This reads like fossil fuel conglomerate propaganda. The first sentence posits an unproven alternative with a complex, expensive and almost entirely hypothetical infrastructure. Hydrogen is not addressed further, and fear-uncertainty-doubt tropes concerning battery powered vehicles are liberally applied. Many of the bullet points on this laundry list are disputable. Just take 'batteries take too long to charge' -- I drove a Nissan Leaf as my main vehicle for 8 years. Even given its tiny 24Kw battery pack, I was able to use home charging for 95% of my driving needs. For the last 5 years of service, I even used 120V 'trickle' charging during the evenings and it was sufficient. Now I have an electric vehicle with significantly higher battery capacity and a much faster charging network, as well as a 240V home charger. It is even more flexible and I am freer to take long road trips. When charging the car during such trips, I get out and exercise, play with the dog. It is a small adjustment that occurs infrequently during the life of the car. Most of these bullet points can be addressed in a similar manner. Enough of the propaganda!

Hydrogen fuel cells are more expensive than batteries, because they either work at room-temperature and they need expensive catalysts using platinum-group metals, or they work at high temperatures and then they have a short lifetime, requiring frequent replacements of most components.

Also the efficiency of a cycle of storing energy into gaseous hydrogen and then recovering it is limited by fundamental reasons to low values.

For cars, it is likely that batteries will remain the best solution, due to the high efficiency of a charge-discharge cycle.

For long term storage of energy, further improvements of fuel cells might make them the best solution for recovering energy stored in chemical form, but not using gaseous hydrogen for storage, but other more appropriate substances, e.g. hydrocarbons, alcohols, ammonia or solid carbon.

There are fuel cells for the other fuels mentioned above and the only advantage of the hydrogen fuel cells is that they currently have the greatest power density, i.e. the speed of reaction of the hydrogen per area of electrode is for now the greatest (leading to the greatest electrical current density), but only either at high temperatures or when using expensive catalysts.

The mitochondria from all the cells of our body are a demonstration that it is possible to make a very high efficiency fuel cell using hydrocarbons as fuel and without using any rare or expensive materials for catalysts.

While the solar cells already exceed the efficiency of plants at capturing solar energy, the artificial fuel cells have a long way until becoming competitive with those used by the living beings.

>Batteries degrade too fast

What is "too fast"?

Much of the fear about battery degradation was from projections and warranty terms at the very beginning of modern EV deployments.

Real world observations have shown the battery packs maintaining >85% of their capacity after 150,000mi/241,000km.

Also, battery components aren't rare. They're called "rare" because they are not found in large centralized deposits but rather spread somewhat uniformly throughout the earth. They are actually some of the more abundant elements on earth. For every two atoms of silicon on earth, there is almost one of lithium, which makes it much more abundant than hydrocarbons. If battery component extraction was subsidized to the degree hydrocarbon extraction is, they would be much less expensive, and more available on the market, than hydrocarbons.

>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle

The battery makes up approximately 1/3rd the price of a new EV. As anyone who has had to pay for auto repair can attest, labor is almost always the main cost. It is inconceivable to me that replacing a battery and motors is more costly than an engine, except due to a shortage of qualified personnel commanding higher hourly rates. There is a video on YouTube of an elderly wheelchair-bound man completely rebuilding a Nissan Leaf battery pack in a workshop so I have no doubts that it is a skill that can be taught to any able-bodied person who is willing to learn.

As far as battery recycling goes, they're working on it: https://www.ornl.gov/news/automated-disassembly-line-aims-ma...

If in the next five years electric battery vehicles become a very big pain, then I suspect you will hear about fuel cell cars ... or whatever the perceived pragmatic replacement is.

That we don't hear about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles actually suggests to me that they are not a viable option.

I presume, stupidly perhaps, that there are bigger thinkers than me (or certainly people in positions that have a lot more to lose or gain in this field) that have already counted the beans and still see the electric (battery) vehicles as the current future path of least resistance.

At the very least, swapping batteries for fuel cells seems to be a fundamentally simpler step than swapping ICE for electric. Going to electric cars generally, regardless of the source of power is a big move for the auto industry.

WT...?!?!

How the h... did my simple comment, based on my PERSONAL opinion on the subject got into this witch-hunt?!

Enough with the torches and forks!

This is not propaganda! It's MY PERSONAL conclusion on everything I've read! - the word -PERSONAL- is the key here.

If any of you think I don't like electric vehicles you are wrong! Anything that does not pollute is welcome(to try to undo the shirt we all did)!

But I have to say it: ATM - personal view, again - to me, electric vehicles based on batteries S-U-C-K!!! And they SUCK big time!!! I don't see them as decent alternative!!!

Sure! Environment-friendly it's the best we have! But they suck! And hydrogen has much more promise! Not developed enough? Yeah! It's not. But then again... Let me say it again: electric vehicles based on batteries suck.

And unless they get at least the first 3 points fixed you won't be changing my mind! 50.000 for a car that takes 25 min to charge and that if, for some reason, the battery goes the way of the Dodo I can expand ALMOST another 50.000?

Sorry, I'm not payed enough for that.

You guys must all have big pay checks every month... But I don't!

>-Batteries are terribly expensive (and prices are not going down as fast as expected)

Not really.

>-Batteries degrade too fast

No, they don't, at least not the well-temperature-controlled ones. Larger EV packs should outlast most ICE cars.

>-Batteries take too long to charge

They really don't, unless you have no way to charge at home - the vast majority of charging happens overnight even on a 120V plug. We only visit chargers when on roadtrips.

>-Electricity prices are already going up terribly fast to take advantage of the boom (and blaming the war, and everything else to justify it's rise)

Not really true, at least in our corner of the US. I think we're sitting at ~$0.14/kwh, which works out to around $0.04-$0.05/mi, or 20-25 miles per $. And any rise in methane prices is going to hit hydrogen harder, given that most H2 is produced by cracking CH4.

>-Batteries pollute a lot more than previously though

Source? What kind of pollution? More than the steel that goes into making a car?

>-recycling Batteries is hard

Not really? Tesla claims a materials yield of 92% on their packs, and 100% of the packs recycled. Recyclers are willing to pay quite a bit for broken packs, which should tell you something.

>-Batteries component materials are rare

Newer chemistries are better about this.

>-if you get into a crash your Battery will most likely be affected - which means you will probably have to spend almost the price of a new vehicle

Yeah, Teslas aren't great on this front, even wrt the bodywork. But battery pack replacements don't cost nearly as much as a new EV.

Gaseous hydrogen has a lot of problems, and you'd need to build a whole distribution network. Which we already have with electricity...

Biggest problem with hydrogen is the lack of refueling infrastructure. With electric, there's an electrical grid to build chargers on top of and worst case you can charge in your garage etc. With hydrogen we would need to create tons of new gas stations designed for hydrogen as well as the delivery vehicles, refineries, etc. to supply them. I've got a relative who works for Toyota (who are making significant investments in hydrogen) and he said most of their current efforts are on semi truck fleets where they only need hydrogen stations at a few locations along a pre-determined route.

I think this has been discussed to death, the TL;DR is that H2 is fundamentally really difficult to store safely and efficiently at reasonable densities and temperatures. This is not something that is likely to improve with technology or scale (it's not like it's an underfunded area), they literally squeeze past other atoms and nothing is smaller than hydrogen.

I do however agree that existing battery technology is _still_ severely disadvantaged, not only in terms of efficiency and density but the rare materials they need to manufacture (same for H2 solutions).

It's annoying because ICE engines are not great (big, heavy, complicated with related reliability issues), yet they consume an easy to transfer high density liquid fuel; Electric engines are fantastic (small, light, simple, highly efficient, powerful, great torque), but they consume electricity which is hard to efficiently transfer with no where near the energy density per unit weight or space storage solutions.

However! ICE exists, all of it's issues are mitigated by mass adoption, and in the short term it's not environmentally responsible to ditch 1 billion cars. I think the best plan I've seen so far is to scale up synthesising hydrocarbons from solar... electric cars can continue to be developed and we can find more reasonable electric storage solutions without undermining the purpose of switching to electric by forcing the world into an immature solution and throwing away 1 billion ICE vehicles and all related infrastructure (manufacturing EVEs has an environmental cost).

We like simple to understand solutions, but the solution that minimises environmental impact must not underscope itself - the whole picture has to be considered, costs of manufacturing and switching are not external to planet Earth, which means there is some ideal conversion rate that must be determined.

The current world of electric cars is sort of like every smart phone before the iPhone came out. Then iPhone/Android hit, and the world was off to the races.

What is the "electric" car iPhone moment?

> Can we bet a little more on the most abundante substance on the universe?

One of those problems is there is no abundant source of hydrogen in isolated form here on earth. You have to use a catalytic agent or an energy-intensive process like electrolysis to get usable hydrogen for your fuel cell.

I'm not particularly knowledgeable, but my impression is that hydrogen might work for specific applications, but we don't have a very efficient of generating it. It still takes substantially more energy than if we just store the energy in batteries.

Big hydrogen subsidies in the climate bill that just passed the senate. Remains to be seen if it’ll build hype.