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As someone with little knowledge of this domain except a few articles and this link, it appears that hydrogen is better enviromentally, but the electric-car lob

by LightG 5y ago

As someone with little knowledge of this domain except a few articles and this link, it appears that hydrogen is better enviromentally, but the electric-car lobby disagree. If there is a chicken and egg problem, as mentioned in the article, where mass adoption of a "better" technology is only held back due to the the number of hydrogen pumps - that seems like an appropriate point for government to step in to bridge the gap. 1) Is hydrogen the better solution? 2) Why wouldn't government recognise this and bridge the gap? 3) As the article is by BMW, what is their agenda? Why wouldn't they just accept and hop on board the prevailing EV trend? (edit: For the Elon cult downvotes, lol, note the word "appears" above, feel free to challenge it).

epistasis 5y ago
Even the most hydrogen positive environmentalists don't think hydrogen makes sense for cars. Those pushing h2 cars either have natural gas interests, or an extreme attachment to fueling. By far the best current assessment of how we will use hydrogen as energy transport I have found: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-hydrogen-part-two-the-demand-side/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...
marvin 5y ago
As for 3: BMW, like most of the transportation industry, is unwilling to make the massive investment in battery production required to profitably be able to switch their production from fossil to renewable. This reluctance obviously extends to hydrogen-electric drivetrains as well, if that option was even competitive. Since they're stuck in a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation, they vainly hope that the rest of the world will stand still until their subcontractors are magically able to produce all components required (at prices that leave them competitive!) to switch their entire production to renewable energy. Some hand-waving around technologies that are promising but "not quite there yet" is a central part of this strategy, as it allows them to sell their reluctance to investors. Just sitting there obviously doing nothing would make it too obvious. They've been doing this for 10 years now, so there's really nothing new to see. Meanwhile, the "electric-car lobby" keeps profitably producing mass-market vehicles and exponentially increasing production capacity, doing the hard work of actually building things in volume that haven't been built before. The market cap of Tesla implies that this is hardly a controversial stance today, although there is obviously still significant uncertainty.
- polar 5y ago
  > keeps profitably producing mass-market vehicles For certain definitions of mass-market.
the8472 5y ago
My impression is that BEVs are much easier to improve incrementally on many fronts while hydrogen faces a lot steeper hurdles. With hydrogen the fuel cell stack, tank, refueling mechanism and distribution are all things you need to solve. With BEVs some of those points collapse into just one component (the battery), we already have a distribution network and at low charging rates any wall plug will do. The technology baseline for electric cars is so low that they're about as old gasoline ones. The same can't be said about hydrogen.

by LightG 5y ago

epistasis 5y ago

Even the most hydrogen positive environmentalists don't think hydrogen makes sense for cars. Those pushing h2 cars either have natural gas interests, or an extreme attachment to fueling. By far the best current assessment of how we will use hydrogen as energy transport I have found: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-hydrogen-part-two-the-demand-side/ https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-separating-hype-from-h...

marvin 5y ago

As for 3: BMW, like most of the transportation industry, is unwilling to make the massive investment in battery production required to profitably be able to switch their production from fossil to renewable. This reluctance obviously extends to hydrogen-electric drivetrains as well, if that option was even competitive. Since they're stuck in a classic Innovator's Dilemma situation, they vainly hope that the rest of the world will stand still until their subcontractors are magically able to produce all components required (at prices that leave them competitive!) to switch their entire production to renewable energy. Some hand-waving around technologies that are promising but "not quite there yet" is a central part of this strategy, as it allows them to sell their reluctance to investors. Just sitting there obviously doing nothing would make it too obvious. They've been doing this for 10 years now, so there's really nothing new to see. Meanwhile, the "electric-car lobby" keeps profitably producing mass-market vehicles and exponentially increasing production capacity, doing the hard work of actually building things in volume that haven't been built before. The market cap of Tesla implies that this is hardly a controversial stance today, although there is obviously still significant uncertainty.

polar 5y ago
> keeps profitably producing mass-market vehicles For certain definitions of mass-market.

the8472 5y ago

My impression is that BEVs are much easier to improve incrementally on many fronts while hydrogen faces a lot steeper hurdles. With hydrogen the fuel cell stack, tank, refueling mechanism and distribution are all things you need to solve. With BEVs some of those points collapse into just one component (the battery), we already have a distribution network and at low charging rates any wall plug will do. The technology baseline for electric cars is so low that they're about as old gasoline ones. The same can't be said about hydrogen.