Are hydrogen fuel cell cars like Toyota Mirai the future?

BeenThroughItAll

bigjl wrote: »

You could nearly hit your target of 15min stop if your journey had a Tesla Fast Charger and obviously you had a Tesla!

Hardly. Superchargers are 100kW rated IIRC, and take up to an hour to fully charge a Model S pack.

gzoom

Superchargers are rated at 120KW, some rumours suggest as high as 135KW. 150KW is the limit of the battery at the moment.

But forget all that. At the moment your only choice for a non-Petrol/Diesel/LPG car to do your 350 miles trip is a Model S. Unless you happen to live next to a hydrogen fuel station.

At the end of the day consumers will decided which way new technology goes. Hydrogen is 10 years+ away from 'mass market'. GM is bringing out a 200 mile range EV for under $35,000 next year. Nissan and Tesla have both said a $35,000 200 mile range EV is coming in 2017.

My personal feeling, if you want to wait for hydrogen fuel cell cars....Your be waiting a long while yet.

WellKnownSid

One thing I tend to disagree with gzoom on - consumers won't be the ones who decide, it'll be down to the marketing of the tech by the conventional players until some disruptive force comes along. Look at phones - how many years were our lives ruled by a handful of mobile phone operators that controlled the market and stifled innovation until Apple came along?

The whole car industry has a fundamental difficulty with EVs - without internal combustion engines they simply have no business model.

We're going to see 'range extenders' heavily marketed as the way forward. Not the best solution by any means - because you get the worst of both worlds, internal combustion plus all of the green battery issues. Let's be honest it's not really range extending at all - it's a hybrid with a very slightly bigger battery.

But that'll be the solution we're offered until Tesla - and bizarrely possibly Apple and Google - become the disruptive force and reinvent motoring. Your basic creative destruction theory. Today's car manufacturers will join Polaroid / Kodak / Nokia / Ericsson / etc.

BeenThroughItAll

gzoom wrote: »

Superchargers are rated at 120KW, some rumours suggest as high as 135KW. 150KW is the limit of the battery at the moment.

But forget all that. At the moment your only choice for a non-Petrol/Diesel/LPG car to do your 350 miles trip is a Model S. Unless you happen to live next to a hydrogen fuel station.

At the end of the day consumers will decided which way new technology goes. Hydrogen is 10 years+ away from 'mass market'. GM is bringing out a 200 mile range EV for under $35,000 next year. Nissan and Tesla have both said a $35,000 200 mile range EV is coming in 2017.

My personal feeling, if you want to wait for hydrogen fuel cell cars....Your be waiting a long while yet.

Fair enough, you obviously have more knowledge of the Superchargers than I do - but they still won't allow for the 15 minute stop I'd expect. A Model S isn't going to realistically and consistently guarantee 350mi, though, is it?


A 200 mile range simply ISN'T enough for many purposes, and for that reason I will always have to have a FF vehicle until such time as I can buy a BEV with a realistic 3-400mi range and a 15min charge time (which is years away, if ever), or I can buy a HFV within the same parameters.


By the time battery technology advances sufficiently to achieve the first option, we'll have a hydrogen refuelling infrastructure, and HFVs will be significantly cheaper than they are now.


I have nothing against BEVs, and that's why my commuting car is a Zoe (although I wouldn't recommend the Renault ownership experience).


What I do have is a customer base including some of the biggest automotive manufacturers in the UK, several R&D firms who actually develop battery and charging technology (they're several years ahead of what's on the market), some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world and fuels distribution and storage companies in Europe, and OEDM businesses who build technology like the solar-powered hydrogen generator I mentioned before.


Most of those businesses are talking about HFVs as the future, and I'm happy to go along with their judgement as they are right at the heart of development.

Herzlos

BeenThroughItAll wrote: »

A 200 mile range simply ISN'T enough for many purposes, and for that reason I will always have to have a FF vehicle until such time as I can buy a BEV with a realistic 3-400mi range and a 15min charge time (which is years away, if ever), or I can buy a HFV within the same parameters.

It depends a lot on your usage, but with the current car ownership paradigm it seems odd.

I can see a future where most people have an EV for normal day to day use and short trips, who will go out and hire an ICE or ICE-based extender trailer for the long trips, in largely the same way we hire vans currently.

I do 100+ mile trips maybe 4 times a year, covering maybe a week or 2. It'd be much more economical for me to drive an EV to the train station and back and just hire a diesel car for the 2 weeks I need the range. Or just stop for a 2-hour break every 200-300 miles (which is like 4-6 hours at best in UK traffic).

BeenThroughItAll

Herzlos wrote: »

It depends a lot on your usage, but with the current car ownership paradigm it seems odd.

I can see a future where most people have an EV for normal day to day use and short trips, who will go out and hire an ICE or ICE-based extender trailer for the long trips, in largely the same way we hire vans currently.

I do 100+ mile trips maybe 4 times a year, covering maybe a week or 2. It'd be much more economical for me to drive an EV to the train station and back and just hire a diesel car for the 2 weeks I need the range. Or just stop for a 2-hour break every 200-300 miles (which is like 4-6 hours at best in UK traffic).

Certainly for many users a BEV is entirely appropriate, but for my personal circumstances they can only be a second-vehicle option.


I regularly do 500 mile days, where I'll travel from North East to Essex and back again, and I just couldn't do that consistently in an EV, even if I had a Tesla with a 200 mile range. I'd just waste too much time.

Herzlos

Yeah that's fair enough; it'll be a while before 500 mile electric journeys and viable

almillar

For people in cities it might be possible to supply enough charging points, note MIGHT. In small towns and villages, forget it.

You're forgetting about charging points installed in peoples' own homes - where they presumably store their car all night.

but when the battery goes flat it takes far to long to recharge

If your petrol or diesel runs out of fuel you'll need a push.

Electricity supply - How many extra power stations will we need to recharge all these electric cars (not to mention the extra cabling etc required). We are already close to bare bones on the generation side and there seems to be little rush to build much more capacity.

The problem is meeting the PEAKS in demand. You want to smooth the demand out. Say, by charging cars over night, then generators can keep running instead of starting/stopping. Adding sustainable capacity is an obvious solution too - buy an electric car, get those free solar panels, which is why it's so short sighted to reduce the tariffs.

And the big one - Environment. The pollution created making these batteries is huge, the pollution from the powerstations to charge them is huge, the pollution in disposing of the old batteries is huge. They are not environmentally friendly in any shape or form.

Any evidence that building an electric car is more polluting than a diesel/petrol? Those batteries won't get disposed of, they'll get re-used (connect them to solar panels!) and when they do get recycled, there's only 3% waste! Also check gzoom's post on how much energy is required to drill for, refine, and transport oil!

Interesting thread?
He asked if anybody had driven a Toyota Mirai?

Bit of a generic question, but here we are talking.

The basic reason for me is that I often do 350mi trips...

Precisely. An EV isn't for your and you've thought it through. So many people don't often do 350 mile trips and could easily have an EV as a second car at least. Anyone

bigjl

BeenThroughItAll wrote: »

Hardly. Superchargers are 100kW rated IIRC, and take up to an hour to fully charge a Model S pack.

According to the info I have read the Tesla fastcharger network can charge a vehicle to nearly full charge in 20mins.

You may have misunderstood I was not referring to a home charger but the free network of Tesla funded fast chargers.

bigjl

This is the charger network that I was referring to.

I should have used the name Super Chargers rather than fast chargers.

http://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/supercharger