I saw years ago some car companies realeasing hydrogen powered Cars. Now its just electrical Cars. What is wrong with Hydrogen Cars?
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Distribution infrastructure for hydrogen fuels just doesn’t exist in large parts of the world.
Meanwhile, in many countries, electricity is widely available almost anywhere.
Tuns out hydrogen is a quite inefficient and expensive way of storing electricity, hydrogen is much lighter and faster to refuel compared to batteries, however you lose over 50% the energy you use to make the hydrogen, and you also need to build expensive hydrogen infrastructure, where electricity is already pretty much everywhere
Nothing is *wrong* with them, they just don’t really have any advantages over the alternatives.
Say you have a hydrogen car.
Now first, everywhere you drive we need to install hydrogen refueling stations. That’s a loooot of infrastructure. (Electric cars had the same issue, but have mostly passed that hurdle. The infrastructure for those mostly exists. And where it doesn’t, it’s pretty easy to add, since electricity is available pretty much everywhere. Hydrogen isn’t)
Secondly, where does the hydrogen come from? And the answer to that is “electricity, or fossil fuels”. So we just introduce another conversion step. Rather than running your car on fossil fuels directly, or running it on electricity, we use those to produce hydrogen, then we transport the hydrogen across the country to all the refueling stations, where it is loaded into your car.
It’s just simpler and more efficient to cut out the “hydrogen” step.
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Hydrogen-powered vehicles are still being highly researched. Toyota’s going pretty hard on it.
https://www.toyota.ca/toyota/en/vehicles/mirai/overview
That said, there are a few key differences between Hydrogen versus Electric, and neither is definitely greater.
Hydrogen can be refilled much faster compared to Electric, making it more convenient for people who will drive significant distances. Someone like an Uber driver might want a Hydrogen vehicle since their electric car would run out after only a few hours of driving.
Additionally, Hydrogen vehicles can be built with significantly more range without adding a lot of battery weight. This is very beneficial for long-haul trucking, where weight is very important.
However, Hydrogen is not necessarily as efficient, since (for clean hydrogen), you need to take electricity and use it to perform electrolysis to split water into H2 and O2, and then recombine them to get the energy back. This extra transition means you lose some efficiency. There are also places getting Hydrogen by using Methane, turning CH4 + H2O into CO2 + H. This avoids any green benefits since we’re still releasing carbon into the atmosphere. If we try and push Hydrogen vehicles too fast, without regulation, this will be happening for people to make cheap Hydrogen.
Just a quick FYI. Hydrogen cars are still electric cars. The ones that are popular today are battery electric. Similar motors and drive trains just different ways of delivering electricity.
Hydrogen is not an energy source, it is a means of storing energy from other sources, leaks 10%, and is a greenhouse gas. It will never take on.
The car industry didnt expect batteries to improve as much and get as much cheaper as they did. Combustion is mechanically very complicated, lots of things that can go wrong and moving parts that needs maintenance.
Fossil fuels can be used to create hydrogen, so fossil lobby prefer it if the status quo needs to change at all, and it is a badly kept secret. So for that reason there is no real push from governments as a co2-solution either.
People that get electric cars go from range anxiety, to fully-charge-every-morning-calamity. Nobody really wants to go buy fuel again once they tried plugging in over night.
Whether storing hydrogen on the vehicle as a gas in a pressure vessel, or as a liquid in a cryo pressure vessel, neither is trivial and in either case the tank will be quite a bit larger and heavier than batteries or a gas tank typically. The lack of a hydrogen infrastructure is another issue. Then there are safety issues, just as there are with gasoline or lithium batteries. Safety issues for those riding in hydrogen power vehicles are far from trivial if a vehicle is involved in an accident and are also striking for first responder EMTs and Firefighters
All the discussion here is pretty good, but it you want to have a nice rundown than you can watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7MzFfuNOtY
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