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Original URL: El Reg has a story on Hyundai's new fuel cell car:
Ask me what my ideal electric car would be and I'll probably tell you one with a range of 400 miles and a three-minute charge time. Shame no such car exists, I hear you say. Not so. I drove just such a vehicle last week.
Hyundai's ix35 Fuel Cell is part technology demonstration, part run-of-the-mill, commercially available motor vehicle. Right now you can buy one off the shelf from Hyundai UK, though there are certain compromises to be made.
All the vehicles on sale or already sold in the UK (and that's exactly 17 at the time of writing) are LHD thanks to the fuel cell sitting where the steering column would need to be.
And they are all front-wheel drive only because one of the hydrogen fuel tanks takes up the space needed by the gubbins that usually drives the back wheels. Oh, and it will cost you over fifty grand. And, erm, there are only three hydrogen filling stations in the UK right now.
LHD only. And no 4WD. And a £50,000 price tag. So not quite mainstream yet
But if you can overlook those four drawbacks the ix35 Fuel Cell is a highly desirable little wagon which drives just like any other good, modern EV but without any of the range restrictions imposed by current battery technology.
Motive power is supplied by a 100kW (136ps) electric motor which in turn is connected to a 24kWh lithium-ion polymer battery jointly developed by Hyundai and LG Chemical. The drive motor takes power from either the battery or a combination of the battery and the 100kW hydrogen fuel cell, depending on driving conditions.
The battery meanwhile can be charged by the fuel cell and by the regenerative braking system. When you do put your foot down the ix35 will hit 60mph in 12.5 seconds and roll up to a maximum speed of 100mph.
100kW electric motor gives the ix35 Fuel Cell decent performance. 0-62 yours in 12.5 seconds but feels faster on the road
Of course as will all electric cars those performance numbers are rather meaningless. The always-available 300Nm of torque makes for very eager and serene progress at all speeds up to the legal limit. It's impressively quiet too, and agile.
The last came as a bit of a surprise to me since the ix35 FC has to carry an extra 150kg around compared with the petrol version. Hyundai's engineers have done a good job keeping the centre of gravity as low as possible and in tuning the suspension to cope with the extra weight.
Refuelling the ix35 couldn't be simpler. Just roll up to a hydrogen filling station (right now there are stations at Heathrow, Hendon and Swindon and three coming to London by year end), pop the filler cap cover, plug in the 700 bar hydrogen fuelling nozzle and ... well that's it.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:48AM
Why, did you know, not only do poor people not drive fuel cell cars, poor people can't even afford to buy fuel cell cars. Instead they drive gas gulping fossil fuel powered pollution machines that are poisoning our planet. We need to fix this problem, by the systematic genocide of all poor people. Finally the rich will enjoy a clean friendly world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:52AM
Please don't reveal the plan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:56AM
Fuel additives to suffocate them with their own vehicle emissions.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:16PM
We are slowly accelerating the difference between their salary/working hours and the cost of living to eliminate them using the "pan slowly heating up" method.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 23 2015, @11:45AM
In a world in which only (a few) rich people remained, their wealth becomes meaningless.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @07:28AM
LHD can mean: Left hand drive, where a vehicle's steering wheel is mounted to the left side of the cabin. Used in most countries where traffic travels on the right-hand side of the road.
But please, don't bother specifying this information for readers who might not actually be drivers. All people are drivers. People who don't drive do not even exist. You insensitive clodhopper.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Nuke on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:23PM
El Reg is a UK website and in the UK LHD is a common abbreviation. It is a bit of an issue being a RHD nation with LHD nations (mostly) all around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @11:38PM
Clodhopper is a British insult, or did you miss that bit?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:42AM
joy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:49AM
Where are the boffins? I was promised boffins.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:00AM
and gubbins too, apparently.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 23 2015, @11:58AM
gubbins is a word apparently as old as mid 16 century, compared to boffin which is a neologism starting its life in 1940-es.
In translation in American English, the old venerable "gubbins" becomes "thingamajig" - you like it better?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @02:09PM
It's not thingamajig, it's doohickey.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday August 23 2015, @08:46AM
Ask me what my ideal electric car would be and I'll probably tell you one with a range of 400 miles and a three-minute charge time. Shame no such car exists, I hear you say. Not so. I drove just such a vehicle last week.
400 miles on 3 minutes' charge? You're fucking serious? I won't believe that until I see somebody demonstrate it in front of me IRL.
From an empty battery, and if you can only get like 100 cycles out of it that doesn't count either.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 23 2015, @09:11AM
That is about how long liquid fueling takes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bart on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:36AM
Not reading or comprehending the article is more of a slashdot thing, maybe you'd like to hang out there.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday August 23 2015, @05:46PM
lol, have we grown to the point where we can send people away?
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Sunday August 23 2015, @06:58PM
I did read the article. I'm still skeptical.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by RedBear on Sunday August 23 2015, @10:56AM
Oh boy, yes, do let's talk about hydrogen (H2) fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs, as some of us refer to them).
This is the topic that spawned a discussion on GreenCarReports.com that went over 2,000 comments within a few days. On an article reporting that drivers of Hyundai FCEVs were complaining in Internet forums that most of the few existing hydrogen refueling stations in California were either out of order, closed for extensive periods of time for "upgrades", unable to fill their H2 tanks more than half full, or strangely incapable of refueling more than two H2 vehicles PER HOUR. There was one guy who hadn't been able to get his FCEV refueled for over a month.
Link: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099082_ca-fuel-cell-car-drivers-says-hydrogen-fuel-unavailable-stations-dont-work [greencarreports.com]
This then spawned a clever meta-article about the original article, which also attracted over a thousand comments.
Link: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099288_who-do-fuel-cell-vehicles-make-electric-car-advocates-so-crazy [greencarreports.com]
Some basic context: Toyota, Hyundai and some other car companies are part of a group that's been advocating hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles for quite some time. Toyota of course brought the hybrid into the mainstream and made it quite popular with the infamous Prius, which contains a relatively small NiMH battery that just assists the engine during acceleration and stop/start to help conserve fuel. Strangely, Toyota seem to have spent the last 15 years sitting on their hands failing to come up with new and better technology for the future. Oh, except for FCEVs, but we'll get to that. The plug-in Pruis is a joke with 6 miles of electric range.
Now Toyota are even going around badmouthing pure electric EVs and batteries and claiming that battery-powered vehicles will never work. Which has been met by the entire green transport online community with significant stupefaction and derision. Their experience is primarily with NiMH batteries rather than Li-Ion, so it's kind of weird.
Link: http://www.greencarreports.com/news/1099228_toyota-negative-on-batteries-because-it-has-more-experience-than-any-other-maker [greencarreports.com]
Meanwhile other car companies like Nissan, Tesla, Chevy, BMW, Mitsubishi and others have chosen a different tack. They're either producing pure battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) like the Leaf, or range-extended plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) like the Chevy Volt or BMW i3 Rex or Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, which have fairly usable All-Electric Range and thus basically end up being BEVs most of the time, driven mostly on battery power. So there's this kind of battle going on between car companies (and Internet commenters) to decide what's the best path to the future of transportation.
This is a basic run-down of why I find myself squarely in the BEV camp and powerfully irritated by the promotion of FCEVs as a superior alternative to BEVs. (Yes, it's not just being promoted as an alternative to ICE vehicles, it's being promoted as the only proper choice for the future.)
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Right now, and for the foreseeable future, most H2 (about 95%) is derived from fossil fuel sources. So while the vehicle itself is zero emission (it outputs nothing but water vapor after extracting electrical energy from recombining the H2 in the fuel tank with atmospheric O2), the H2 refueling process as a whole is not particularly green. Yes, you can travel about 300 miles on a tank of H2 in a Toyota Mirai, but they've had to go from 5,000 PSI (years ago) to 10,000 PSI tanks to do it, and 10,000 PSI compressors are not cheap. Also, the overall H2-to-miles process is only about 40% efficient, barely any better than an ICE vehicle, and some say it's either the same or slightly worse than gas in terms of total CO2/methane emissions once you do the well-to-wheels calculations.
It's been reported that the few H2 stations that exist are using around 60% H2 from clean sources and renewable energy, but I strongly suspect that this is due to some judicious use of specific H2 sources in order to qualify for state and federal subsidies, and if they go into mass production they will quickly end up much closer to that 95% number as they are forced to source H2 from non-green fossil fuel sources processed by non-renewable energy.
So, FCEVs do not seem to do a good job actually being better for the environment, which is kind of the whole point of the exercise.
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You'll notice I call them FCEVs, since they are essentially electric vehicles. They're just less efficient BEVs. They have electric drivetrains just like BEVs. The fuel-cell produces electricity to drive one or more electric motors, just like a BEV. Except that the fuel-cell can't actually produce enough energy to give the vehicle sufficient performance, so they also have to include a rather large Li-Ion battery to assist the fuel-cell. You can see right in the summary that the described FCEV from Hyundai has a 24kWh Li-Ion battery. The current Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh battery and goes around 100 miles with nothing but the battery. If you removed the H2 fuel-cell (heavy) and the space-inefficient round 10,000 PSI H2 tank and replaced them with more Li-Ion batteries, you'd wind up with a BEV like the Tesla Model X. Nearly the same range already (and batteries are improving every year) and only slightly heavier. You do the math. Will we soon have some BEVs with more range than any FCEV has? Hmm...
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H2 fueling stations are extremely expensive. Each pump and the compressors and other equipment to go with it cost around $1,000,000. That's one million dollars, or more, per H2 station. The vehicles themselves are still quite expensive to make. Used to be a million, now probably closer to a quarter million apiece. Then there is the H2 refueling network required to keep the H2 stations supplied. And we're talking about highly refined purified H2, not the cheap industrial H2. Oh, and guess who is going to be paying for the H2 infrastructure, refueling stations and all? Hint: it isn't the auto manufacturers. Are you a taxpayer?
Contrast this with BEV infrastructure, which consists primarily of a standard 120V outlet at home, or a home Level-2 charger (sub-$1,000 and coming down), and relatively few Level-3 charging stations for long-distance driving (about $100,000 each, and coming down). This doesn't quite work for a lot of folks just yet, with typical BEV ranges of 55-95 miles, but within 3 years from right now we will have several different BEVs available with between 200 and 300 miles of range. That's not even including all the range-extended plug-in hybrids we already have available, which already do more than 90% of their miles on nothing but battery power, and give you plenty of range for long-distance trips.
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BEVs can be recharged anyplace there is electricity. It's slower and less convenient on a 120V outlet than it is on a Tesla Supercharger, but it's doable. Quite a few people have criss-crossed North and South America and Europe already, recharging off of friends' dryer outlets and RV park hookups when public chargers were not yet available in the area. FCEVs can't go more than about 125 miles from any H2 station. Ever. So there will need to be quite a few H2 stations before you can even think about taking a cross-country trip in your FCEV. We won't have that many H2 stations for several years, possibly a lot longer. Right now there are about 24 in the whole country, which don't seem to be working well (see link above). So it's hard to understand how people can think FCEVs are somehow a better choice than BEVs already. FCEVs face a much worse chicken-and-egg problem than BEVs. Without proper infrastructure, a BEV is inconvenient but usable. Without proper infrastructure, a FCEV is a paperweight.
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There is significant argument about this, but H2 may have cost issues. Right now they're giving the H2 away to promote the FCEVs, so it's hard to get a handle on how much it will really cost at retail, but I've seen quotes from $4 to $16 per liter. It will be interesting to see how it ends up. Remember we're talking about purified H2, not standard quality industrial H2. It has to be free of contaminants or you'll damage your extremely expensive and delicate H2 fuel-cell. Which is another issue with fuel-cells: durability. Batteries seem to be lasting much better than expected in the wild. I'm not so sure about fuel-cell longevity. If you think replacing a battery pack is expensive...
==
Anyway, that's the gist of why I am not impressed in any way by hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and don't believe they should be promoted in the passenger vehicle space right now, especially when we already have access to a technically superior technology (that is still improving every year) that is actually capable of being directly fueled from 100% clean renewable energy sources, and using that energy very efficiently. Large delivery vehicles that have plenty of room for H2 tanks and local routes, maybe. But not personal transportation. It just doesn't make sense and will cost taxpayers tens of billions to build out a sufficient infrastructure backbone to make widespread FCEV passenger vehicle ownership practical. We could install 10 Level-3 high-speed EV charging stations (or 100 Level-2 chargers) for the cost of each H2 pump.
That's my $20.00 on the matter.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by c0lo on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:43PM
May be true for H2 FCEV, but I wouldn't bet it will stay true for all types of fuel cells.
Natural/bio gas in particular: Apple [gigaom.com] branched out as part-time energy company based on a mix of solar and fuel cells. More recently Microsoft seems to do the same.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday August 24 2015, @12:41AM
I am not sure how a reference to stationary fuel-cell power production is relevant to a discussion of hydrogen-powered passenger vehicles. And producing clean power from a source like bio-gas with a fairly closed-loop carbon cycle of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and then re-releasing it is one thing. It's quite another thing to continue to harvest ancient sequestered CO2 from fossil fuel sources and release it into the atmosphere. Due to the discovery that there is extensive accidental release of methane from capped natural gas wells, which is 30 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2, the mining of natural gas to replace coal for power production is generally seen as, at best, a wash in terms of environmental effects. Which is another reason to be negative about hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, since most of the hydrogen available right now for FCEVs is processed from natural gas.
The time when we will be able to economically process and compress H2 from clean sources like the ocean using nothing but clean renewable energy is far in the future. We have the technology to do it like plants do, maybe even more efficiently. But that technology is still in the lab, and nowhere near ready for mass production. Meanwhile many battery-electric vehicles are already spending their whole lives being recharged from solar, wind and hydro/geothermal power sources and having no net environmental effect beyond the CO2 released during manufacturing. I therefore give FCEVs two thumbs down.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 1) by FunkyLich on Sunday August 23 2015, @11:20PM
My knowledge in the matter is very limited, but I agree with what RedBear has written about hydrogen usage as a fuel. While hydrogen itself maybe very clean and planet-friendly, providing and producing it is almost completely the opposite of that. To get hydrogen in a state which it can be used as a fuel means to separate it from any other chemical compound that contains it. And hydrogen is highly reactive and will try to bind very strongly to anything available. And all this means that a high energy is needed to extract hydrogen, be it fossil fuel energy, electric energy, etc. But then, while we will need to use high amounts of fossil fuels or electricity to produce hydrogen so that we can use it in cars, it's smarter and cheaper to get rid of the middle man and use fossil fuel cars (we already do this) and electric cars (this is the true sensible thing being researched and promoted for the future) directly, instead of hydrogen fuel cars.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Monday August 24 2015, @12:27AM
(Score: 2) by RedBear on Monday August 24 2015, @03:21AM
I agree completely. Ultimately all passenger vehicles need to be BEVs. I'm careful to only say positive things about what might be called "strong" plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt or the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV which have at least 35-55 miles of All-Electric Range before the engine even comes on. It's been very impressive to me that many Volt owners basically use their Volt as a battery-electric vehicle, almost never putting gas in it. And that's with the first-gen Volt which only had about 34 miles of battery range, on a good day. The second-gen Volt just got EPA rated for almost 55 miles of battery range, which means many careful drivers should routinely get over 60-65 miles out of it before the gas engine kicks in. Fleet-wide that means Volt owners will be pushing toward 95% overall yearly mileage driven entirely on batteries. That's pretty damn good zero-emissions performance while the masses wait for longer-range BEVs to be affordable.
This is of course in complete contrast to the "weak" PHEVs (commonly known as "mild hybrids") with small batteries that typically end up running the engine almost all the time for performance reasons and tend to even have slightly worse-than-gas mileage in the final calculations. I don't care for those at all. I should be more clear about that for those who aren't familiar with the range of vastly different PHEV types on the market.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:04PM
plug in the 700 bar hydrogen fuelling nozzle and ... well that's it.
Given the foolishness people get into at gas stations operating around 0 psi, letting drunken/ignorant civilians fool around with 10000 psi connectors can only lead to disaster, eventually.
Why not just plug in a battery? Thats something people can handle, and range isn't an issue.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday August 23 2015, @12:26PM
one of the hydrogen fuel tanks takes up the space needed by the gubbins that usually drives the back wheels
"Gubbins"? On what is supposed to be a technical website?
Refuelling the ix35 couldn't be simpler. Just roll up to a hydrogen filling station, pop the filler cap cover, plug in the 700 bar hydrogen fuelling nozzle and ... well that’s it.
Like filling with petrol (I'll use the British term here to save the ambiguity) or diesel fuel, he means. Way to hype an everyday occurrence. Oh, and it looks like he forgot paying.
It’s just like filling up a petrol car just without the stink of hydrocarbon fumes.
I've always liked the smell of petrol. Anyway, the world doesn't need to adopt hydrogen cars to avoid the "stink". It could adopt for petrol and diesel the same type of filler seal as used for this hydrogen.
the fuel tanks are rated to 10,000psi and are pretty much indestructible
Nothing is indestructable.
[in the UK] such matters are dismissed as "green crap".
Make no mistake. all the fossil fuel that is accessible in the world is going to be used within a generation or two. Someone, somewhere, is going to use it. Even if it is not used by guilt-ridden Greenies in the Western World, others, like China, India and Africa will have no hesitation whatever in stepping up for it.