I have to laugh every time I read such statements. It's like the man who invented the apartment claiming houses now obsolete. Price is not always the driving force. If it were, SUVs would not exist, nor would BMW, Merc, Ferrari any every other performance car brand.
Cars are as much personal statements as houses, probably more so. Relatively few people see you in your house, but everyone sees which car you drive. Setting aside the robot driver debates, these are fashion items. Society isn't going to abandon such vanities simply to better leverage a new technology.
Most people who own cars can't afford fun or fashionable ones, or don't choose to allocate their budgets that way. SF is a distorted perspective: car ownership is unnecessary, so the only cars you see are those owned voluntarily. I was struck by how new and expensive all the cars on the road looked when I lived there this summer. In Chicago, the overwhelming majority of the cars I walk by are 10-year-old beige econoboxes.
Luxury cars may be around for the long haul, but I suspect cars of necessity will not.
> I was struck by how new and expensive all the cars on the road looked when I lived there this summer.
That has less to do with "we don't need a car so we're only going to buy fancy" but with how affluent SF is. The quality of cars on the road directly correlates to how wealthy a neighbourhood or town or country is.
I was in Luxemburg two years ago. A brand new BMW 3 series was downright pedestrian. I don't think I've ever seen so many fancy cars in one area as I did there. SF by comparison, is a shitshow of crappy cars.
You can see this effect if you drive down the peninsula. SF has normal cars, south SF has old beat up cars, then the fanciness of cars waxes and wanes, until you reach the general Palo Alto area where there's a shitload of Teslas and other fancy cars. Even Maseratis are relatively normal. And then you go further south and the quality of cars starts dropping again.
But what you will see rarely in the Bay Area are supercars like Lamborghini, Ferrari and such. I don't know why, but I would venture it's got to do with the fact that most people use their cars for commuting and supercars are terrible commuters. Or maybe the Bay Area just isn't affluent enough for those kinds of cars.
I suspect it has to do with the culture of not showing off. Most of the tech multimillionaires probably do not care as much about such vanities as their reputation and/or impact on the world and therefore has better use for their money.
Anyone with actual knowledge of the matter please chime in. ;)
Cars may be fashion statements, but also: they are loud; they are expensive; they sit unused most of the time; their emissions are a health hazard; their production and use is a disaster for the environment; they cause terrible city planning; they are unusable by children, the elderly, the disabled, the poor, many tourists, etc.; and most importantly they are killing machines, one of the leading causes of death.
The reason people like cars is mostly that they are currently economically necessary tools in many parts of the world. Once that is no longer true, there will be many people happy to ditch their cars.
People will ditch their secondary cars, but not their primary. Right now, many families have two cars: The family car, which is flexible, big and does lots of different things; and the commuter car, which is used to get to work and back, but sits at home on the weekends. I can see people ditching their commuter car for self-driving, but it will take a long time for people to be willing to ditch that family car.
If you think Americans were being irrational when it came to the gun control debate, just wait until the sentiment catches on that the gub'ment wants to take away their cars. "You can take it when you pry it from my cold, dead hands" will sound quaint.
In 30-50 years, children would ask their parents, "What was it like to have to spend so much money on your car? You actually had to own one yourself?" The horror!
> Guess where we are now? I'll calculate this for you. Tesla announced that their replacement batteries cost $12000 for the 85kWh version. That is $140/kWh. Right now, in 2015, we are to the left of this entire diagram already.
Does the Tesla do 240 Wh/mile? I searched quickly and saw 480 from someone, is there an official figure for this?
In addition to the official figure, which is measured over the EPA test, any Tesla owner can tell you what their actual average is. Mine's 305 over 27k miles.
I couldn't find the original source for the $12k claim, but some articles mention this is the price after 8 years. They had a deal where you prepay $12k now and get your battery in 8 years, which sounds too similar to be a different deal and can't be used to support a $/kWh claim.
"Where does hydrogen sit in this equation? Currently, filling up hydrogen costs $12/kg at the moment in California. This is roughly in line with the actual cost of hydrogen - a bit on the low side if you want to commercially exploit one of those expensive filling stations, but we can safely assume that if hydrogen were ubiquitous, the price is roughly in this order. This will get you about 60 miles, so your cost is about $0.20/mi. An electric car costs about $0.06/kWh to fill up, and drives 4-6 miles on that charge. That's about a cent per mile. Yes. A 20-to-1 difference in running costs. This isn't percents change, this is orders of magnitude."
I've worked on hydrogen fuel-cells, and I wasn't particularly enthused by them. However, passing off a competitor (Tesla's Elon Musk) trashing the competition as a factual "we've known" reeks of fanboyism and idol worship.
Its not fanboyism at all. How many Model S vehicles are in the wild? They can charge almost anywhere, have range above 250 miles per charge, and have a Supercharger network that's fully operational. (And that's only the Model S, I neglect the Leaf for the moment even though there are for more in the wild, regardless of their range)
How many fuel cell vehicles are in consumer hands? Can they charge at home? Do they have a nationwide refueling network?
It may be in general case, but Musk earned the trust for being precise and honest - so it's more like listening to the opinion of a proven specialist in the field (with a staff full of experts behind him to call him on his mistakes).
He seems to have a typical engineer problem with underestimating time, but at least is not trying to bullshit anyone; even in his "misleading" announcements he's straigth and to the point. You can see that he honestly does his best to deliver. It's a refreshing quality.
May be he doesn't know something? Elon several times praised Merlin engines - which are certainly quite impressive. But he seemingly omitted some other rocket engines which were technically even better.
He's very good in delivering - and delivering a lot, but I think he still promises even more. And that's not too typical for engineers.
With the assumption that hydrogen is indeed "Fool cells", some possibilities for why Toyota may still be pursuing it (not necessarily in any order. Largely listing for discussion and for thinking about later in more depth).
1) Japanese govt. incentives are sufficient to push Toyota and other Japanese companies to try and make Hydrogen work.
2) It's a conspiracy between car companies and oil companies (I don't see how this can work because I don't see how car companies benefit.)
3) Car companies don't like the fact that EVs have lower maintenance, because a large chunk of their profits comes from maintenance and repairs.
4) Car companies are basically behaving like Blackberry after the iPhone. Their current model works, and being incumbents, they find it hard to imagine a world that does not work like the current one.
5) EVs would be too much of a revolution and they would essentially lose all their incumbent advantages. FCV basically follow the same model and so they allow incumbent car companies to better fend off new entrants than if EVs became popular (I find it interesting that all the new entrants are EV manufacturers or rumored to be making EVs (Apple)).
Any other ideas?
Personally, I think #s 4 and 5 (both of which are basically blindness caused by incumbency) are the biggest factors. This is bolstered by this Toyota quote in the article:
“You may think 35 years is a long time,” Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. “But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary.”
The way Japanese manufacturers seem to be the only ones who are so uniquely focused on hydrogen, however, seems to indicate that Japanese policy is also playing a large role.
One theory is that Japan's methane hydrate resources [1] give them the opportunity to become at least energy independent, if not a net energy exporter. For a traditionally resource-poor nation, this is an attractive prospect, but it requires the adoption of hydrogen as a fuel, so the Japanese government is strongly encouraging it. Another theory is that Toyota has done the math and decided that they can't compete with China on EVs (e.g., see [2]) and so are looking for a different game to win.
This seems similar to how focused the American car companies in the 90s and Oughts seemed on Hydrogen Fuel Cells: a lot of it just seemed to be perverse market incentives, including Government research grants, to build proofs of concept HFC vehicles with no actual practicality. That said, at least it doesn't seem to be all Japanese manufacturers as thus far Nissan seems to be fairly transparent that they are focused on electric vehicles.
Also: even if fuel cells won't be needed for most vehicles, i could see how it would fit heavy equipment, trucks, etc . And maybe that all that will be left from their industry and they're just preparing for that?
Unfortunately, hydrogen doesn't have the energy density required for trucks. They'll need to move to natural gas or biodiesel until batteries catch up.
> Cryo-compressed hydrogen stations cost about $2.1 million apiece today, while Asemblon figures that stations using its form of hydrogen fuel would cost about one-tenth as much.
Even if you get the cost down to $200K for a cryo-hydrogen fueling station, you still need to make the hydrogen from natural gas (which you could just burn in the first place) or from electrolysis (which is terribly inefficient).
You'll see natural gas truck powerplants long before you see hydrogen versions. Natural gas fueling stations are very inexpensive and straightforward where there is natgas infrastructure already run.
I was asking myself the same question since some years, too. I just googled for some minutes and the only realistic reasons why they prefer hydrogen over elctric I found were: more range than electric and quicker refueling than electric. And both points are highly questionable in my opinion. So unfortunately I didn't found any rational explanation why they prefer hydrogen.
The comparison made here is misleading -- both hydrogen and electricity have heavy storage systems that make up a larger fraction of vehicle weight the larger the range of the vehicle is, which is a problem both have compared to gasoline. So, comparing how much distance per unit of the energy source a vehicle gets based on a vehicle that only has storage to get a single-digit number of miles on a fill-up for one source vs. one that has storage for an order of magnitude more for the other source is not an apples to apples comparison. Scaling up to similar range would make the comparison substantially worse for electric.
That's not to say that Hydrogen isn't more expensive than electricity for the utility provided when you consider actual use in powering motor vehicles, but the comparison made here is quite poor and can only be seen as deliberately misleading (since Musk clearly is not innocently ignorant of the scaling issue it ignores.)
I appreciate the polite response! Let's assume weight isn't an issue, as it drastically contributes to vehicle stability due to having such a low center of gravity (From what I've heard from Model X engineers, its damn near impossible to roll).
* Distribution network: Hydrogen filling stations are expensive. Very expensive. There are very few of them. Electric vehicles can be charged from any 120V outlet, although 220V+ is preferable (Model S owners in a pinch can charge at RV campsites for a few bucks when there are no superchargers around). Tesla's Supercharge network covers almost the entire US (they will complete their buildout in 2016).
* Conversion efficiency: Hydrogen, unless produced from methane/natural gas, will never be as efficient as straight charging an electric vehicle. You can charge your electric car with solar panels on your roof, or an electrical grid that gets cleaner by the day as coal is phased out (and natural gas will phase out as wind and solar begin to dominate generation).
* Range: Batteries are getting cheaper stupid fast. We're already ~5 years ahead of the curve. The failure scenarios are very safe (I'm using Tesla's titanium plate armored pack as the example) compared to a Hydrogen storage failure. Could charging happen faster? Sure. But needing a ~5-10 minute turnaround on your vehicle's fueling is an edge case; the vast majority of owners are going to charge at home overnight, at their workplace, or at Superchargers (or other non-Tesla high current charging stations).
But this is more of a comparison of next-generation fuels. Gasoline is only included in the post to provide a baseline comparison that people can easily understand.
Sure, but IMO they are most interesting to compare in a context of what they each offer over conventional (gasoline) fuel, rather than versus eachother. Otherwise we leave out the context of where we are coming from today.
It is incredibly frustrating to not have more options outside of California (from Michigan) over IC engines. Modern gas engines are getting more and more complex in order to meet stricter emissions standards while still delivering fuel economy and power. I have no interest in direct injected engines that make 200hp/liter, they are far more complex and unreliable than engines from 10 years ago. The IC engine is far past its prime and yet the political and market forces are keeping it around because of legacy costs.
It is interesting to read a thorough refutation of the legitimacy of hydrogen fuel cells, specifically because I thought this was a known quantity... It feels like reading about how wood-burning stoves just aren't going to work out for central heating.
"Toyota has gone, to put it midly, full macintosh."
I assume the fuel cell stuff is mostly running on inertia at this point, as full electric vehicles and battery tech advances they'll be first to go except for a few tiny niches.
Thank you, I appreciate the response. Presuming we create a low cost process to produce hydrogen and all our cars and power plants were burning hydrogen as fuel, it would not be an extreme statement to say we would have more rain and snow?
Not really. Let me check... according to Wikipedia, hydrogen has energy density of 142 MJ/kg.
In 2014, about 136.78 billion gallons of gasoline was consumed in the US, which is about 518 billion liters. Gasoline has energy density of 32.4 MJ/L, so this amounts to 1.68 x 10^19 J = 16.8 EJ.
If all this gasoline converts to hydrogen economy, we get 118 billion kilograms of hydrogen (per year), which will produce 1.06 trillion kilograms (or 1.06 billion tons) of water.
An estimate for the total amount of water vapor in the atmosphere says 12,900 cubic kilometers, or 12.9 trillion tons.
So, not exactly a drop in the bucket, but more like a teaspoon in the bucket, I guess.
Not necessarily, right now it's more economical to reform it out of natural gas or other fossil fuel so it's not like hydrogen fuel would take water in that's turned into hydrogen.
But even if efficient catalyst driven electrolysis were used to generate hydrogen for fuel, it's not likely that the water would be extracted from the air, they'll suck up liquid ground water that wouldn't necessarily have ended up evaporating into the atmosphere. So the water generated by hydrogen burning cars will end up as extra water vapor that wouldn't have otherwise been emitted.
But, gasoline burning cars already emit almost a gallon of water vapor for each gallon of fuel burnt, so depending on the efficiency of the hydrogen cars, there could be a net decrease in water vapor emitted. (I'm not sure how much hydrogen a car would use to travel an equivalent distance as a gasoline powered car)
I'm imagining a plane this big and it's awesome. I can already see the Michael Bay film. A little impractical right now though I think we can all agree. I think by the time hydrogen becomes feasible for planes, the landscape will likely be wildly different.
I have to laugh every time I read such statements. It's like the man who invented the apartment claiming houses now obsolete. Price is not always the driving force. If it were, SUVs would not exist, nor would BMW, Merc, Ferrari any every other performance car brand.
Cars are as much personal statements as houses, probably more so. Relatively few people see you in your house, but everyone sees which car you drive. Setting aside the robot driver debates, these are fashion items. Society isn't going to abandon such vanities simply to better leverage a new technology.