FCEVs are a scam. The mirai is heavier than BEVs with similar range, bulkier, and has a much smaller internal volume. BEV busses are volume limited not weight limited and are already capable of covering most routes with only overnight charging (so hydrogen is worse there). Fuelling time in real world situations favours the vehicle that is sitting at 80-100% full every morning over the one you have to visit a fuelling station for. Heavy trucking is cost limited, not time limited – so filling the trucj with the cheap electricity directly at 4x efficiency is better even in the low production season.
It’s also not “the only way” for air travel because there are no planes that use it, volume constraints limit use cases to those that mostly overlap with batteries (and don’t replace liquid fuels) and battery aircraft are much closer to production (albeit limited in niche so far).
Every single use case of hydrogen has better alternatives.
greengnu@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
quick refueling only matters if your travel distance exceeds your battery’s range (which for 95% of driving is less than 100 miles) I would agree on the weight issue only if you don’t engineer the hydrogen storage to properly survive car crashes. Range is of no practical use if it vastly exceeds your needs.
I find trains better for heavy transport and fixed route power lines would cover that problem in a more efficient manner.
Hydrogen would take double conversion loses if used like a battery and a flywheel would be more efficient at storing renewable energy at a grid level.
Off-grid energy storage can be done in heavy weight battery chemistries which can last forever without the maintenance cost that must occur with combustion. (heck even Nickel–iron batteries from 1901 would work)
I will grant you that hydrogen has many useful and wonderful applications.
Home energy storage and transportation are not one of them.
JoBo@feddit.uk 10 months ago
This is such a non-argument. I cannot have one car for short distances and another one for road trips.
There are no electric cars that can get me to my Dad’s and back without recharging. He does at least have off-road parking but he doesn’t have a safe charging point. I don’t have off-road parking so charging at home is not possible. Yes, I can pay over the odds to charge while I do my supermarket shop, but I wouldn’t usually use my car for the supermarket shop and I don’t want to use my car for the supermarket shop. The only option for long journeys is to take an annoyingly long break.
Hydrogen is very inefficient, for sure. But there’s no other way to get an electric plane that can replace existing passenger aircraft. Batteries are a non-starter for heavy transport because they’re too big and too heavy to be practical. That’s why we’ve been rolling out hydrogen buses for a couple of years now.](www.greencarfuture.com/…/how-hydrogen-buses-work)
greengnu@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
completely fair perspective, if you are required to travel large distances outside of cities then liquid fuels would be the superior option.
But if cities are linked by high speed rail and effective bus coverage; there would be no need for a car to visit someone. #fuckcars
I do agree that batteries are not a good solution for planes but I believe plane use should be only for special cases that are extremely time sensitive (like organ transplant transportation) and are of high social benefit (which could justify carbon fuel usage)
One doesn’t need batteries or combustion in heavy transport as fixed lines can just use electric wires which saves on moving weight and would make such transport more efficient that any carried fuel source.
JoBo@feddit.uk 10 months ago
I go to my Dad’s by train as often as possible but prices have doubled since the pandemic and there are usually two of us. It’s become impossibly expensive, which is why we bought a car last year after ten years without one. It does not get used for short journeys because the bus and the tram still work well enough, as do our feet and our bikes.
We cannot electrify our bus routes, unless we make them entirely useless for most people. Come on. I live where I do because it’s close to the tram station. But most people need a bus to get them to a tram station. And I usually need one when I get off the tram.
And I agree that a lot of plane travel is entirely unnecessary. But I’m not about to tell people that they can’t move to another country without waving goodbye forever to everyone they left back home. It’s an obscene proposition.
We have got to have solutions that actually work. Green hydrogen ticks a lot of vital boxes. We just need to be very clear that the only acceptable hydrogen is Green. I know a lot of the hatred for it comes from Big Carbon trying to hijack it. But the baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater,
schroedingershat@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You’re trying to argue that 10-15 minutes of reliable delay on a road trip over 500km trumps hours over the rest of the year filling (and also a probably 20 minutes of delay because hydrogen filling stations slow way down and only give half a tank during heavy use).