I know about 7y ago everyone was salivating at the idea of hydrogen powered vehicles.
I’ll be very interested to see how well it works in practice…
with refill stations every 50-100Km, this could work extremely well. the current mirai has 700Km of range. you could even power standard combustion engines with very little modification. mike copeland built 2 muscle cars that run perfectly on hydrogen.
A hydrogen engine is so much worse for efficiency than a hydrogen fuel cell, and even that is not good compared to batteries. I’d estimate the round trip efficiency of a hydrogen engine to be about 10-15%. So for the same energy that could be used to drive a battery EV 100km, this car from Toyota could drive 12km.
Additionally, hydrogen is not very energy dense per volume. A compressed hydrogen tank that replaces the boot/trunk of the car would have enough hydrogen for about 100km of range.
Please let me know if I’m wrong about any of these numbers. For Toyota’s sake, I really hope I’m wrong.
and you have to use it up within a week or two, or your fuel disappears
And yet here we are breaking new ground with brand new (within the year) solid hydrogen.
The alternative is the slow charging and short life high cost lithium battery. We need better and efficiency matters not when it’s being pulled from the air in huge stand alone stations now being built.
a hydrogen engine is a useless joke.
