Meet the fast-charging, affordable ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Thu Feb 26, 2015, 09:26 AM - Edit history (1)

Meet the fast-charging, affordable ‘future’ car that Elon Musk hates

By Drew Harwell February 25 at 8:00 AM
@drewharwell

Toyota this week officially rolled out what it's betting will mark "a turning point" in automotive history — a sleek, affordable, eco-friendly "future" car that can drive for 300 miles, takes less than five minutes to refuel and comes with three years of free gas. ... It's everything critics of gas-guzzling car culture could love. And the biggest name in electric cars hates it.

Toyota's Mirai (meaning "future" in Japanese) will be one of the first mass-market cars to run on hydrogen fuel cells, which convert compressed hydrogen gas to electricity, leaving water vapor as the only exhaust. As opposed to getting plugged in overnight, the sedan will need only about three minutes to get back to full charge, a huge boon for convincing the world's drivers to convert to a cleaner ride.

But the green technology has found a surprisingly forceful critic in Elon Musk, the electric-car pioneer and founder of Tesla Motors, maker of battery-powered cars like the Model S. Musk has called hydrogen fuel cells "extremely silly"* and "fool cells," with his main critique being that hydrogen is too difficult to produce, store and turn efficiently to fuel, diverting attention from even better sources of clean energy.

"If you're going to pick an energy source mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick," Musk said** last month in Detroit. "The best-case hydrogen fuel cell doesn't win against the current-case batteries. It doesn't make sense, and that will become apparent in the next few years."

* and ** I can't make this link correctly:

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. He's right. Hydrogen sucks.

There are two ways of making hydrogen: 1) electrolysis of water or 2) reformation of natural gas. The problem with the former is that it takes more electrical energy to split the Hydrogen atoms from the Oxygen than you can get from the Hydrogen... plus you have to transport it to the filling station. The problem with the latter is that breaking apart hydrocarbons (as the name implies) leaves you with mass quantities of CO2 as a byproduct. And then you still need to transport the hydrogen to the filling station.

Scientists are working on a battery design that enables drivers to dump the depleted electrolyte slurry from their Lithium Ion batteries at a filling station, refill with charged electrolyte and drive away. The filling station then recharges the electrolyte and uses it to fill up the next customer.

300 mile range, cheaper and depending on how the electricity is generated, potentially zero emissions.

It's EV for me.

[F4lconF16]

2. +1000

Thanks for the info on the new batteries, hadn't heard that before. Looking it up now.

[tsites]

3. Musk knows

People are working on catalysts that will improve the efficiency of water electrolysis, but they are still mostly theoretical metamaterials that don't even have working quantities to test. Even with catalysts, you can't get around the conservation of energy, it will always take at least as much energy to separate hydrogen and oxygen as the energy you get out of putting it back together in a fuel cell. The storage of hydrogen under high pressure is a bad idea. The containers must be extremely strong and with no flaws and be able to be produced in large numbers while keeping quality at NASA rocket propellent storage levels, and we know even they blow up occasionally. The smaller the molecule of gas, the harder it is to create reliable seals. Hydrogen is only slightly larger than helium (hydrogen exists as a diatomic molecule of two hydrogen atoms while the slightly large atom of helium exists singly) and will leak through just about any standard seal, especially at high pressures. This means that all the transfers of hydrogen will require some sort of closed transfer mechanism that prevents the car owner from causing any potential damage to these seals. We already have problems with LPG (liquified methane) verses Propane/Butane. LPG requires very high pressure to store compared to propane and butane, so currently LPG is almost exclusively used by commercial vehicles where the larger heavier tanks can be accommodated and fueling can be handled under controlled safety conditions and still many believe the safety of using LPG is not quite where it needs to be. Hydrogen will not liquify at normal temperatures, meaning the only way to store very much is under extremely high pressure, far more that LPG. Most serious engineers believe the only practical and safe way to store hydrogen is to develop storage systems that absorb the hydrogen in another material under lower pressure. This is how acetylene is stored, by dissolving it in acetone (it will explode if just stored under high pressure). But again we are no where near finding a suitable candidate material for hydrogen.

Since in both batteries and fuel cells we are effectively using energy from the grid and storing it in some medium to be used latter, the question then is how much is lost along the way before it actually drives the wheels of the vehicles. I'm not sure of the efficiency of either system, but I do know that it appears there are far more paths to improving battery efficiencies currently being explored than fuel cells. Super capacitor technologies hold the promise of approaching 100% efficiencies and they are now approaching energy capacities per unit volume that make them competitive with chemical batteries in some applications and there is good reason to believe capacities will continue to rise and eventually exceed that of chemical batteries.

The best application for fuel cells is simply to not use atomic hydrogen. Fuel cells technology exists that can use simple hydrocarbons and atmospheric oxygen to produce electricity directly. They are more efficient than internal combustion engines and produce only pure CO2 and H2O. There is also no reason to use petroleum based hydrocarbons. They work just as well with alcohol, and although current corn based alcohol production is a disgrace, other more ecologically sound methods exist and have the potential for significant improvement in production. So this path provides the potential of approaching a net zero carbon footprint. Why is this not being pushed?? Because of policies put in place by Bush's "hydrogen initiative" restricting research grants to hydrogen only and by environmentalist sentiment among the developers of green technology thinking hydrogen is greener that any hydrocarbon. Small scale versions of these fuel cells are already being developed with the intended market of powering portable devices like laptops and cell phones which will run far longer than any current battery technology and are recharged simply by injecting a couple of ounces of alcohol.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. Thank you for your reply. Welcome to DU. NT