I’d recommend an electric car for avoiding oil changes, but I think we still have a few more years until cheap second hand electric cars become available.
No, a electric car is twice the price of an ICE car. It’s not an oil change per year that will break the deal.
Also don’t believe the 3000 miles oil change, it’s a scam. I change my oil every 8000 miles, there’s zero problem with that, especially if you put synthetic, but dino works the same.
Depends on if you shop around for oil. I can usually get mobile one high mileage synthetic for about $5/qt at Walmart and buy filters at napa when they have a deal on buying multiple qty.
So $40ish for full synthetic high mileage oil change.
I’ve been helping friends find a new car and at least in our area there’s no EVs available, new or used. The best anyone around here can do is put themselves on a wait list or buy an ICE.
Yeah most* engines can fairly easily do 7500mi changes on good synthetic. Even my 30 year old Honda expects 7500mi changes from the factory.
*I say “most” because a lot of modern direct injected turbocharged engines (designed for efficiency) have issues with fuel washdown due to DI cold starts and high turbo bearing heat cooking the oil to death. Those actually do need 5000mi oil changes typically, especially since 0w20 and 0w16 has real low film strength to start with.
To be sure of any OCI do an oil analysis from a lab like Blackstone at the end of your extended interval to make sure it’s still in acceptable shape.
You can find what the manufacturer recommends for your make and model in your owners manual or you can look it up online. It’s never 3k miles and is almost always something like 6-8k miles, with increased frequency as the vehicle ages. Older vehicles frequently burn more oil so you might want to check your levels more often if you use one as a daily driver.
It makes you a toxic hypocrite who looks like you’re either ban evading or sock puppeting on your new account as you screech at people to “go back where they came from,” dumbass.
I’ve had an electric car since 2011. The battery looks like it will last another 10 years.
Early Nissan Leaf batteries degraded relatively quickly (8-10 years) due to poor battery chemistry and no thermal management. Both of these issues have been fixed in all new electric cars (except the new Nissan Leaf which still doesn’t have battery cooling).
Even the old degraded batteries are valuable as static energy storage, and several people are using them as house batteries.
Most of the cost of a battery replacement is the manufacturer markup. There is at least one company making replacement Nissan Leaf batteries for significantly less than Nissan, and they include the latest chemistry and liquid cooling (unlike Nissan who just give you a second hand battery).
Most electric cars today have a 10 year warranty on the battery. Manufacturers wouldn’t be offering that if there was a reasonable chance you would need to replace the battery in that time.
Even if today’s EVs degraded like the first Leaf, when you start off with 250 miles of range you could lose a third of it and still have a very usable vehicle.
I have a 2011 Nissan Leaf AZE0 24kWh with about 40% battery degradation. It can drive about 80km (50mi), which is perfectly adequate for a second car. It is rarely driven more than 20km in a day.
My other car is a 2018 Nissan Leaf ZE1 E+ G 62kWh with about 4% battery degradation.
The fastest battery degradation happens when the battery is new, and the degradation slows down gradually over time. I expect the 2011 Leaf to still have at least 50km range in 2041, and the 2018 Leaf to still have at least 200km (130mi) range in 2038. Both of these will still suit my needs.
Seriously, unless you’re working a labor job in manufacturing there’s little reason to do 90% of all white collar jobs in person. It’s all staring at a damn computer screen anyway so who cares where you do it from?
Seriously… Everyone is missing all the side b.s that comes with cars especially new cars…
My car was “cheap” for a new car and it still came with a lane change radar thing… Guess who has a $1200 windshield replacement now because some schmuck kicked up a rock with their car? $300 was expensive for a windshield but now I need a freaking sensor alignment too?
Knew it would be a matter of time before the fuck_cars crowd popped in. Not everywhere is a city, and I work potentially all over the state. I also have equipment and gear I have to bring to the job. I actually need a vehicle.
Good for you, man. How would you like for most of the people, who don’t actually have exceptional use-cases, to not be on the road, in your way, in the form of traffic?
You two aren’t strongly disagreeing; he wants to make it more feasible outside of cities. I’ve met a handful of people who do indeed manage to bike around suburban towns.
Because the amenities you require are geographically close enough to not necessitate a car. I don’t know what the population density is where you live, but if it’s a city, there’s obviously going to be public transit to make that happen at least somewhat efficiently.
And yeah, the cities that don’t have effective public transportation, or just have unattractive public transportation (i.e. “its too crowded,” “I don’t want to be around this many people,” etc.) are the places where you’ll find more traffic on the road. In a rural setting though, it comes down to a low population density and much broader geographical ranges. I’d imagine that makes public transportation really inefficient, and in the eyes of local government, fiscally untenable.
Public transit only works in densely-packed cities. I do not want to live in a densely-packed city. In suburbs, where life is relatively pleasant, public transit is agonizingly slow compared to cars.
It works pretty well here in Berlin. The trains go far to the suburbs and beyond, are fast and comfortable. You pay 49 euros a month and can travel anywhere in the country with the ticket. Most of them go even at night.
Well, why don’t you compare? Open up Google Maps. Choose two points in the suburbs, and see how long it takes to travel between them by car versus by public transit.
I did the same, between my apartment complex and a nearby business, and the estimates are 12 minutes by car and 47 minutes by bus. Main problem: there’s a transfer in the middle of this route where I’d have to wait 11 minutes for the next bus to arrive.
I tried again with a different business, and got a direct bus route with no transfers and exactly the same route I’d take in a car. This is the best-case scenario for public transit, but going by car is still significantly faster: 10 minutes by car, or 17 minutes by bus.
You mean densely-packed cities? I would not call that sane. I would call that hellish. You have no privacy, no yard for your kids and pets to play in, almost no living space, a building manager threatening you with homelessness and catastrophic debt unless you bow to his every whim, and you pay a king’s ransom for the dubious privilege of living like that. No thank you.
You mean densely-packed cities? I would not call that sane. I would call that hellish.
You have no privacy,
There are forms of non-SFH density that offer plenty of privacy.
no yard for your kids and pets to play in,
The existence of rowhouses makes this false. It’s completely possible to have a yard while not living in densities that support public transportation and cycling.
Higher densities also usually come with common amenities like parks, where your children can play, and also walk to/cycle to without risking their lives. Their friends can also walk/cycle there.
almost no living space,
Baseless falsehood.
a building manager threatening you with homelessness
Higher densities does not equal living in a rental apartment, false again
and catastrophic debt unless you bow to his every whim,
As opposed to living in a house which you don’t have to incur any debt whatsoever to obtain? Hell of a statement.
and you pay a king’s ransom for the dubious privilege of living like that.
Cities are usually more expensive on account of the fact that people actually want to live there, because people want to be close to the things that they want to do, and not have to spend their lives sitting in traffic behind the wheel all their lives. Lots of places have also tax incentivized living in suburban densities to the detriment of those living in higher densities, so it’s not like the higher cost is a law of nature.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but I lived in a city for four years. I found it miserable, and it’s not for everyone. In fact I’d argue that you seemingly advocating for us to live in one big sprawl is the dystopian poor take here.
There are forms of non-SFH density that offer plenty of privacy.
Namely?
The existence of rowhouses makes this false. It’s completely possible to have a yard while not living in densities that support public transportation and cycling.
Rowhouses are just single-family housing subdivisions without gaps between the buildings. They are not high-density housing and they are not any more supportive of public transportation and cycling.
Furthermore, they combine the worst of both worlds: they’re little denser and therefore little better for the environment than single-family housing, but they do have a building manager whose whims you have to obey.
Higher densities also usually come with common amenities like parks, where your children can play, and also walk to/cycle to
My cats aren’t going to happily wander around in a park full of humans. They’re going to run and hide in terror. Parks are not a substitute for a yard.
almost no living space,
Baseless falsehood.
My parents’ single-family house has about three times the square footage of my apartment. That’s a fact, not a falsehood.
Higher densities does not equal living in a rental apartment
Irrelevant. Even if you “own” a part of a building, someone is in charge of the building as a whole—the building manager—and everyone living in that building must obey the building manager’s whims, no matter how cruel, or face fines and/or confiscation of “their” home.
Ownership of parts of buildings is a legal fiction ripe for abuse. Only entire buildings, and the plots of land on which they stand, can be truly owned.
As opposed to living in a house which you don’t have to incur any debt whatsoever to obtain?
“Buying” a condo incurs debt in exactly the same way as buying a house, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Cities are usually more expensive on account of the fact that people actually want to live there
Well, I certainly can’t imagine why.
people want to be close to the things that they want to do, and not have to spend their lives sitting in traffic behind the wheel all their lives.
A minor inconvenience, compared to everything that’s wrong with city life.
Hydrogen is only 30% efficient compared to 90-95% for batteries. Most hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels, and contains less energy than the fossil fuels used to make it.
Yes, but the difference is that it doesn’t move at all, which major companies are really pushing that technology, there was a hype, but now it just sits
but an electric car is heavier than a hydrogen car, so the electric platform is less efficient. imagine carrying an extra ton of a batterypack wherever u go. hydrogen could be made from renewable energy, and doesn’t require batteries to be stored. battery metals are finite. u can’t scale that up. 5kg of H2 translates to 400km mileage.
Most large combustion SUVs are heavier than most electric cars.
Sodium ion batteries are being produced with no rare metals in them, and will be in production cars within a year. Hydrogen is difficult to store due to is low volumetric density, it’s molecular size, and corrosive nature.
Hydrogen (fuel cell) cars all have a battery because a hydrogen fuel cell is slow to change it’s energy output, so can’t change its output fast enough to directly power the car.
Battery electric cars are about 90% efficient from charging from the grid to moving. Hydrogen cars are about 30% efficient from grid to moving when made from renewable energy. These efficiency numbers include the weight and rolling resistance of the car. The theoretical maximum efficiency of hydrogen storage allowed by the limits of physics is about 50%.
The volumetric density of hydrogen is so low that you would need 20 tanker trucks to transport the same amount of energy that 1 tanker truck of gasoline can carry. This is at maximum pressure or liquified.
Hydrogen only makes sense when the weight of the energy storage medium is critical. As demonstrated by American cars, it isn’t.
Twice as expensive to fill as a gas car and more expensive than a battery EV to buy, all while still producing tons of CO2 by steam reforming methane to make the hydrogen? Wow, sign me up!
Hydrogen is the answer, but the question is “How can fossil fuel companies keep making money while pretending to be green?”
Hydrogen trades volumetric energy density for gravimetric energy density. It is too difficult to build a car that can safely hold a reasonable amount of hydrogen without making it bigger or sacrificing cargo space, and building a distribution network on the same scale as gasoline is a problem we still have no idea how to solve.
I think hydrogen will be much more viable in shipping, where these problems are much less pronounced. Big trucks and container ships are less concerned with volume (weight is more important). And they move along common and predictable routes meaning you don’t need quite so many hydrogen gas stations. You distribution just needs to cover truck stops and ports.
The same infrastructure argument could go for electric though. It’s difficult to build infrastructure for these vehicles yes I agree but why would electric be any easier?
Also don’t quote me on this but i think there are ways to collect hydrogen at a home, which would reduce the need for these stations, at least in the city
It’s easier to build charging stations when we already have a massive grid for distributing electricity. We have no such infrastructure in place for distributing hydrogen. Producing hydrogen cleanly and efficiently is still a hard problem we haven’t really solved.
DC fast chargers cost something like $70k each. Hydrogen filling stations cost around a million each.
Also, with battery EVs home charging does most of the heavy lifting, you only use fast chargers for long trips. So just a handful of fast chargers on the main roads between cities makes battery EVs viable for a lot of people.
It’s not enough to collect hydrogen, a filling station also needs to compress it to 10,000 PSI to actually get it into a vehicle’s tank. So there’s no home filling for fuel cell EVs, you need a similar footprint to gas stations. Nobody’s interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars building all those filling stations.
The difference with hydrogen stations is that the vehicle turnover would be incredibly higher despite the larger cost, similar to a regular gas station
It actually isn’t. Hydrogen filling stations can only fill a couple of cars in a row before they need time to pump hydrogen from the storage tank to the buffer tank and compress and cool it to -40 degrees. So the number of cars they can handle in a day is not massively higher than a DC fast charger.
If it doesn’t have time to prepare between vehicles, it starts taking 20 minutes to fill each vehicle.
I’d recommend an electric car for avoiding oil changes, but I think we still have a few more years until cheap second hand electric cars become available.
I’d recommend not being poor
Then the oil change wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place
No, a electric car is twice the price of an ICE car. It’s not an oil change per year that will break the deal.
Also don’t believe the 3000 miles oil change, it’s a scam. I change my oil every 8000 miles, there’s zero problem with that, especially if you put synthetic, but dino works the same.
This is only true if you’re purchasing used. Anyone in the market for a NEW car absolutely can and should be considering an EV.
Also, you would be fucking shocked how expensive an oil change can be on some cars, even when doing it yourself.
Depends on if you shop around for oil. I can usually get mobile one high mileage synthetic for about $5/qt at Walmart and buy filters at napa when they have a deal on buying multiple qty.
So $40ish for full synthetic high mileage oil change.
I’ve been helping friends find a new car and at least in our area there’s no EVs available, new or used. The best anyone around here can do is put themselves on a wait list or buy an ICE.
Yeah most* engines can fairly easily do 7500mi changes on good synthetic. Even my 30 year old Honda expects 7500mi changes from the factory.
*I say “most” because a lot of modern direct injected turbocharged engines (designed for efficiency) have issues with fuel washdown due to DI cold starts and high turbo bearing heat cooking the oil to death. Those actually do need 5000mi oil changes typically, especially since 0w20 and 0w16 has real low film strength to start with.
To be sure of any OCI do an oil analysis from a lab like Blackstone at the end of your extended interval to make sure it’s still in acceptable shape.
Yeah I’ll totally get on that.
You can find what the manufacturer recommends for your make and model in your owners manual or you can look it up online. It’s never 3k miles and is almost always something like 6-8k miles, with increased frequency as the vehicle ages. Older vehicles frequently burn more oil so you might want to check your levels more often if you use one as a daily driver.
true 6-8000 is completely fine
(disclaimer i have no idea what imtalking abouy
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The type of person this meme if referring to clearly doesn’t have the money to buy a new car.
Also fuck Tesla and its shitty owner.
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No u.
You have a day old account btw.
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It makes you a toxic hypocrite who looks like you’re either ban evading or sock puppeting on your new account as you screech at people to “go back where they came from,” dumbass.
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You’re defending Elon and yet saying “go back to reddit”? L o fucking l
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Which will also need a costly battery replacement not long after buying it 😬
I’ve had an electric car since 2011. The battery looks like it will last another 10 years.
Early Nissan Leaf batteries degraded relatively quickly (8-10 years) due to poor battery chemistry and no thermal management. Both of these issues have been fixed in all new electric cars (except the new Nissan Leaf which still doesn’t have battery cooling).
Even the old degraded batteries are valuable as static energy storage, and several people are using them as house batteries.
Most of the cost of a battery replacement is the manufacturer markup. There is at least one company making replacement Nissan Leaf batteries for significantly less than Nissan, and they include the latest chemistry and liquid cooling (unlike Nissan who just give you a second hand battery).
Most electric cars today have a 10 year warranty on the battery. Manufacturers wouldn’t be offering that if there was a reasonable chance you would need to replace the battery in that time.
Even if today’s EVs degraded like the first Leaf, when you start off with 250 miles of range you could lose a third of it and still have a very usable vehicle.
Would you mind sharing which EV you have that has a battery that will last 22 years with normal use?
I have a 2011 Nissan Leaf AZE0 24kWh with about 40% battery degradation. It can drive about 80km (50mi), which is perfectly adequate for a second car. It is rarely driven more than 20km in a day.
My other car is a 2018 Nissan Leaf ZE1 E+ G 62kWh with about 4% battery degradation.
The fastest battery degradation happens when the battery is new, and the degradation slows down gradually over time. I expect the 2011 Leaf to still have at least 50km range in 2041, and the 2018 Leaf to still have at least 200km (130mi) range in 2038. Both of these will still suit my needs.
No, it will not. Stop spewing nonsense.
My 02 VW diesel goes 10,000+mi between oil changes. 50mpg fuel economy. The car cost $6000
Answer: hydrogen
Actual answer: Public transportation and bicycles
Actual actual answer: WFH
A job is not the only place any given person would have the need to transport themselves to.
Sure, I figured once you get past one “actual” any answer is allowed to be somewhat facetious.
The real actual answer is “all the above”.
Seriously, unless you’re working a labor job in manufacturing there’s little reason to do 90% of all white collar jobs in person. It’s all staring at a damn computer screen anyway so who cares where you do it from?
Seriously… Everyone is missing all the side b.s that comes with cars especially new cars…
My car was “cheap” for a new car and it still came with a lane change radar thing… Guess who has a $1200 windshield replacement now because some schmuck kicked up a rock with their car? $300 was expensive for a windshield but now I need a freaking sensor alignment too?
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Yeah
Knew it would be a matter of time before the fuck_cars crowd popped in. Not everywhere is a city, and I work potentially all over the state. I also have equipment and gear I have to bring to the job. I actually need a vehicle.
Good for you, man. How would you like for most of the people, who don’t actually have exceptional use-cases, to not be on the road, in your way, in the form of traffic?
That’s entirely not feasible for anyone living a typical life with errands to run and places to go, and you know it.
You two aren’t strongly disagreeing; he wants to make it more feasible outside of cities. I’ve met a handful of people who do indeed manage to bike around suburban towns.
I literally live a typical life with errands to run and places to go, entirely without a car.
Because the amenities you require are geographically close enough to not necessitate a car. I don’t know what the population density is where you live, but if it’s a city, there’s obviously going to be public transit to make that happen at least somewhat efficiently.
And yeah, the cities that don’t have effective public transportation, or just have unattractive public transportation (i.e. “its too crowded,” “I don’t want to be around this many people,” etc.) are the places where you’ll find more traffic on the road. In a rural setting though, it comes down to a low population density and much broader geographical ranges. I’d imagine that makes public transportation really inefficient, and in the eyes of local government, fiscally untenable.
…are far too slow to be a practical substitute for a car.
In the US? Yep! We really need working public transit that isn’t seen as a poor person’s “punishment”.
Public transit only works in densely-packed cities. I do not want to live in a densely-packed city. In suburbs, where life is relatively pleasant, public transit is agonizingly slow compared to cars.
It works pretty well here in Berlin. The trains go far to the suburbs and beyond, are fast and comfortable. You pay 49 euros a month and can travel anywhere in the country with the ticket. Most of them go even at night.
Well, why don’t you compare? Open up Google Maps. Choose two points in the suburbs, and see how long it takes to travel between them by car versus by public transit.
I did the same, between my apartment complex and a nearby business, and the estimates are 12 minutes by car and 47 minutes by bus. Main problem: there’s a transfer in the middle of this route where I’d have to wait 11 minutes for the next bus to arrive.
I tried again with a different business, and got a direct bus route with no transfers and exactly the same route I’d take in a car. This is the best-case scenario for public transit, but going by car is still significantly faster: 10 minutes by car, or 17 minutes by bus.
Usually either one bus or one train. 10 minutes longer, sometimes 15. And so much cheaper and better for the environment.
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This is highly dependent on what kind of built environment you happen to live in. In sanely built places, it’s very much not true.
You mean densely-packed cities? I would not call that sane. I would call that hellish. You have no privacy, no yard for your kids and pets to play in, almost no living space, a building manager threatening you with homelessness and catastrophic debt unless you bow to his every whim, and you pay a king’s ransom for the dubious privilege of living like that. No thank you.
A lot of untruths to unpack here.
There are forms of non-SFH density that offer plenty of privacy.
The existence of rowhouses makes this false. It’s completely possible to have a yard while not living in densities that support public transportation and cycling.
Higher densities also usually come with common amenities like parks, where your children can play, and also walk to/cycle to without risking their lives. Their friends can also walk/cycle there.
Baseless falsehood.
Higher densities does not equal living in a rental apartment, false again
As opposed to living in a house which you don’t have to incur any debt whatsoever to obtain? Hell of a statement.
Cities are usually more expensive on account of the fact that people actually want to live there, because people want to be close to the things that they want to do, and not have to spend their lives sitting in traffic behind the wheel all their lives. Lots of places have also tax incentivized living in suburban densities to the detriment of those living in higher densities, so it’s not like the higher cost is a law of nature.
Generally poor take.
I’m not the guy you’re replying to, but I lived in a city for four years. I found it miserable, and it’s not for everyone. In fact I’d argue that you seemingly advocating for us to live in one big sprawl is the dystopian poor take here.
Namely?
Rowhouses are just single-family housing subdivisions without gaps between the buildings. They are not high-density housing and they are not any more supportive of public transportation and cycling.
Furthermore, they combine the worst of both worlds: they’re little denser and therefore little better for the environment than single-family housing, but they do have a building manager whose whims you have to obey.
My cats aren’t going to happily wander around in a park full of humans. They’re going to run and hide in terror. Parks are not a substitute for a yard.
My parents’ single-family house has about three times the square footage of my apartment. That’s a fact, not a falsehood.
Irrelevant. Even if you “own” a part of a building, someone is in charge of the building as a whole—the building manager—and everyone living in that building must obey the building manager’s whims, no matter how cruel, or face fines and/or confiscation of “their” home.
Ownership of parts of buildings is a legal fiction ripe for abuse. Only entire buildings, and the plots of land on which they stand, can be truly owned.
“Buying” a condo incurs debt in exactly the same way as buying a house, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here.
Well, I certainly can’t imagine why.
A minor inconvenience, compared to everything that’s wrong with city life.
The feeling is mutual.
Hydrogen is only 30% efficient compared to 90-95% for batteries. Most hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels, and contains less energy than the fossil fuels used to make it.
I’d love to see the technology develop more but it’s definitely not viable today. It’s like when EVs started out.
Yes, but the difference is that it doesn’t move at all, which major companies are really pushing that technology, there was a hype, but now it just sits
Toyota and some truck companies are the major ones pushing this
but an electric car is heavier than a hydrogen car, so the electric platform is less efficient. imagine carrying an extra ton of a batterypack wherever u go. hydrogen could be made from renewable energy, and doesn’t require batteries to be stored. battery metals are finite. u can’t scale that up. 5kg of H2 translates to 400km mileage.
Most large combustion SUVs are heavier than most electric cars.
Sodium ion batteries are being produced with no rare metals in them, and will be in production cars within a year. Hydrogen is difficult to store due to is low volumetric density, it’s molecular size, and corrosive nature.
Hydrogen (fuel cell) cars all have a battery because a hydrogen fuel cell is slow to change it’s energy output, so can’t change its output fast enough to directly power the car.
Battery electric cars are about 90% efficient from charging from the grid to moving. Hydrogen cars are about 30% efficient from grid to moving when made from renewable energy. These efficiency numbers include the weight and rolling resistance of the car. The theoretical maximum efficiency of hydrogen storage allowed by the limits of physics is about 50%.
The volumetric density of hydrogen is so low that you would need 20 tanker trucks to transport the same amount of energy that 1 tanker truck of gasoline can carry. This is at maximum pressure or liquified.
Hydrogen only makes sense when the weight of the energy storage medium is critical. As demonstrated by American cars, it isn’t.
Twice as expensive to fill as a gas car and more expensive than a battery EV to buy, all while still producing tons of CO2 by steam reforming methane to make the hydrogen? Wow, sign me up!
Hydrogen is the answer, but the question is “How can fossil fuel companies keep making money while pretending to be green?”
The technology is extremely underdeveloped. That’s why it’s so expensive and impractical right now. Batteries aren’t ecological saints either.
Hydrogen is a pain to store and work with. Even on rocket engine that is worth millions it’s almost impossible to avoid leaks.
On the other hand gas can be carried in a plastic bottle and electricity is already available everywhere.
I don’t see any future where hydrogen car become mainstream.
Hydrogen is such a pain to deal with, the filling stations cost something like a million dollars each.
You can’t just use normal materials to contain high pressure hydrogen - the molecules are so small that it seeps through steel and turns it brittle.
Hydrogen trades volumetric energy density for gravimetric energy density. It is too difficult to build a car that can safely hold a reasonable amount of hydrogen without making it bigger or sacrificing cargo space, and building a distribution network on the same scale as gasoline is a problem we still have no idea how to solve.
I think hydrogen will be much more viable in shipping, where these problems are much less pronounced. Big trucks and container ships are less concerned with volume (weight is more important). And they move along common and predictable routes meaning you don’t need quite so many hydrogen gas stations. You distribution just needs to cover truck stops and ports.
The same infrastructure argument could go for electric though. It’s difficult to build infrastructure for these vehicles yes I agree but why would electric be any easier?
Also don’t quote me on this but i think there are ways to collect hydrogen at a home, which would reduce the need for these stations, at least in the city
It’s easier to build charging stations when we already have a massive grid for distributing electricity. We have no such infrastructure in place for distributing hydrogen. Producing hydrogen cleanly and efficiently is still a hard problem we haven’t really solved.
DC fast chargers cost something like $70k each. Hydrogen filling stations cost around a million each.
Also, with battery EVs home charging does most of the heavy lifting, you only use fast chargers for long trips. So just a handful of fast chargers on the main roads between cities makes battery EVs viable for a lot of people.
It’s not enough to collect hydrogen, a filling station also needs to compress it to 10,000 PSI to actually get it into a vehicle’s tank. So there’s no home filling for fuel cell EVs, you need a similar footprint to gas stations. Nobody’s interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars building all those filling stations.
The difference with hydrogen stations is that the vehicle turnover would be incredibly higher despite the larger cost, similar to a regular gas station
It actually isn’t. Hydrogen filling stations can only fill a couple of cars in a row before they need time to pump hydrogen from the storage tank to the buffer tank and compress and cool it to -40 degrees. So the number of cars they can handle in a day is not massively higher than a DC fast charger.
If it doesn’t have time to prepare between vehicles, it starts taking 20 minutes to fill each vehicle.
Also cars like the Toyota Mirai have a range of 400 miles, which is not bad at all considering that the median range for a car in the US is 403 miles.