Is there anything other than this oversimplified Youtube cartoon describing this? Is this a battery swap system, or what?
Battery swapping seems to be an obsolete technology. Battery capacities are now big enough, and charging is fast enough, that it's not worth the hassle.
Battery EV is high-capacity battery + engine + thermal management system for the battery.
Hydrogen EV is fuel cell + low-capacity battery (for smoothing out peaks and recuperation) + engine + thermal management system for the fuel cells.
BEV have low price per km (here it's about 1/4 compared to gas cars), but lower range, while H2EV have higher price per km (in Germany where there's actually infrastructure available, its about the same price per km as gas car) but higher range, so it can make sense for some use-cases, like long-range buses or whatever.
You could even build Plug-in Hydrogen EV with medium capacity battery and have BEV-like usage where you charge at home but still get 1000 km range if necessary - it seems needlessly complex, but it just means adding bigger battery and charging port to H2EV, so it can make sense.
It might be in the future. Here (EU) and now (2019), they cost as much as BEV, while fuel costs as much as fuel for ICE, giving you the worst of both worlds.
We're not going to run out of lithium any time soon, current supplies are limited only by the fact that it's only been desirable for a few years. There's a LOT of lithium mining capacity coming online now or in the near future.
Hydrogen was a dead end in 2000 and it's only getting deader.
1) There is zero elemental hydrogen on Earth. We currently get it mostly as a byproduct of....fossil fuel production. The other option is to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, but obviously this takes more energy than the resulting hydrogen could ever produce. Makes you think why don't we just use this energy to recharge batteries instead of making hydrogen with huge inefficiencies. It only makes sense if you have nearly free energy that you can dump into the process and don't care about loses.
2) Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence - meaning that it escapes through any container you put it in. A 70kg pure lead bottle only holds about 1L of hydrogen, and all of it will evaporate within couple months naturally. And as it does so, it makes the metal brittle. So "producing loads of hydrogen for storage" is not a great idea either.
Sure, but for a given amount of "free" solar you can drive a pure BEV 2-4 times as far as you can drive a fuel cell car, and the BEV will also be a better car. If you have infinite free electricity then hydrogen is potentially viable but since we discovered LiIon it's always inferior to batteries.
I do not think having called anyone Musk fanboy, but you seem to have been hurt or felt concerned wierdly :)
I did say that Musk hates the idea of Hydrogen car, and that might not be only for technical reasons.
> compressed hydrogen is extremely dangerous
Lithium battery is also well known dangerous. Dangerous enough that they are now banned into airplanes
> Hydrogen cars already require a battery.
False claim, supercapacitor on the long term can very likely do the job as a "buffer" after the fuel cell. And they are cheap to produce.
Supercapacitor that "battery-eletric" car also need for their "fast 30min charge" btw.
> I do not think having called anyone Musk fanboy, but you seem to have been hurt or felt concerned wierdly :)
You offered that the only reason they opposed fuel cells was due to "Elon Musk propaganda." The message was crystal clear even if the word "fanboy" itself was not used. :p
> I did say that Musk hates the idea of Hydrogen car, and that might not be only for technical reasons.
Maybe so, but the technical reasons alone suffice.
The biggest problem is that hydrogen is a zero-carbon bait and switch. Hydrogen from water costs 2-3x as much as hydrogen from cracking natural gas, for fundamental thermodynamic reasons.
Also fuel cells are no more than 50% efficient, because physics. This means the theoretically best possible hydrogen fuel cell car has worse well-to-wheel or panel-to-wheel efficiency than today's existing electric cars. Ouch.
> False claim, supercapacitor on the long term can very likely do the job as a "buffer" after the fuel cell. And they are cheap to produce. Supercapacitor that "battery-eletric" car also need for their "fast 30min charge" btw.
Where to begin?
- The size and mass of supercapacitors makes this a non-starter. Seriously do the math, it's quite bad.
- Supercaps are not cheaper than batteries per kWh. Quite the opposite.
- Supercaps are not needed for 30 minute charging. Tesla cars achieve this already without supercaps.
- Adding supercaps to EVs wouldn't make the battery charge faster anyway (other than quickly charging the small buffer). To get a lot of benefit you'd need to replace the entire battery with supercaps, and again that's not realistic.
Hydrogen cars were dead long before Elon Musk weighed in.
I hope Formula E adopts Nawa's ultra-capacitors. It will make the cars better. The big benefits will be a lighter battery pack and stronger recuperation in braking.
I think you covered most of my objections, the only thing I'd add is that the expensive catalysts have (or had? surely it's improved?) a sharply limited lifespan, so your $60k fuel cell could only run for 1000 hours before requiring a full rebuild.
Basically these "H2EV" things are EVs with a range extender, and the fuel cell range extender that they're using is in all ways inferior to a biodiesel or ethanol fueled range extender.
I was going to say this - Toyota gave up on batteries after building the Prius.
Their hydrogen fuel cell is clearly not the way the industry is going. So are they going back to batteries, the tech they said would never be commercially viable?
H2EV don't "burn" the hydrogen, because fuel cells are much better than engines that burn stuff in cylinders. So you end up with electormotor and fuel cell.
And since you can recuperate into fuel cell and fuel cells aren't very good at providing big short peaks of power, it makes sense to add a battery to smooth things out and to store energy when braking.
But the battery doesn't need high-capacity, because it's just a temporary store of energy. It's a very different battery technology than what you find in a Tesla or Kia e-Niro or whatever.
In the end, Toyota H2EV (Mirai) is basically 1) electromotor from Lexus hybrid 2) battery from Prius 3) Fuel cell.
Well, they are still called batteries. So I assume they are still rechargeable and you can charge your battery.
I think the idea is to save you time at charging station if you can do a swap and go. + increase the performance life of your car by making it cheap to replace the battery.
Unless making ultra fast rechargeable batteries is sustainable, safe, and environment-friendly, Battery swapping is a good option.
I think the answer is in the article in thios case
> Plugged into a Supercharger, a Model S battery can be charged to 80% capacity in just 40 minutes, free of charge. On the other hand, a battery swap is by appointment only and could cost the driver between $60 and $80.
There's also the question of "where can I swap my battery?". Charging stations are now common enough[0] that it's not a worry for people who would consider an Electric Car.
Is charging really fast enough?
I do not have the possibility to charge an electric car overnight, because I live in an apartment and the building has no garage.
Can I just charge my car before going to work in the morning in 5 minutes, like I do with petrol?
Depends on the car. The Porsche Taycan is supposed to be able to charge to 80% state of charge in 20 minutes. And it's supposed to be able to add 180 miles of range in 9 minutes:
Better answer: it depends on how charged your battery pack is at the time. New Tesla superchargers have been able to charge Model 3s up to 420 mph. That is if the charging continued at that rate for one hour, that battery pack would give you 420 miles of range.
But as you charge a battery, the rate at which you charge slows down. Think of it as stuffing a pillow, the more stuffing you have in your pillow, the harder you have to push to cram that stuffing in. In this case voltage is pushing electrical current into your battery. Recently, Tesla has been upgrading their charging stations to have higher voltage which means faster charging. In the attached article you'll see that they say in optimal conditions you'll be able to add 75 miles of range to your battery pack in 5 minutes.
To help optimize your battery, a software update 'warms up' your battery pack before you get to the charger as long as you put it in your vehicles map. I'm not sure what warming up means exactly or how heat would help but I'm sure someone else could explain that better than me.
So yeah, if you work less than 75 miles away, you could get a quick 5 min boost. But it would be advisable for long term health of your battery pack to charge it up to ~%80 each time. Again, I'm not the guy to explain why that is. So you'd want to plan ahead a bit.
If I'm imagining being in that situation where I'm late for work and I don't have enough juice to get there I would put the nearest supercharger in the navigation, fuel up for 5min, and then charge at work probably from a slow charger, and on my way home I'd stop at that supercharger again and top it off for 30min while I got a coffee or groceries (or browsed hacker news). And I'd try not to let that happen again because it could wear out that battery.
Sorry for the long reply but I hope this gives you a glimpse of the reality of EV ownership. I'm a prospective owner and have been doing some reading up on what to expect, if anyone has some input I would love to read it.
Battery swapping seems to be an obsolete technology. Battery capacities are now big enough, and charging is fast enough, that it's not worth the hassle.