Teslas).

I don't know if things are better at Hyundai/Kia now that their EV business is growing but I would hope so since traditional auto repairs/dealer and parts networks should be one of their core competencies

Specialized wheels/tires? Go down to any tire shop. It's just a tire.

For a while, tire shops wouldn't touch whatever Tesla had put on there. Whether it was actually specialized or there was some legalese w/ Tesla wheels that made them paranoid, I don't know. Drove friends who were Tesla owners nuts. That's recently changed, though, I think. I assume Hyundai/GM and other traditional car companies didn't do this.

The manufacturing of H2 from CH4 is one thing that really bothers me about the whole concept.

We have CH4 cars today, and an infrastructure in place. It should be expanded and tbh it's a great fuel. The leakages are a problem but I think much of them can be fixed.

I had a Honda Civic Gx, (natural gas) and it was comfortable and very convenient while in Los Angeles. Road trips and camping sometimes sucked so we just rented for those. But there are already "natural gas" highways because so many trucks use it.

Sadly I think it's era is over, oh well.

Some of these issues are also true with EVs. I’m not sure where you live but around me chargers are very often out of order, or vandalized/stripped by drug addicts, or don’t charge at the advertised rates. It is far worse than what I gather the experience is for hydrogen.

I didn’t have maintenance issues other than minor ones, but I do have friends who had their EVs in the shop for several months at a time. Tesla was nice enough to provide replacement cars but I’ve not heard of months long issues for typical gas vehicles (outside of pandemic supply chain problems).

>“Even cleaner than electric”

The catalysts for hydrogen->electricity are the same rare earths that people complain are harmful in EVs. Electricity->hydrogen->electricity is also far more lossy than the over 80% efficiency of the lithium cycle. Hydrogen has a round trip efficiency of 40%.

You may hear ‘it turns into water’ but that’s just obfuscating the origin of it (which may be electricity or more likely cracking fossil fuels).

All up I don’t see how you could claim it’s better than current electric cars from an environmental point of view.

I'm curious why you think maintenance of a hydrogen car will be like a gasoline car instead of an electric car.

I suspect the answer is maintenance. Maintenance is the primary reason I am not buying an electric.

This is actually the MAIN reason to buy EVs. I have a 2014 Tesla S, total cost of “maintenance” since purchase - exactly $0.00 (got free supercharging too of course). the only “maintenace” I had was replacing modem for 5G switch and replacing internal battery - $400 total. The car has 90k miles and it is still on original brakes as with regenerative breaking I hardly ever use the brake.

You must have at least replaced the tyres at least once, no?

Part of the argument for electric is that you are not paying for oil changes and other routine maintenance that gas cars require.

The two options for a hydrogen car are: (1) ordinary internal combustion engine and (2) fuel cell.

(1) is an off the shelf technology but is not very fuel efficient and not perfectly clean. You don't get CO2 or CO or hydrocarbons but you still get oxides of nitrogen; hydrocarbons + nitrogen oxides + sunlight = photochemical smog, you can never get hydrocarbons to zero because there are natural sources (Reagan used to say "trees pollute") so lowering NO is important.

(2) gets better fuel efficiency which improves range by countering the low density of every form of hydrogen storage; it's not a mature technology, it combines some of the difficult aspects of the ICE (from an Ashby [1] perspective it has all the functions of an ICE including fuel supply, air supply, cooling [2], exhaust removal [3][4]) plus it has the electrochemical problems a battery has.

[1] https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27150

[2] actually harder because the fuel cell operates a lower temperature!

[3] it's probably not running hot enough to remove water as vapor, if you can't remove the liquid fast enough the fuel cell it will clog up

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics was introduced to make it possible to maintain the complex emissions controls system; an ICE could be simpler if it didn't run under a strict pollution control regime, but a fuel cell needs a control system like that just to run reliably

Your theory ignores that Toyota pushes Hybrids over both Hydrogen and BEV. Hybrids are more complex than either BEV or ICE.

Your point about ICE being lower maintenance also has some issues. BEV have way fewer moving parts and therefore require significantly less maintenance.

The parts that are likely to break on an EV are largely mechanically similar to an ICE (anything in the wheel well assemblies) or in terms of body construction, physically similar to the same generation of ICE.

A lot of people look at the cost of new EVs and their repair parts but compare against older ICE vehicles that haven’t moved to the same construction methods. Newer ICE vehicles are mostly the same cost to replace parts.

Beyond that, Hydrogen fuelled cars are mechanically more complex than BEV, while still being harder to repair than your age of ICE

I had always been under the impression that EVs are significantly lower maintenance than ICEs. Was that a misconception on my part, or am I missing why maintenance would be a point in favor of fuel cell cars?

As I recall EVs (generalizing) require maintenance less often, but the maintenance is expensive comparatively. I suspect it varies significantly by brand in reality.

The only things I know of are:

1) You have to pay a lot to swap the main battery (but if this is amortized over the lifetime of the battery the argument falls apart.)

2) Tires, because most EV’s have supercar-level zero-to-sixty times.

Fuel cell cars probably accelerate worse (it’s not fundamental, but the fuel cell is sized for wattage, so better zero to sixty is expensive), and, I think the fuel cell components would be cheaper than a battery.

Having said that, all the high pressure storage tanks I own have limited lifespans, and I’m not sure how much it costs to replace that part of a fuel cell car.

I get what you mean by EVs having high cost components but low maintenance is usually used as an argument for EVs. As long as nothing breaks they are very cheap to run in terms of both maintenance and fuel.

Which is an excellent reason to buy a Toyota EV. Hybrids are the most complicated cars and should be the worst for maintenance, but they consistently come out on top of rankings because a large portion of the non-plugin hybrids are Toyota's. Conversely PHEV's are on the bottom because a large portion of them are from Stellantis.

Imagine a Prius minus most of the bits that need maintenance and wear out. That car would last forever and should sell like hotcakes. But Toyota would rather sell you a hydrogen lemon than an EV.

Yes I don’t understand the complexity criticism. Most hybrids seem more reliable than BEVs. It is complicated by things like software issues and not issues with drivetrains, but clearly companies like Toyota can make hybrids and PHEVs that are insanely reliable. A PHEV (from the right brand) seems to offer the best of all worlds - electric drive for most daily trips and the range of ICE for weekends and road trips.

A Prius BEV would be both cheaper and more reliable with a longer lasting battery than the Prius Prime PHEV. A Prius battery only lasts ~150,000 miles whereas a Tesla battery lasts ~250,000 miles. That's because a battery is rated by the number of cycles. A Tesla goes >300 miles per cycle, and a Prius Prime about 50.

> Maintenance is the primary reason I am not buying an electric

This is a real problem that will hopefully soften with scale. EVs should be fundamentally cheaper to maintain than ICE or hydrogen cars.

EV maintenance is far easier and cheaper than ICE vehicle maintenance.

They are equivalent. ICE have more parts but they are cheaper; EVs have fewer but vastly more expensive parts. Also, EVs are luxury vehicles so you get walloped with the rich person rates from the dealers. Give it another 20 years then EVs will be overall cheaper.

I treat my 2012 Honda Fit like absolute garbage and it's pushing 150k miles without one single repair. I've literally only replaced the tires.

I think people in the comments are missing that maintenance is cheap, repairs are expensive. Saying EVs have less maintenance is like saying you get free drink refills at a fine dining restaurant.

Same with my 2016. I am so sad Honda discontinued that model.

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