Hydrogen question

these are just r&d using governments money. many companies have dropped out as the money dried up.

no one is going to fund multimillion dollar fueling stations all over the country.

having a 3-500 ile battery isn't all that bad, and prices will keep coming down. then you don't need anything but more charging stations, which area lot cheaper, and you don't have to make electricity out of natural gas

 

Depends on how you store the hydrogen. In liquid form, the tank vents some periodically in order to keep the pressure from building up as the hydrogen warms. It isn't going bad, but you are losing fuel over time.

But the car companies pushing hydrogen for fuel have settled on compressed gas. Then the PEM type fuel cells they use are finicky about hydrogen purity. So there is basically just hydrogen in the tank. The fuel should be fine for quite sometime.

Long term, the concern isn't the gas, but the fuel cell and tank. The tank has a limited life for safety reasons, as the resin and other materials will degrade over time. It is 15 years from manufacturer, making them good for the typical life of the car, but it is a pricey component. That means lower resell, and the cars have become more 'disposable'.

The the fuel cell wears out with use, losing power over time. Current ones go maybe 80k miles before their output hits 50%. Making the car a plug in would help with this, as the cell sees less use, but the FCEV companies generally aren't fond of plug ins, and see the two in competition. Get use to plugging in a PFCEV, and you might get a BEV next is likely a concern of theirs.

 

As @Trollbait said, the issue isn’t the hydrogen going “bad” in the tank but will start to disappear. There a lot of ancillary parts like valves, pipes, seals, anywhere there’s an interface between the transfer of hydrogen. Toyota seems to have addressed the interface issues with some solid engineering, but I haven’t even looked at other manufacturers. I never wanted them to make a FCEV car. Looking at it from the retailer side, you want to drive the requirement for using more hydrogen, which would have driven the requirement for more stations, and better compressor technology in the long run which would have resulted in cheaper hydrogen stations. I wanted Toyota to build hydrogen trucks and buses to boost the requirement for hydrogen, not lessen it by building cars.


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