Sure! The power of a motorcycle nowadays is limited by the ability of the pilot to tame it without hurting her/himself. Start with a Kawasaki H2 Turbo before you consider the need for more.
It's a fantasy used to greenwash oil & gas companies. It'd be nice if it were practical, but it's not for a variety of solid technical reasons such as leaking through metal.
H2 is such a tiny molecule that leaks out of everything making it a nightmare to try and seal pipework, and it will permeate (and embrittle) metals, namely steel.
It's idiotic to try and use it as a fuel. The money being wasted on H2 research should just go into purchasing more renewable power sources.
Hydrogen could be very useful for CO2-free iron smelting, powering cargo ships, and many other use cases. The problem is getting it - cheap green hydrogen requires excess green power, something we don’t have yet.
We already have excess green power (spot prices are sometimes 0 or even negative). There is (now) just not enough of it. However as renewables quickly ramp up there will be more and more of it.
I vehemently agree with your impression that a lot of that is pushed by misinformed interest, trying to hawk one more century of steam-reforming and other polluting ideas. However, a couple of processes do need hydrogen, chief among them is making steel: the coke-based approach generates far too much CO2.
If you are a little allergic to calling hydrogen blue or green, depending on how much greenwashing it receives, that might not be the best keywords to type in a search engine. But hydrogen should become a needed industrial step for the world's second or third most widely used commodity (it goes: sand, cement, steel, glass, gravel, petroleum, macadam, wheat…)
I’m not sure what’s #2 on the list of actual hydrogen uses, as most big potential applications could use an easier fuel to handle than a literal cloud of angry protons. It's often a good first step, though: ammonia, synthetic methane, etc.
Far down that list, there’s also a project to put hydrogen back into dirigibles, which I find very engrossing (and yes, the people working on that have heard of the Hindenburg), but it's less solid than making steel.
Thanks for the extra info. My comment was targeted at the article mentioning automobiles, and Toyota especially. Hydrogen might find use cases elsewhere, but companies need to admit it is inappropriate for cars.
I'm guessing that the GP means that every automaker except for the ev-only ones has the infrastructure, supply chain, tooling, and know how to build reciprocating piston engines and the associated drive systems. None of which is applicable to a fuel cell vehicle.
One advantage I’ve seen talked about for the hydrogen ICE as a transitional engine is that it doesn’t require the same level of hydrogen purity as a fuel cell does.
It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable. Add a small regenerative battery pack or ultracapacitor and efficiency will increase further. Reciprocating engines seem quaint at this point.
>It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable.
Probably not, but it's hard to say really: Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced, whereas modern gasoline engines by Toyota seem to be ridiculously reliable. Reciprocating engines may seem quaint, but with so many decades of work and development, they (or at least some manufacturers) seem to have made them some of the most reliable mechanical machines ever devised. (Of course, this doesn't apply to all manufacturers; I wouldn't count anything by Chrysler here.)
What does seem quite clear is that using hydrogen in an ICE necessarily means a huge hit in efficiency because of the thermal cycle. Why anyone would want to waste time on this solution instead of just jumping straight to the fuel cell + motor drivetrain, I don't know. It's like having a cellphone company and making a fancy new flip-phone when everyone else is moving to smartphones.
> Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced
That's news to me. Actually, I was impressed, given how new Tesla was as a company: several car executives have dismissed them as unlikely to make good enough cars "for a few decades."
Something I’ve noticed as a Tesla owner is that the impression one gets from reading about Teslas online and the impression one gets from actually owning one are almost completely different. I believe there are people with bad Tesla experiences, but I think the severity and frequency of such experiences is magnified by the way the media spins it.
I agree there's a gap, but I've heard both people dramatically insist it's one way, and the other. I don't have a good model of why that might be (other than a coordinated campaign at least one way).
The quality of Tesla varies a lot depending on the factory in which it was built. The ones that came from the USA are probably the worst, especially at the beginning of a model. The ones that came from China are surprisingly better built. We own a Tesla Model 3 built in China, and I could compare the quality to what we drove during our multiple test drives, to what our friends got (built in the USA), and what I saw online. Our car had none of the issues reported by people with cars built in the USA.
That explains, in my opinion, the different experiences you see online.
Media distorts the negative experiences, but there are a lot of Tesla owners for which Tesla was the first car. And those people tend not to report issues because they don't have something to compare. I heard about people who could not take delivery of the car because the trunk was not closing and opening properly, and they had to wait for the service to re-align it on the delivery date. For someone who bought a car before, this is hard to accept as "normal".
The quality is probably improving daily, but I would not dismiss any complaints as exaggerated by the media.
I’m not doubting individual complaints, but I’ve noticed for basically every product that the people who are heard in public forums tend to be people who have a complaint while people who are content are often relatively under-represented in such places. And so, if your views of something are formed by reading reviews, you almost always form a more negative review of the thing than you would have if you experience it yourself. Add in various partisan attitudes about Teslas, and I’ve consistently found that the impression I got from reading about Tesla, Autopilot and FSD was significantly worse than the experience of using them.
What gets me is that Tesla seems to have nailed the hard parts about making BEVs (battery/engine management) but struggles with things like interior fittings and vibration noise and some other minor design issues.
Here in Dublin (the one in Ireland) there are a number of Teslas operating as taxis and you can see some of that as plastic parts break off or start making vibration noises as the car ages (and taxis age faster because they have higher duty cycles).
If you’re going to insist on an internal combustion engine, it probably makes more sense to go to the extra effort of making methanol or even synthetic gasoline or diesel rather than deal with the difficulty of storing hydrogen.
I run a race car on methanol. There's reasons why we don't use it for civilian pedestrian use cases. Number one your eyes immediately start burning from the combustion gases. Secondly the hygroscopic nature of it leads to corrosion.
Yeah and if you’re running individual zoomies you take a shower if it’s running rich. Gotta be careful though as it sometimes is hard to tell if something is on fire because it burns so clean.
The article seems mistaken on a point. A "lean burn" lets in _more_ oxygen than is required, whereas a rich burn provides too much fuel (wasting it), usually to help cool down the engine through evaporation. Adding water to the intake mix helps keeping the engine cool and increases the efficiency because of the expansion of droplets into water vapor before going through the turbo exit.
But what's the range of a 'practical' hydrogen car? (one where all the cargo space is not taken up with hydrogen tanks.)
Both hydrogen and battery cars have the same obstacle to their take-up: infrastructure and range.
When there are as many recharging stations for hydrogen and electricity as there are normal petrol/gas pumps, those alternatives might finally be viable.
I realize that you are being a bit over-the-top, but most people don't have high-voltage, high-amperage circuits in their homes in the US, and the vast majority of apartment dwellers, even those who have reserved parking, do not have a way to connect a high-wattage charger to their car that will also bill to their apartment.
So if you're limited to fast charging, it is relevant how common the chargers are.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 61.8 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37836237
Leakage is one of many issues, but it's also not just solved by a special liner.
> solid technical reasons such as leaking through metal.
Where the heck did you read that.
H2 is such a tiny molecule that leaks out of everything making it a nightmare to try and seal pipework, and it will permeate (and embrittle) metals, namely steel.
It's idiotic to try and use it as a fuel. The money being wasted on H2 research should just go into purchasing more renewable power sources.
> could
I'll believe it when I see it.
If you are a little allergic to calling hydrogen blue or green, depending on how much greenwashing it receives, that might not be the best keywords to type in a search engine. But hydrogen should become a needed industrial step for the world's second or third most widely used commodity (it goes: sand, cement, steel, glass, gravel, petroleum, macadam, wheat…)
I’m not sure what’s #2 on the list of actual hydrogen uses, as most big potential applications could use an easier fuel to handle than a literal cloud of angry protons. It's often a good first step, though: ammonia, synthetic methane, etc.
Far down that list, there’s also a project to put hydrogen back into dirigibles, which I find very engrossing (and yes, the people working on that have heard of the Hindenburg), but it's less solid than making steel.
‘Sand’ caught me by surprise, my uninformed view was that it was just for glass
In my city the buses are electric and some have an hydrogen fuel cell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell
https://inocel.com/product/
It is possible the internal combustion engine+drivetrain is cheaper but it is unlikely to be lighter than the fuel cell and electric motor, and quite unlikely to be as reliable. Add a small regenerative battery pack or ultracapacitor and efficiency will increase further. Reciprocating engines seem quaint at this point.
Probably not, but it's hard to say really: Teslas haven't been very reliable at all and have had to have their drive motors replaced, whereas modern gasoline engines by Toyota seem to be ridiculously reliable. Reciprocating engines may seem quaint, but with so many decades of work and development, they (or at least some manufacturers) seem to have made them some of the most reliable mechanical machines ever devised. (Of course, this doesn't apply to all manufacturers; I wouldn't count anything by Chrysler here.)
What does seem quite clear is that using hydrogen in an ICE necessarily means a huge hit in efficiency because of the thermal cycle. Why anyone would want to waste time on this solution instead of just jumping straight to the fuel cell + motor drivetrain, I don't know. It's like having a cellphone company and making a fancy new flip-phone when everyone else is moving to smartphones.
That's news to me. Actually, I was impressed, given how new Tesla was as a company: several car executives have dismissed them as unlikely to make good enough cars "for a few decades."
Media distorts the negative experiences, but there are a lot of Tesla owners for which Tesla was the first car. And those people tend not to report issues because they don't have something to compare. I heard about people who could not take delivery of the car because the trunk was not closing and opening properly, and they had to wait for the service to re-align it on the delivery date. For someone who bought a car before, this is hard to accept as "normal".
The quality is probably improving daily, but I would not dismiss any complaints as exaggerated by the media.
Here in Dublin (the one in Ireland) there are a number of Teslas operating as taxis and you can see some of that as plastic parts break off or start making vibration noises as the car ages (and taxis age faster because they have higher duty cycles).
Any source for this? Electric motors are supposed to be more stable than ICE.
It's also highly toxic if the vapors are breathed in.
Did I mention it's also invisible when burning?
how come there is not a single video of the engine in this announcement or in their youtube channel?
Both hydrogen and battery cars have the same obstacle to their take-up: infrastructure and range.
When there are as many recharging stations for hydrogen and electricity as there are normal petrol/gas pumps, those alternatives might finally be viable.
So if you're limited to fast charging, it is relevant how common the chargers are.