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I agree the concept doesn't seem to be proving out in the real world, but there's an obvious use case for car owners who can't charge an EV at home. If you don

I agree the concept doesn't seem to be proving out in the real world, but there's an obvious use case for car owners who can't charge an EV at home. If you don't have home charging for whatever reason, doing from a gasoline car to an EV is a nontrivial convenience downgrade when it comes to "refueling". Fast charging has helped somewhat, but it's still considerably slower than refueling a gas car and still not great for the battery to do it all the time. Hydrogen in theory solves that problem by replicating the gas car experience for those drivers. At this point though it does seem more likely that the home charging problem will be solved for more people before hydrogen cars become practical for the same user base. What's interesting to me is thinking about why this is the case, and it I think it comes down to relatively low pressure for drivers to switch away from gas cars. For drivers who can charge an EV at home, that's actually a big convenience upgrade and so drives EV sales. But for drivers who can't charge an EV at home, there's very little practical reason to switch away from a gas car. I'm sure some of them care about the environmental benefits of doing so, but that's probably not a sufficient motivator to switch on its own given how big of a purchase a car is.

dagmx 2y ago
Faster refueling is definitely a big one but the refueling state for hydrogen is abysmal. That’s after significant government and corporate funding.Toyota would need to be like Tesla and really bootstrap their refueling infrastructure for those people converting from gas but not going to EV, like you said. I suspect most hydrogen drivers are more interested in the cost savings on gas/vehicle than the environmental impact. The verge did a special on hydrogen cars recently and every owner they talked to basically credited cost over any other factor.
atmavatar 2y ago
The EV refueling problem seems like an easy one to solve: create industry standard, modular, and replaceable battery cells. Refueling is done by swapping-out low charge battery cells for fully-charged battery cells. If designed properly, the swapping could be done quickly and easily, making the overall refueling of an EV vehicle at least as fast as filling a gas tank. The cost of refueling would include the price of the charge itself plus some moderate fee to amortize the cost of replacing cells that go bad, which likely would still be cheaper than the cost of gasoline. The refueling station itself could either constantly charge the battery cells on hand or choose to keep a larger number of backup cells and charge exclusively during periods of cheaper electricity - whichever ends up being more cost effective.
- mattmanser 2y ago
  I don't think this is true, admittedly with me not knowing that nuch about ev car batteries. But I believe an EV car battery weighs about 1/2 ton for 200-300 mile range or whatever it is today. Say you make cells that a less than average person could pick them up, say 1kg, The number required to change, 500, would makes it clear it's not a trivial problem at all.
- dagmx 2y ago
  Most definitely not easy to solve because battery packs are a structural component of the car with variances in how they are charged/cooled etc, and as such would also then require standardized electrical+cooling and standardized body shapes. You’d also need to store these fairly large objects in unused but high enough numbers for the subset of people who would opt for that instead of just waiting a little bit longer for a charge.

dagmx 2y ago

Faster refueling is definitely a big one but the refueling state for hydrogen is abysmal. That’s after significant government and corporate funding.Toyota would need to be like Tesla and really bootstrap their refueling infrastructure for those people converting from gas but not going to EV, like you said. I suspect most hydrogen drivers are more interested in the cost savings on gas/vehicle than the environmental impact. The verge did a special on hydrogen cars recently and every owner they talked to basically credited cost over any other factor.

atmavatar 2y ago

The EV refueling problem seems like an easy one to solve: create industry standard, modular, and replaceable battery cells. Refueling is done by swapping-out low charge battery cells for fully-charged battery cells. If designed properly, the swapping could be done quickly and easily, making the overall refueling of an EV vehicle at least as fast as filling a gas tank. The cost of refueling would include the price of the charge itself plus some moderate fee to amortize the cost of replacing cells that go bad, which likely would still be cheaper than the cost of gasoline. The refueling station itself could either constantly charge the battery cells on hand or choose to keep a larger number of backup cells and charge exclusively during periods of cheaper electricity - whichever ends up being more cost effective.

mattmanser 2y ago
I don't think this is true, admittedly with me not knowing that nuch about ev car batteries. But I believe an EV car battery weighs about 1/2 ton for 200-300 mile range or whatever it is today. Say you make cells that a less than average person could pick them up, say 1kg, The number required to change, 500, would makes it clear it's not a trivial problem at all.
dagmx 2y ago
Most definitely not easy to solve because battery packs are a structural component of the car with variances in how they are charged/cooled etc, and as such would also then require standardized electrical+cooling and standardized body shapes. You’d also need to store these fairly large objects in unused but high enough numbers for the subset of people who would opt for that instead of just waiting a little bit longer for a charge.