Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> Of course Musk doesn't just ridicule fuel cells, he affectionately calls them "fool cells". As someone who builds his businesses by reasoning from first principles...

That's almost an ironic statement, given that his whole game-plan with Tesla and SpaceX has been aggressively commercializing extremely efficient implementations of proven, well-understood technologies.

I love Elon Musk, but there's an additional wrinkle here. Fuel cells are much further from commercialization than lithium ion, and needs a lot more basic R&D, and Tesla doesn't have the time or resources to go down that road. Toyota does. This is not to say whose approach is right, but rather that there is a lot more in play than "first principles."

It's a time-honored tradion in business: ridicule and marginalize the things that you d not do or that compete directly with you - until you so them.

Examples: Apple: Nobody wants native apps, theywant the mobile web. Oracle: You don't need row locks (row level locking appears in Oracle 7, as a premium add-on called the Transaction Processing Option).

I would hope Musk's position is rooted in the knowledge that we need to get off of fossil fuels in a few decades or we're done. If hydrogen as a non-thrust fuel has any use, it has so much research ahead of it; there isn't enough time for that.

This is mainly driven home by the idea that hydrogen is very much in abundance in the universe, but here on earth it really only exists as hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are a tricky thing to exploit without contributing to global warming.

>hydrogen is very much in abundance in the universe, but here on earth it really only exists as hydrocarbons.

Uh, water?

Sorry, I should have mentioned water. But that bond is very strong, and the methods of breaking it are thus very poor.

Another compound worth mentioning is ammonia. A lot of the current hydrogen harvesting research revolves around ammonia. Unfortunately, ammonia is very scarce in nature and certainly soon exhaustible as a global fuel.

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