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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
Alt text:
An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.
ICE with hydrogen has some racing applications, but that’s about it. It’s taking something that already has efficiency issues compared to batteries and making it even worse.
Fuel cells use hydrogen to generate electricity to spin a motor. There are issues with that, as well, but there’s no future in ICE either way.
Personally, outside of some niche applications, I don’t think fuel cells are going to replace EVs. The losses in efficiency are just to great in the conversion from water to hydrogen/oxygen gasses to electricity - unless someone figures out how to harness the energy released in a hydrogen bomb. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that. I do think that Tesla isn’t as long for this world as Musk would have hoped for though. I personally hope he ends up broke and mocked as soon as possible. The world will be just a tiny bit better place IMO.
There’s also expected future battery improvements to consider. We can’t make a useful battery-powered airplane right now that could do passenger service from LA to Sydney. EV long haul trucking is also in its infancy at a barely feasible level for a limited number of cases. Then there’s heavy construction equipment like cranes. All of which are cited as niches that hydrogen would be useful.
Thing is, our battery tech tends to improve–about 5-8% capacity by weight each year, at the higher end of that over the last few years. That’s a doubling every 10-15 years. We’re not at theoretical limits yet, money is still being pumped into both fundamental research and large scale deployment, and we have every reason to believe this trend will continue. That’s going to squeeze out the niches where hydrogen is useful.