▲ | nautilius 16 days ago | |||||||
Efficiency is the standard red herring of the battery crowd - if efficiency was the prime motivation, we would all be driving bicycles and SUV or sportscars would not exist. What are your other metrics? It’s an electric drivetrain with all advantages, but with the range of a gasoline car. Refueling cNG or LNG is standard in Europe, LH2 works just fine. Google “burning Tesla” for that ridiculous take on why batteries would be inherently safe. | ||||||||
▲ | philjohn 16 days ago | parent | next [-] | |||||||
Except it's efficiency for the same class of vehicles we're talking about, so a bike is an apples to oranges comparison. Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV. Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing). Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people. And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway. Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing. | ||||||||
▲ | crote 16 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |||||||
Range is almost entirely irrelevant. The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough. You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk. BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier. | ||||||||
▲ | pipodeclown 16 days ago | parent | prev [-] | |||||||
Efficiency doesn't matter when you're literally pumping energetic liquid from the ground. It does matter when you need to build 150% more solar panels to produce the energy to create your energetic liquid/gas. | ||||||||
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