Has Tesla Killed the Fuel Cell Vehicle?

I found this interesting

I do think that green, lack of tail pipe emissions is a reason some buy the prius. I really doubt it gets many sales for low ghg emissions. I did have a strange encounter the other day, when some one commented to me, that they had never heard country music come out of a Prius before. I thought wow, this car still caries a lot of wacky stereotypes. 5 people thought I plugged it in (2010 gen III liftback), at least 3 dozen inquires on gas mileage, at least 10 people thought it was more expensive that it is, etc. Somehow just me driving it sold 1 prius, a ct200h, and a camry hybrid, and I am in no way pushing the prius.

But to the meat of the matter. Will people buy fuel cell cars because they are green? I would say no, that would be a reason not to buy one. The volt is a political punching bag, if people are forced to subsidize hydrogen stations those fuel cell cars are going to be anouther political target. The volt, even though developed under bush, has become obama's car. Mitt attached it in his campaign. A Fuel cell car will become a democratic punching bag, as George bushes (or who ever is in charge of the republican's at the time) car, and the tea partiers will join the democrats..

The phev not the tesla is what is likely to be the death call of the pure fuel cell car. You can fill it up at home. Look at the volt and i3, well i3 if it had a 3 cylinder engine and a 6 gallon gas tank. As long as you can buy some fuel, methanol, ethanol, algea bio diesel, and fuel the rest on renewables, you likely will be kinder to the earth with one of these, and spend less money on fuel than a fuel cell. Say you can get 70% on renewable (solar or wind), and you can plug in at home or at work. I don't know how a fuel cell can compete energy cost wise. If the gen III less expensive tesla is a success, and a redesigned volt, energi, or phv takes off, then that is anouther nail in fuel cells coffin in the US.

Now there are people that can't get to a plug, but they generally also are not initial adopters of car technology, so lets look 15 yeras out. I could see a fuel cell in a phev instead of an ice. It all depends on gas prices, ghg fears, and infrastructure. I would not say fuel cells are dead, but they certainly don't look like they did in 2004.

 

The review seemed a bit Tesla biased to me (being the Honda seemed to have the Tesla beat on some categories, but the author diminished these points). Of course, if they had a category of which car is drop dead sexy, the Tesla would win that too.

If you were to ask me which car would I get? Tesla.

 

What category does the clarity win?

I think the bias is against future fuel cells that are better than the clarity, but again plug-ins are not standing still. I would be shocked if a nation wide hydrogen fuelling structure was built before 2035. That leaves fuel cells at a big disadvantage to plug-ins for the lifetime of any car you buy in the next 5 years and expect to drive outside of California, Japan, or Europe.

I pulled this little bit of pro clarity stuff up from 2009
The New Great Race - - Tesla versus Clarity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
Note what has changed in 4 years.

Now we have the improved batteries in the 60kwh Tesla S, getting epa 95 mpge. That means on renewable electricity, or ccgt versus steam reformed hydrogen the Tesla is more efficient than a clarity (60mpge), despite the extra performance and weight.

Charging time has dropped from 4 hours to 1 hour on the new free quick chargers, and the battery swap, available at one station in california is less than 2 minutes.

In the mean time we have promised cost reductions on the fcv, but the key benefits have all disapeared.

 

Austingreen - I'd say in fuel time and lease cost.

Fuel Time - 3-5 minutes vs. 30 minutes (currently)(.....pun not intended but is there anyway).

Lease cost - The author does bring up a valid point that the true cost of the car may be different (and perhaps very expensive for the clarity), but if you were just to compare lease expenses, the clarity would be less expensive.

 

Gone in 90 Seconds: Tesla's Battery-Swapping Magic - Businessweek
90 seconds is much faster than 3-5 minutes. Charging at home is faster than driving and trying to find a hydrogen pump. I would say its at least 10 minutes for fuel cells because you need to drive to one of the few stations, and its much longer if you don't live in southern california.

My advantage goes tesla, but only tesla. No one else is putting up free quick chargers and building battery swap stations.

But you could lease a leaf for $199 instead of a clarity. The tesla S is clearly a more desirable car. I wonder what those bmw i3s will lease for, that would be a more fair comparison. We have toyota saying their fuel cell vehicle will cost about as much as a tesla. My round is thinking cost goes to the plug-in, but we have yet to see what fuel cell cost really is, we have only seen these small quantity leases.

 

No, I would say the Tesla isn't going to displace fuel cell cars, but that is due to a technicality.
There is nothing to displace.

Will they compete when the mass produced, freely available fuel cell cars are made? Sure they will, and at that time we will see how they stack up.

Personally, unless there is an efficient home fueling option for the hydrogen vehicles I give the fueling advantage to Tesla, and EVs in general as plugging in at home is vastly more convenient (for me at least) than stopping while traveling to fill up with gas, much less hydrogen stations.

The lease prices currently offered are heavily subsidized. I'll compare the lease and sale prices when they make the hydrogen cars widely available.

 

If its like corn ethanol, and Congress is picking winners and losers, we have already picked PHEV/EV (and corn) as the horses we choose to ride. If it's merit based, I gotta give FCV a chance to see why Toyota likes it so much. And apparently CA-state is willing to give it a shot, otherwise forget it. H2 infrastructure does not scare me too much as I know you can put H2 supply on trucks and ship it around sort-of like gasoline. Possibly just add a dispenser to the truck, and voila instant H2. H2 is made from nat gas (much cheaper now) so this is the time to give it a try.

 

But are they even really green? The hydrogen doesn't magically appear at the filling station any more than the electricity for a plug-in/EV magically appears at your wall outlet. I've read that the production costs for hydrogen are fairly high, and most of it comes from separating it from fossil fuels like natural gas. Its nothing more than a (currently) inefficient battery.

 

EV makes a lot more sense from an infrastructure standpoint. Electricity is everywhere. Maybe you need fast chargers, but it's still cheaper than installing a way to store and deliver hydrogen. Nevermind the industry behind making it in the first place.

 

Congress picked both, and subsidized fcv at a higher level for a number of years. It continued to put back in fuel cell subsidies. Yes congress did pick a winner, fuel cells. When the DOE tried to change the pick, congress continued high funding of fuel cells, even though they failed every milestone.

Battery/motor technology is key to bev, fcev, and fcv. When the government started funding plug-ins in 2006, the cars reached every milestone except sales. Sales are on pace to hit goals in 2018, what was wanted in 2015. FCV may reach in 2017 the goal for 2010, but again these are promises, and no one actually has sold to the public a fcv, only leased.

Nothing wrong about giving it a shot. California favors FCV over BEVs. They get 7 ZEV credits instead of 3 for a BEV. CARB was one of the biggest lobbying groups to get funds restored to fuel cells. California appropriated money for a hydrogen highway, but wrapped it in renewable rules, so only DOE funds were used to build most of the hydrogen stations. Every time we get close to a milestone, it is removed. The next milestone is 2015-2017, my bet is car companies will fail to produce the promised fcv. If they do, I still don't want huge federal subsidies to build hydrogen fueling infrastructure.

In 2018 to get EPA waiver approval, CARB removed the extra credits for fuel cells versus BEVs. The rules seem quite wierd against phevs though.
Vehicle Technologies Office: Fact #771: March 18, 2013 California Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate is Now in Effect

Those don't scare me either, taxes to put it in place scare me. How many taxes from Virginia are going to go to build hydrogen fueling infrastructure that we aren't likely to use.

 

They can be green That is only if a lot of money is put in place to make it that way, solar and wind to hydrogen. I don't believe people that are green really want these things, as this electricity is more efficient in a plug-in. Hence my answer was it is unlikely.

 

Obviously toyota is pushing fuel cells because

A) They have spent a lot of money, and have a team commited to it. The team wants to keep going, and they want governments to help pay for the R&D

B) Only the biggest companies (mercedes, vw, bmw, toyota, gm, nissan, hyundai) can afford to sell fuel cell cars. If they can pull it off its a barrier to entry for upstarts like Tesla.

C) They really believe they are best

D) They don't believe batteries will improve, they just put out pr to confuse other companies

E) Dealers hate BEVs and PHEVs because they require less maintenance. Toyota wants to support them with a car that is going to need dealer service.

F) All of the Above

G) A, B, and E

I'll leave it up to you other guessers, or pick one of the choices.

 

Since most manufacturers of FCVs have chosen compressed gas, a tanker truck just isn't going to be filling a 10k psi tank soon. You could with liquid hydrogen, but those tanks vent some off everyday to keep the rest cold. How many people will want a car that has to be filled every week while just sitting in the garage. On second thought, keeping such a car in the garage probably isn't a good idea.

Trucking the hydrogen around isn't going to work long term. It's just too expensive, and the $4 to $5 per kilogram will quickly shoot up to $9+. It's a similar situation to styrofoam. We can recycle it, but many places don't because the fuel cost to ship it to the recycling plant is more than what's worth.

A semi tank trailer can hold up to 9100gals. Such a trailer can only hold 2440kg of liquid hydrogen. Actually, less since the tank will have thicker walls for insulation. The trailer can hold about a quarter the amount of hydrogen compared to gasoline. And it will need to be shipped farther do to the less extensive infrastructure.

 

Well, in the whole area of green energy, CA must be doing a great job of getting USA tax dollars to build out solar, EV's etc. So I would not penalize H2 fuel cells in particular for that.

Geez I do not know how to fill a 10000 psia gas tank...I know up to 4000 psia is probably what they have on a H2 truck. Compressors obviously but I am not experienced with 10000 psig, if that's what it is. But I am not thinking liquid H2 has much chance of being wide-spread option. Compressed H2 via pipeline or truck...but it's OK if the truck does not hold as much as H2 as gasoline...it'll still fill a lot of FCV cars for the intial roll-out of a few cars.

 

Hydrogen vehicle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It's not Tesla Bias . . . in fact considering how they made the Clarity look as good as possible, I'd REALLY not call the article biased. The fact that the article failed to mention the HUGE cost of building the "hydrogen highway" - which has all but been abandoned by the oil industry (the industry that'd have the most to gain) should silently state volumes ... never mind the fact that the 10,000PSI hydrogen fuel tanks are not capable of lasting the life of the car ... another consumable. These folks were as nice as humanly possible in their comparison. If anything, they turned a blind eye to some of the deficits of hydrogen transportation.

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+1

quite true, but I wish they would limit there request, they want more of everything. What they got was more of what they wanted, and the DOE got less of what it wanted. I liked chu's priorities better than the state of California.

It takes a lot of energy to make it liquid, but it takes diesel to move the truck. If you are building infrastructure the energy ballance unless the trips are very short is to liquify the hydrogen, truck it to the station, and store it there either as a liquid or compressed.

For roll out perhaps Air Products can just leave some canisters out. The hydrogen station here has a reformer, but it is part of the university, fuels a bus, and is used for educational purposes, hopefully our own state senators ride the hydrogen bus and learn about it, before appropriating money

 

The overall hypocracy in some of the articles, is we have EV-proponents, who hold as the second greatest sin of mankind criticizing EV's, at the same time damning FCV. Having said that, I have a hard time understanding how H2 makes sense myself. Alls I really know is it's never a good idea to be too negative on new technology, because sometimes you may be wrong with the passage of time (or with big enough tax incentives).