alt Hacker NewsEVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic. They are not cheaper long term, for they rely upon thousands of pounds of heavy batteries.
If they go further now, that is not a given down the road.
Were you to employ this logic when electric cars first came out, there wouldn't be a single one on the road. It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
But sure, let's not work on multiple paths. Let's discount other attempts at clean tech. Even if they're older, cost less to the environment to build (batteries are terrible, environmentally), and so on.
> EVs take forever to charge, rendering long trips unrealistic.
You'll find EVs that will go 700km+ with just one, 15min stop, as they charge at over 350kW in this day and age:
https://ev-database.org/#group=vehicle-group&av-1=1&rs-pr=10...
You'd want to make that 15min stop at least once on such a trip. Or fly instead.
> It's only through trillions of research dollars, that current battery tech is where it is.
Problem is that while batteries only needed scale and improvements in manufacturing processes to become cheaper, there's no such path with hydrogen.
The tank and the fuel cell are inherently expensive. The fueling station costs literally 10x that of a fast charger and in this day and age doesn't even charge faster as while the first customer will be done in less than 15min, the next needs to wait for the system to repressurize and that takes time. Also it goes kaboom if it fails, which is something we know, because it already happened. The fuel itself cannot be cheaper than electricity unless you want to make it from natural gas, in which case you better just use that instead.
> (batteries are terrible, environmentally)
The sheer energy that's wasted by a hydrogen car vs EV over its life cycle is enough to produce and safely dispose of a battery.
And this is what it really boils down to: hydrogen is not energetically efficient, therefore you can't make it cheaper unless you use fossil fuels. We already have fossil fuel cars.