The Biden Administration is out with its big plan to reduce transportation emissions in the next decade and almost entirely eliminate them by 2050. There’s a lot of talk of prioritizing electric vehicles and sustainable aviation fuels. What’s missing? Hydrogen for light passenger vehicles.
That’s the focus of this morning’s dump, but we’ve also got more on the Tesla ‘Autopilot’ probe, and updated car sales numbers from luxury German automakers.
What Happened To The Hydrogen Cars?
It’s dangerous to base your theories on graphics on government reports, especially if the reports are of the wishful thinking variety. The report, which you can read here, is called “THE U.S. NATIONAL BLUEPRINT FOR TRANSPORTATION DECARBONIZATION: A Joint Strategy to Transform Transportation.”
I’m going to quote from the first paragraph of the executive summary, because it explains succinctly what’s going on:
The transportation sector is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, responsible for one-third of all emissions. To address the growing climate crisis, and to meet the goal of net-zero GHG emissions economy-wide by 2050, it is critical to decarbonize transportation by eliminating nearly all GHG emissions from the sector.”
Maybe the “wishful thinking” part was a little harsh. The last administration’s wishful thinking about climate change was that it didn’t exist, so already this is a vast improvement.
This report covers everything from rail, to plans for off-road vehicles and long-haul heavy trucks (which account for 7% of emissions on their own). There’s a graphic, though, that really knocked me on my seat-filler this morning. It’s called Figure B and it shows up a couple of times:
It’s a touch weird the way they do this, but each little symbol indicates how likely something is to happen, from limited long-term opportunity to greatest long-term opportunity. For light passenger vehicles, the biggest opportunity is a move to battery electric powertrains. For aviation, sustainable liquid fuels is seen as the best bet.
There’s not even a “limited” ranking for hydrogen light duty vehicles! They didn’t even bother to toss in one “well, maybe” graphic for cars. It’s there for long-haul heavy trucks and even aviation. Cars, though? Nada.
Most of the focus of the report with relation to light passenger vehicles (the cars most of us drive) is on battery electric vehicles. Hydrogen is mostly reserved for freight and other uses:
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can complement battery EVs for applications requiring longer ranges and faster refueling times, like long-haul trucking.
Many automakers (and whole countries) are focused on producing hydrogen vehicles, but I don’t personally find these offerings that persuasive. On the other hand, hydrogen-fueled trucks like the Quantron FCEV 60-2000, which has a reported 900-mile range, make a lot of sense to me.
In addition to discussions of alternative fuel sources, the government’s plan leads with transportation system design and land use:
Homes, workplaces, and services are often located far apart from one another. When people have limited transportation choices, or less accessible and efficient options, it can take them even more time to address their daily needs. The spatial mismatch between jobs, housing, and services is especially pronounced in disadvantaged communities.
I know there’s no one single strategy that’ll bring us to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, but as a closet NUMTOT, I think it’s foolish to ignore the humongous role that land use and transit system plays in our lives. The little tidbit I always like to share in these situations is that Los Angeles is twice as dense as Houston, which means that something as simple as collection trash requires twice as much energy in Houston as it does in LA (not exactly a new urbanist paradise).
All of this matters. For what it’s worth, I agree with the government’s subtle appraisal of hydrogen passenger vehicles.
Tesla Autopilot Probe Moving ‘Pretty Fast’
The big man, David Shepardson of Reuters, is here today with an update on the probe of Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ system that is, in reality, anything but. The headline of the story is:‘Extensive’ Tesla Autopilot probe proceeding ‘really fast’, U.S. official says. Here’s the money quote:
“We’re investing a lot of resources,” said NHTSA acting head Ann Carlson in comments to reporters on the sidelines of an event in Washington. She declined to commit to a particular timeframe on when the probe will be resolved. “The resources require a lot of technical expertise, actually some legal novelty and so we’re moving as quickly as we can, but we also want to be careful and make sure we have all the information we need.”
Tesla, as is the company’s standard practice, didn’t comment. This could be a big deal for the automaker if it gets slapped with a huge fine or, like in California, the company is banned from using the term “full-self driving.”
The German Luxury Brands Had A Good Q4, A Meh Year
Taken overall, the Germans had a decent time in a terrible year when it comes to car sales.
At the top is BMW which, like GM, had an increase in sales in the fourth quarter to end the year that propelled the company to 332,388 new vehicle sales overall in 2022. That’s a 1.3% drop, year-over-year, which ain’t bad when compared to the double-digit decreases for most Japanese automakers.
Mercedes actually managed to increase sales, likely due to supply chain issues easing in the fourth quarter, with a year-over-year increase of 4% to about 276,100, which puts still puts them behind BMW. Audi was at the bottom, with 196,038 vehicles sold in 2022, a y-o-y decrease of 5%, though the fourth quarter saw a huge jump of 63%.
Here are the links to the full sales reports if you’re interested:
Volvo Is Going To Try Subscriptions
People do not love buying a car and then having to pay a subscription to actually use its features. Too bad, Volvo announced at CES that it was working with supplier Qualcomm to make that the future, specifically calling out the new Volvo EX90.
From an Automotive News article about the Volvo-Qualcomm tie-up:
Ehh…
The Flush
What would you pay a subscription for in a new car? Do you pay for one already?
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Photos: Toyota, U.S. DOT, Volvo, Tesla
“Sustainable” Liquid Fuels. Is this going to be like the corn ethanol boondoggle that requires large inputs of petroleum to produce? The petroleum goes into powering the farm and transportation equipment (obvious) and production of fertilizers. It would be nice to see at least the farm equipment converted over some form of biodiesel that doesn’t turn solid in cold temps.
Aviation is always a special case that requires fuels that are both energy dense and weight/space efficient. Both H2 and battery really can’t manage these requirements. As for transportation, I am definitely for fuel cell hybrids that allow for the H2 powered fuel cell to be used as a range extender.
Is this going to be like the corn ethanol boondoggle that requires large inputs of petroleum to produce?
You’re out of date. Corn ethanol has been energy positive since the 1990s. Depending on who out ask and which facility is doing it corn ethanol is 2.7-4x energy positive now:
https://ethanolproducer.com/articles/19190/corn-ethanolundefineds-energy-balance-is-strong-continues-to-improve
I could quibble with some specific ratings in that chart, but overall it looks like a pretty sane and rational approach to reducing emissions. Let’s give some credit where it’s due here!
Hydrogen from the fuel refining process is also a fossil fuel, and hydrogen from electricity is a complicated and wasteful way to transport energy.
– So thanks, Joe (thumbs up emoji)
So even Audi is resorting to cheap tacky shiny black plastic for their front clips? Sad…
I’d pay $5 a month for SiriusXm, which is the deal I have until March when it goes up to(random abacus noises) $26!!!! WTH??? It’s just radio stations like I could stream from my phone! Definitely gonna be a call here in a few weeks.
For the Electric car discussion, PHEV beats Hydrogen fuel cells, already have the infrastructure, already in more stable storage format(liquid), just about as efficient, no real point. One of the strengths of pure electric is it’s energy source ambiguous, could be nuclear, could be coal, could be wind from elephant farts, whatever, so that’s a better solution than locking in to a specific fuel format.
“What would you pay a subscription for in a new car? Do you pay for one already?”
At this point, not a goddamn thing. My last four cars have come with complementary Sirius XM subscription for a year, and I did continue the subscription once because after making it very clear that I didn’t want the service they made me an extremely ridiculous hard to ignore offer. I don’t recall the exact number but it was something like $5 for an entire year. When the year was over they made the same offer again, but honestly I hate that kind of genre driven music delivery and turned it down. I actually enjoy the kind of musical whiplash one gets from going from Slayer to Herb Alpert to Johnny Cash to Run the Jewels to Einsturzende Neubauten to…you get the idea. Anyhow all I need for that is either an aux input or a decent Bluetooth connection, and if you’re going to charge me monthly for the later, I’ll gladly make do with the former.
One other subscription that interests me: whole car subscription service. I think Nissan was testing this in limited markets, though the supply issues probably broke it all down. But the idea of paying a monthly fee to be able to go and swap cars whenever is pretty attractive, especially if you don’t have the space for multiple vehicles or just aren’t sure what you want and need a few months of trying different things.
I personally LOVE the subscription based model of commerce. I think EVERYTHING in the car should be paid for on a subscription basis. Specifically, I want to pay for each firing of the spark plug.
You do that every time you fill your tank.
I pay for registration and insurance on a subscription basis. That’s enough, thanks all the same.
Hydrogen for cars is always 5 years away.
Some subscription services I can see paying for like satellite radio. I find myself in the sticks a lot where terrestrial radio is horrible and cell service gets spotty. So in my particular situation I pony up. Paying to keep a geofenced Level 2+ ADAS up to date is also okay for me. Someone has to do that. Heated seats or other built in features is a hard no. Just roll it into the price. For additional power, nope. That’s greedy.
I guess I’m paying a ridiculous subscription fee on our new GMC lease, since they baked a $1500 non-optional option into the price for 3 years of their most expensive On-star plan. Any new Buicks or GMC’s for 2022 and 2023 have that requirement. Even with On-star, the lease price was still lower than other options due to a GM employee discount, a lot of rebates, and a salesman/dealership that I’ve leased cars from for about 15 years now. This one is going to my son in the fall when he moves off-campus in a city that gets an average of 200″ of snow a year. I felt he needed something dependable and AWD, so in this market it felt cheaper to lease something than buy a dependable used AWD SUV. I also limited myself to the big 3, since those are the only dealerships near him for about 100 miles. At least that subscription means I can track the car, see oil life, tire pressure, fuel level, etc. with the app.
I don’t want to subscribe to my car, but I do like the idea of being able to “update” it as it ages with new software features or whatever. I’d just rather pay for those packages that I want when they become available so that I can own them just like I do the rest of the car.
I think that feature subscriptions in a car would work best when the car is being leased or financed. It’s a lot more palatable to just add a couple bucks to a big monthly payment that you’re already making than it is to have an entirely separate subscription payment. It’s still the same amount of money, but it’s easier to trick people into thinking about monthly payments instead of full price / lifecycle cost. I guess that’s why BMW is leading the way in subscriptions — a lot of their cars are leased.
I do not maintain any subscription services with my car. When I purchased it, it came with trial subscriptions to satellite radio and a connected service that would allow me to control certain aspects of the car (door locks, vehicle health checks, etc) from my phone, but neither were valuable enough to me to personally justify continuing the subscriptions at my own expense. The in-dash navigation is also frozen in time from when the car was new despite the manufacturer attempting to sell me map updates each year (after several years they just gave up). I would be willing to pay a subscription for a feature only if that feature required some regular upkeep on the other end (server maintenance, software updates, etc) — not for something like heated seats.
As for hydrogen, I’ve always been skeptical. It sounds like a good idea only if you don’t think about it too hard (“It’s the most abundant element in the universe! The only byproduct of its combustion is water!”). There’s always a loss any time energy transfers forms (damn, laws of thermodynamics!), so you’re going to put more energy into extracting it than you’ll get out of it… which is fine so long as the energy going into it is “clean”… but “clean” energy (hydro, solar, geothermal) is practical in only specific locations… and elemental hydrogen is notoriously difficult to transport and store, making a distribution and service network a big challenge. I’m not saying it’s impossible or not worth pursuing, but there are many more realistic and attainable technologies within reach.
What happened to hydrogen cars? I’ll tell you… they don’t have a future and never had a future. Hydrogen cars were always just bullshit designed to get governments to delay ZEV mandates and/or tougher fuel economy/emissions standards.
If hydrogen can’t make it in less TCO-sensitive segments like consumer-grade cars and trucks, then it doesn’t have a hope in hell in other segments that are far more TCO-sensitive.
And thus, Figure B is wrong in my view. For short-haul trucks and buses, it should be zero icons as battery-electric tech has already ‘won’ there. For long-haul heavy trucks, it should be not more than one icon. Same deal for Aviation since battery-electric airplanes are already a thing too!
The one area where I’d give hydrogen maybe 2 icons of opportunity is with ships/boats… if there was some sort of system developed that converted seawater into hydrogen on the fly. But honestly, I think the shipping industry will have better luck reducing emissions by using a combo of solar and sails (when the wind is blowing in the right direction)
The Flush: It depends on whether I saw a real benefit for the subscription. For example, if I had a BEV, I might subscribe to a plan for unlimited vehicle charging if I travelled a lot and they had charging stations that were properly located. But I don’t currently have any car-related subscriptions.
Battery electric airplanes are a thing for little propellor driven puddle jumpers that carry a couple of passengers a few miles. The amount of lithium batteries needed to power an airliner across the ocean woud max out the plane’s entire payload capacity on their own.
By ‘a few miles’ you must mean 500-650 nautical miles… and by ‘a couple of passengers’, you actually mean 2500kg of passengers or cargo.
And I say that because that is actually what is coming in the near future.
This is an example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eviation_Alice
So yeah, initially this will be for small aircraft/air taxis.
And yeah, with current tech, the batteries use up 60% of the payload.
But in spite of that, battery electric tech is financially viable in this segment now… while hydrogen tech isn’t.
That’s my point.
The current prototype has a range of 250NM, 500-650 is speculative future development within the next several years, maybe. That’s 287 miles, not exactly a threat to Airbus or Boeing, frankly, at those distances, just driving is usually more economical on both time and finances
2500 lbs commuter payload OR 2600 lbs cargo (not kg).
9 passengers and two crew will be almost all of that so not much left for luggage.
I wish them all the best but they’ve got a hell of a long way to go before they can even hope to challenge big jet.
That aircraft currently has a 250 nm range and a 2,500-lb passenger payload, not kg. It’s right there with a number of turboprops on payload, and apparently, it has a pretty big cabin. Impressive! But electric aviation still has a very long way to go before the big manufacturers will even break a sweat.
Battery-electric transport category airliners are a dead in the water with current tech. Not happening, no chance. The very best, state of the art batteries currently available in the lab have like 1/50th the mass energy density of jet fuel. Looking at an actual real world high performance application like Formula E, it’s more like 1/100th the energy density.
That excess mass is absolutely BRUTAL in aviation. As a general rule of thumb, for any given cruising speed (most efficient phase of flight, ignoring the more mass-sensitive takeoff and landing phases), the energy consumption of an airliner vs increase in mass goes as the doubling of a square, which is why aerospace companies will pay millions to shave bare ounces.
With current battery tech, something with A320/B737 mass and cruising speed is going to have an absolute maximum range of like 300 miles, and that realistically drops to more like 100 miles when you factor in margins of safety and diversion requirements. You can sort of make it work on a limited scale for small planes with 10-20 passengers, but once the mass goes up, the double square rule just kills any viability. Airliners will need either sustainable aviation fuel, or LH2, and there are a number of projects under development for both.
Airliners will need either sustainable aviation fuel, or LH2, and there are a number of projects under development for both.
If you want an apples to apples comparison of jet fuel to LH2 to LNG take a look at the Soviet experimental Tu-155:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-155
IIRC in a nutshell on LH2 they lost roughly 2/3 of the range and 2/3 the power (only one engine was converted for alternative fuel use), and ~1/3 the passenger capacity to the massive cryogenic tank. Running the plane on LNG doubled the range over hydrogen but was still only 2/3 that yielded by jet fuel.
Granted engine tech has advanced but I’d expect those gains to be proportional to each fuel.
Hydrogen is a dead end for all uses except perhaps aircraft, especially short flight aircraft. Even there it’s highly unlikely to prove very useful. High production cost, low storage density, low energy, leaking, high compression and storage costs, and embrittlement are simply too many obstacles to becoming cost effective.
You specifically won’t find on-the-fly hydrogen conversion in oceangoing ships because you would have to carry the fuel onboard to drive the hydrogen conversion process, and it would be far more efficient to use the fuel directly instead.
If only there was a way to propel a ship with off-shore wind….
I once subscribed to Sirrius, it was not bad, but when I sold off one car and tried to cancel just the one, they cancelled both cars. prior to that Billing was bad, so I just went without. I do not much care for subscriptions, but I suppose if it make the various packages I am forced to by to get something like good headlights, then so be it, I would be hard pressed to pay extra for them, but I could see the secondary market liking them as it would enable somebody to maybe update or add a feature to avoid the 5-10 year old systems to be completely out of date.
I am not really sure this administration has shown the competency required to set up a decades long plan to handle a problem of this complexity. Their approach in anything so far has been throw billions at it.
Yeah, and the last administration was a bunch of rocket scientists. Why didn’t they solve all the world’s problems. Bad take Dave, GTFO.
Where did i say the last administration was any better? You are reading things that arent there.
Hydrogen’s biggest problem is that even if resources were put into it, the infrastructure lags at least 20 years behind electric. By the time it could even be built out, home electric charging for apartment dwellers will be solved and nobody will want to go back to station-based refueling for anything but long-distance road trips.
I’m not a Global Warming denier or anti-electric car-ista, but there is another elephant in the room that the experts are ignoring. That is, geo-engineering to adjust our climates. Heck, we change the pathways of rivers, not to mention release carbon stored for millions of years to create global warming. We can change the earth. Let’s employ Manifest Destiny my friends!
Seems reasonable to use all of our our human talents to reduce carbon emissions. We’re spending almost nothing on this approach to reduce global warming and even when we try to experiment with other approaches, the self appointed guardians of the planet oppose it.
For example, a Harvard University team planned to do an experiment with a high altitude balloon and dust particles to see how global warming might be affected – sort of a synthetic volcano approach to absorb the sun’s rays. The research effort was quashed by everyone’s favorite environmentalist, Greta Thunberg and the indigenous people of Sweden. (I’m not making this up.)
Also, we – and when I say we, I mean the powers that be – think we can fix our problems by covering the earth in solar cells and windmills. There was a reference to this approach in the movie Blade Runner 2049. It’s not pretty (but the solar farm was real!)
You’ll forgive me if I don’t shed a tear from hydrogen. I prefer to put out fires with gasoline.
This kind of thinking – change our environment to suit us rather than suiting ourselves to our environment – is EXACTLY what’s got us into this mess in the first place.
Geoengineering is a massive Pandora’s jar with unknowable side effects. Popping a giant balloon particles to simulate a volcanic eruption? Where do you think that dust is going to end up?
Of course changing the environment got us into this mess. And it will get us out of this mess. If humans didn’t change the environment around them, we’d all be huddled together, freezing our hairless asses off in caves. But we built yurts and invented fertilizer so we could shelter and feed ourselves (a strange and terrible story). We heat and cool the air, and fly and drive in metal and plastic vehicles. And we change the direction of rivers and split the atom to provide power. It’s what humans do.
There’s plenty of dust in the air. Moving it around a bit probably won’t kill us.
Greta’s right, why bother when REAL volcanic eruptions already occur for free? Iceland, Hawaii, Fiji the Phillipines, Washington, Alaska, the world is full of erupting volcanos. Just observe what happens when one of those go off.
(Spoiler alert, they tend to wreck travel plans.)
Besides unless the Harvard folks plan to detonate a SIZABLE nuke, as in at least a few megatons there is no way they can put up as much dust as an actual volcano.
I pay a subscription for an app that allows me to start the car remotely, set climate controls, find my car, and several things I will never use. I’m kind of salty about it, but I do understand that they are maintaining a server and data connections to make it work.
I have paid for satellite radio for a short time when driving a lot. I wouldn’t do it again, but I get it. My parents use theirs, and it would be hard to get them up-to-speed on downloading music and such.
I wouldn’t pay for navigation. It might make sense for someone like my parents to pay for that if it stayed up-to-date.
I would avoid any car that makes me pay for things that normally require no outside connection to work. Not only is it frustrating to pay for those features that should be included, you are adding a failure point. If my heated seat tries to check with the server to see if I have the subscription, that’s one more thing that can go wrong. If the car’s computer checks to see if I have a performance upgrade, it could be flat-out dangerous to have an accelerator that might react differently once it has connection (not to mention the possibility the connection could be compromised). If you want to standardize the construction and charge for features, one-time activation is far more sensible than subscription.
Arguably, even my remote start is a tradeoff, since it adds a data connection that can start or stop the engine, but it adds a level of convenience, which means it is adding complexity with a purpose.
While defeating some of these subscriptions might be possible, it still increases complexity for no good reason and also means we should not buy from those companies.
Since Volvo seems to be talking about navigation and entertainment, I’m not ruling them out of future car purchases based on this.
As someone who pays for satellite radio, the ultimate reason I do is to discover new music. I have Spotify but its algorithm is terrible.
That is also a good reason. Perhaps if I had left the decade-specific stations a bit more, it would have seemed to be worth the money.
I paid for OnStar when I was commuting through the boonies a lot. It came in handy a few times. Now that my commute is on a 4 lane highway with help trucks a call away I let it go.
I still pay for satellite radio. It’s often more current than other music streaming services and the usability in-car can’t be beat. It’s easy to scroll until the genre I like is available. Unlike my phone which is harder to navigate even in car mode.
Really? When I had satellite radio it seemed like I heard the same 20 songs over and over on the channels I listened to. Maybe things have changed, but in the end the only thing I ever used XM for was listening to sports, particularly ones outside my region.
I don’t even think I did the trial for my app subscription when I purchased it. The only thing of value would be remote start which wasn’t even an option. Hyundai/Kia pushed the remote start function of their app a bit a few years ago – I remember an Elantra Super Bowl ad where a guy tells his smartwatch to start the car, I think running from a bear? – but interestingly they’ve moved to a hard button on the fob for remote start in the more recent generations.
OnStar was one of the first ones and more detailed as it could tell you even the tire pressure readouts where applicable. But I wouldn’t buy a GMC or Buick now that they require you to subscribe to OnStar.
Safety services were another big push of those connected services, but now other tech seems to be taking that space – I think some of the more recent Apple Watch advertising has pushed that feature in automobile accidents too.
Every experience I have had with satellite radio is worse sound quality and just as much as a playlist as terrestrial radio, maybe even moreso. It’s novel for a bit when they activate it for free around certain holidays and I tune in, but it’s largely the same songs on some of the stations. My father likes it and always was an AM/talk radio listener, so sort of generational it does seem like you said about your parents.
Mine is a Kia, and if it didn’t have the remote start, I would not have even done the trial, either. I do wish mine also had the fob button, but the app is more convenient for me, since I can start it from my desk without issue.
The services I won’t be using include geofencing and speed alerts, which I assume are so you can monitor a teen driver. It also has a valet mode, but I virtually never get valet parking and probably wouldn’t go into the app to prepare for it. Maybe I should have done so when it was in for repair. I can see some use cases, but not for me. And I won’t pay for the higher tier, since all it adds is stolen vehicle immobilization/recovery and features for sending stuff to navigation, which I don’t use.
And the safety services are still there, just not that valuable to me. It’ll call 911 if the airbag deploys and it tracks my maintenance and diagnostics, but I stay on top of maintenance and can see if error codes or lights pop up in the car.
… last time I checked, most Hydrogen is created from the feedstock from Dinosaur juice.
Still takes a greater energy input to crack Hydrogen versus resulting usable Hydrogen output.
Hydrogen:
What did you expect? Electric is the big thing right now. All combustion = bad combustion! Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what the majority of lobbyists in that sector were clamoring for as well.
Also it takes, at a minimum, twice the energy for garbage hauling in L.A. as it does in Houston. I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes three times as many due to various factors such as gridlock and Cali’s pollution laws.
Tesla
I’m not sure if moving quickly is a good thing or not. Typically when something such as this moves slowly in Washington that means everyone is crossing their T’s and dotting their I’s to ensure that everything happens properly and Something Happens. You start moving quickly and its generally a sign of recklessness.
Given the current political climate and the report from the govt outlined in the Hydrogen blurb its possible that the current administration has made a decision about electric cars and is going to pull something that will protect all electric auto makers, no matter how fucking stupid that decision actually is.
Subscriptions
No comment. Nothing I have has them. Don’t really plan on driving anything with them.
Forgot a comment on the hydrogen section.
A big part of the problem with hydrogen is that its so damned hard to keep it sealed and keep a full gas tank. Getting the infrastructure in place to mitigate that is going to go a big way towards making the whole system viable for commuter vehicles
perhaps a big fabric bag above the vehicle filled with hydrogen would be a solution
Hmm, long-haul blimping. I like it!
“Also it takes, at a minimum, twice the energy for garbage hauling in L.A. as it does in Houston.”
Other than it being hilly, I don’t understand. Are the transfer stations further away?
Twice the population, means twice the garbage, means twice the amount of energy/time/whatever to pull it, right?
That is at a minimum if everything is working the exact same in both cities. The congestion in L.A. is a hellscape (Houston isn’t much better, but it is better) so to get everyone’s trash picked up on the same day you need to account for the congestion. How do you solve that? Maybe you need 12-15% more sanitation workers and trash trucks, maybe there’s another number, but the end result is that there are more workers and trucks required.
That is only looking at the effect of congestion.
Land is at a premium in L.A. in a way unlike Houston, so the dump sites likely are going to be farther. More time to get there, same amount of time required to get everyone’s trash the same day, more trash trucks needed.
And so on and so on
That energy chart makes perfect sense to me. Hydrogen is the worst of the options for light transport and not much better for aviation. Rail and trucking? Maybe for long hauls in remote areas where electrification isn’t practical and coverage gaps are too great for batteries to handle.
H2 is better for maritime as current battery tech would be heavy enough to sink any ocean crossing ship that tried to depend on it but IMO synthetic fuels would be even better, at least from a technical viewpoint. For river and lake based vessels hydrogen might be OK if synthetic fuels prove impractical or are needed elsewhere.
The real question for me is the TBD regarding sustainable fuels for cars – which fuels are they considering? biodiesel? biomethane? tritium for nuclear fusion? hay for the horses needed to pull the cars? At least with the latter option the engine bay can be emptied to make a convenient frunk.
Why is H2 a poor choice for your average passenger car? I’m genuinely asking, because it makes a lot of sense to me, based on my (probably poor) understanding of how it works.
From the end user perspective, it’s great, hydrogen cars are fine to drive and use, the issue is it requires more energy to produce hydrogen than can be extracted from it, and storing and transporting it is difficult
Liquid hydrogen is like 1/5 of the energy per volume of gasoline if my math is right.
It is also literally the hardest thing possible to store. Likes to escape.
Plus it’s very explosive.
The hydrogen BMW 7 series would empty it’s tank in less than 2 weeks, just from leaks. So you can’t go on holiday or park indoors.
LH2 has low volumetric energy density, but extremely high mass energy density (2.2x gasoline). So the use case comes down to whether or not you can install pressurized, sealed LH2 tanks. If you can, LH2 makes a lot of sense.
And no, it’s no more explosive than other gaseous flammables. Everyone forgets (or never learned) the Hindenburg burned because it’s aluminum paint was extremely flammable, and all of the fire you see there is aluminum burning, not hydrogen.
Not really. the weight of the tanks and supporting equipment more than nullify the weight advantage of the LH2 except for VERY large volumes.
Too bad the mass energy density doesn’t matter if it still takes up 5x more space.
It’s doable, but there are some intractable problems. 1) It takes a lot of space to store the hydrogen necessary for a reasonable range. 2) it requires the occupants to sit on top of a 10,000 psi pressure container. In a large truck, you could place the pressure vessels in a different location. FWIW, it’s not the fire danger that makes hydrogen a problem (liquid petroleum fuels cause far more damage in the case of a fire), but the explosive danger of having pressurized tanks.
The main reason I think H2 is a dumb idea for passenger cars is because why build up an infrastructure from the ground up to just be a less efficient version of an EV? With recharging times already down in the sub-20 minutes range for the new generation of EVs and EVs in the sub-$20k-40k range popping up fast, it just seem like a good use of time. Electricity obviously isn’t going anywhere, it’s used in every facet of modern day life from light bulbs, to cell phones, to the internet, to cooking food, even to power gas pumps. Hydrogen has a lot of the same problems as gas: you need to manufacture it (which takes more electricity than to just charge an EV), store it, transport it, store it again, and have people line up on a regular basis (since they can’t get it at home like raw electricity) to fill up.
Take your pick:
Availability: Hydrogen is touted by its proponents as the most abundant element of the universe. The problem is while that may be fine in a star its not much help here on Earth where there are ZERO natural reservoirs of H2. Every bit of it has to be made from something else usually methane (currently 95%) or occasionally water.
Regarding water:
Efficiency: Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen has a loss of about 60% of the input electricity. Compare that to batteries which are about 93%. You’ll need more than twice the renewable energy to go the same distance with hydrogen so double the windmills, double the solar panels, etc. That gets expensive.
There is another possibility, producing copious amounts of H2 from nuclear power. Nuclear power plants can be designed to produce hydrogen either via electrolysis or direct thermal cracking of water. Doing so will require an enormous amount of capital which is doable but also a lot of political will which given the anti-nuclear sentiment in this country will probably make this path a no starter. That’s a whole separate rant.
Storage time: Compressed hydrogen is pressurized to 10k PSI in vehicles. That stored hydrogen tends to leak over time so if your car sits for a few weeks you’ll be dry. Liquid hydrogen has to be stored at near absolute zero temperatures and as such needs either active refrigeration which is power intensive or needs to be periodically vented to relieve pressure. Either way you can’t keep a tank full for very long.
Storage volume: Hydrogen has a very poor energy to volume. Using the Toyota Mirai as an example one needs to store 35 gallons of 10k PSI hydrogen to move that car 400 miles. Compare that to a similarly performing Prius that needs only 8 gallons of gas to do the same. Those hihg pressure tanks also need to be shaped like soup cans to maximize volume to surface area. That shape is going to be harder to design around. Those tanks are also very heavy (193 lbs in the 1st gen Mirai) so they more than nullify the oft touted energy-to-weight advantage of hydrogen in passenger cars. A 15 gallon automotive gasoline tank weights about 22 lbs with the pump so to go the same 400 miles its less than 72 lbs for gasoline plus tank and pump vs 205 lbs for tank plus hydrogen and that’s assuming the larger 2ng gen Mirai tanks got no heavier.
Batteries will be even heavier and bulkier than that of course but there are gains in not having a fuel cell and batteries have far fewer design constraints.
Storage safety: IMO this is a questionable topic. H2 tanks can be designed to be VERY safe but there is no data I have found on how long they will last. Any high pressure gas tank needs a schedule to to be re-certified and replaced. I have no idea how long 10k PSI H2 tanks will be certified for nor how much it would cost to replace them, nor if the tanks would need to be removed for testing. Regardless it is a potentially expensive PITA.
Infrastructure: There is currently no significant infrastructure to transport the volumes of hydrogen needed. Building a dedicated H2 pipeline network is going to be more expensive than a comparable natural gas line due to the special materials needed to prevent embrittlement. Hydrogen CAN be run as a fraction with NG without embrittling the metals but both gases will need to be re-purified which I think will only drop the energy efficiency of both further. Almost all BEVs and PHEVs can be charged in millions of homes and workplaces TODAY with nothing more than access to a plug whereas it would be very difficult and expensive to do the same with hydrogen.
Catalysts: Fuel cells and electrolyzers tend to need the same catalysts as catalytic converters but in greater amounts. That tends to nullify the moral high ground H2 advocates try to use against battery tech.Those catalysts are also quite expensive.
Precedence: About 20 years ago there was a similar and in many ways superior “alternative fuel” being touted – methane in the form of natural gas. NG had many advantages over hydrogen, notably a much greater energy to volume ratio, abundant natural resources, a robust and extensive pipeline network including home delivery to MILLIONS of homes in the US alone, no embrittlement issues, better emissions than gasoline or diesel, etc. Some lucky folks even had their own gas wells. Companies like Phil made home compressors that allowed users to refill their tanks at home ( just ~3k PSI and it took as long as L1 charging an EV but it was doable). The NG was burned in ICE engines that ran much cleaner than gasoline or diesel engines so they lasted much longer with less maintenance. Natural gas was CHEAP too, much cheaper than gasoline or diesel. Its also renewable as biogas. The only significant drawback was methane is a potent GHG but to me that was a solvable problem with stricter controls and better engineering.
Still the tech flopped in the marketplace. I have no expectation hydrogen which has far more limitations than advantages over NG would do any better.
If you made it this far congratulations! I hope you found it helpful.
The biggest reason is the quare-cubed law. A high-pressure hydrogen tank needs a certain wall thickness. The smaller the tank, the more the “overhead” from the tanks costs space and weight. In something the size of a passenger car, current battery tech basically matches or beats H2. Look at the Mirai compared to BEVs. As it scales up though, H2 pulls ahead. In something the size of a cargo ship, battery density just isn’t good enough but H2 might be.
There’s other factors like leaking, easy ignition of fumes (though conveniently, those fumes remove themselves rapidly from the area unless there’s an enclosed roof), the question of hydrogen production, etc.
I think hydrogen made with green electricity is potentially a better choice than battery EVs. Batteries have lots of rare earth minerals that we need to mine out of the ground, hard to replace when their life cycle starts to deplete, and they are heavy.
Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel has too many hand-wave-aways to be viable with current technology. Hydrogen proponents, some of whom I’m sure are sincere, either have to hand-wave away
1) Leakage — It will take a breakthrough in materials to solve this problem
2) Production economics — It will take a breakthrough in H2 production to even out the energy-in vs energy-out equation.
3) Distribution logistics — H2 pipelines? See No. 1. Local production? See No. 2.
4) Safety — Others have mentioned riding around with a 10,000 PSI H2 tank in the vehicle. There’s also the issue of an H2 leaking from a vehicle parked in a garage. I suppose H2 detectors will be a thing.
I believe the one suggestion of rail car size H2 Generator boxes connected to Natural Gas lines already present at fuel stations would be the most viable option. it still uses Natural Gas to generate, so it is not the cleanest option, but the most viable for sure.
Is that powered off of the natural gas or making it out of the natural gas? Either way why on earth wouldn’t you just use the natural gas.
I think that would be a better option for sure. Though I believe it it has something to do with transporting liquid Hydrogen. I think the reason why Natural Gas never took off as a fuel source is the required PSI versus what you get from the lines for houses and so on, but I am not 100% on that.
IIRC (and some wild guesses) why NGVs never look off were:
1) lack of fueling stations compared to gas/diesel. Sure home fueling was possible but you had to buy the compressor which wasn’t cheap and only gave you the snail slow equivalent of level 1 charging. Otherwise you had to go to your utility company station which may or may not have been open when you needed it. Road trips were much harder to plan in the days before Google maps.
2) range. The vehicles at the time used 3.6k PSI tanks which only got you 200ish miles
3) boring and slow Most NGV were slower versions of existing gasoline cars. The 12.3s 0-60 Civic NGV comes to mind. The other options were the kind of bare bones, low end vehicles you find in government fleets which is not what the virtue signaling crowd want to be seen in.
4) resale. Nobody wanted to be stuck with an unsellable anchor
5) gasoline was cheap and climate change was SEP.
6) alternative fuels are for dorks, nerds, worry warts, losers, poors and smelly hippies.
7) lack of awareness. No advertising, no word of mouth, superb owl commercials.
8) competition from hybrids. Why deal with the above when you could just buy a virtue signaling Prius instead?
The one good thing (at least in CA) was driving a NGV got you one of the highly coveted HOV stickers that, thanks to low NGV adoption rates, were continually renewed. Even so there were not a lot of takers.
It’s my understanding hydrogen leaks aren’t really that big a deal from a safety perspective Hydrogen tends to disperse rapidly rather than accumulating.
It depends. Outside, yes. It just goes straight up rather than pooling nearby like a heavier-than-air gas. In a garage or other building that doesn’t have vents somewhere at or near the roof peak? That I’m not sure about.
I’m not in favor of subscription services, but I also admit that they’re probably coming, whether we like them or not.
I think the dim view of hydrogen powered light vehicles by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy* is correct. The space needed for hydrogen storage in compressed gas form (the only practical way to store hydrogen at the moment) makes its use in passenger cars impractical. But for large vehicles, it makes a lot more sense. Unless there’s a breakthrough in storage of adsorbed hydrogen in some kind of relatively low-density organ-metallic or metallic framework, it’s just not possible to store enough hydrogen in a small space to make a light-duty hydrogen vehicle practical. And, of course, that greatly diminishes the energy density of hydrogen by introducing a relatively massive storage framework. Oh, there’s also the possibility that someone finds an energy-efficient way to release hydrogen from a dense chemical storage medium like water or ammonia, etc., but so far that has proved very difficult.
* I find it hilarious that the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) is so inefficiently named. I think efficiency is implied if you’re specifying renewable energy as your goal. I would have called it the Office of Renewable Energy Operations (OREO).
I despise subscriptions and refuse to pick any up. It’s just a way to make things look cheaper than they really are and make a company more money. Plus I like to actually own things I’m spending money on. Oh, and if I make a 1-time payment for something they can’t jack the price up.
Re: hydrogen
Just do this instead. It’s carbon neutral.
https://www.audi.ie/ie/web/en/models/layer/technology/g-tron/power-to-gas-plant.html
I’d want to see the round trip efficiency of that process before signing onboard. Just going through hydrogen loses ~60% of the electrical input energy. I don’t see going through methane to be any more efficient.
Disappointing as well that there’s no commitment to sustainable liquid fuels for passenger vehicles either.
Even if you’re a hardcore EV believer, you have to admit that there is significant risk in putting all the eggs in one basket, so to speak.
Indeed.
We definitely need cheap EVs. Part of the issue is that the working class are going to be soon completely priced out of automobile ownership in the USA. The money in the household budget simply isn’t there. Tens of millions of Americans are deferring car maintenance because they can’t afford it, and it’s only a matter of time before something fails.
Making gasoline-powered vehicles more efficient should also be a major focus. There’s a lot of room for improvement. Kits could be made to bolt-on to modern cars to cut drag for existing used cars, since most people are priced out of the new car market, and since the embodied emissions in producing a car are such that it takes many years for the increase in fuel economy over an older car to be covered by a replacement. CAFE regulations and tax breaks currently favor and subsidize large trucks and SUVs and make them artificially cheaper than they would otherwise be, to the disadvantage of sedans and compacts. With attention to streamlining and weight reduction, we could have inline-6 turbodiesel sedans and sports cars exceeding 60 mpg combined, which will make hemp-produced biodiesel much more viable, and we could also use hemp-produced methanol to run modified gasoline engines. That said, the amount of sustainable liquid fuels that can be produced is going to be limited. The vehicles we drive must reflect that.
It is possible to synthesize gasoline from air, but the amount of energy it takes to do so is so massive that it won’t be practical until nuclear fusion becomes viable/economical.
Regulations pertaining to vehicle emissions systems have also become onerous, and are hampering the potential to reduce CO2 output per mile and increasing cost/complexity of vehicles with efficient engines(such as diesels). It would IMO be beneficial for the environment if we could go back to less computerized diesel engines without the mandatory fluid tanks, because it would make diesels an economically viable choice for people of modest means again.
Even better would be diesel-electric series hybrids. The 1990s-era cars prototyped for the PNGV project/government boondoggle were such cars and could exceed 70 mpg combined. These were midsized cars. The Dodge Intrepid ESX/ESX2/ESX3, GM Precept, and Ford Prodigy were these cars. The federal government gave the auto industry more than $200 million to develop them. The Toyota Prius was developed as a response to them because Toyota thought it would get left behind if it couldn’t compete. Little did Toyota know that the catch to the PNGV boondoggle was that the big 3 never had to sell these offerings, or use their advancements in subsequent vehicles, and mostly didn’t. These PNGV cars had half the drag of today’s cars, without much compromises entailed in doing so. They did use advanced/expensive build materials and hybrid-electric powertrains, which were expensive, but most of their fuel economy advantage over contemporary offerings came from the drag reduction, and the drag reduction over increase in MPG was the cheapest advantage these cars had over their contemporary offerings. Toyota ended up having a niche that had no competition for many years as a result.
I completely agree on the diesel-electric hybrids, though I think that ship has sailed. The sheer complexity there just isn’t worth it anymore. Back when diesels didn’t require all sorts of stuff to meet emissions it made a lot more sense.
I must reiterate that unless you can show me the modern streamliners that meet crash safety requirements, what you are suggesting is probably not possible.
The airflow doesn’t care what a car’s compliance with safety regulations looks like. It cares about the shape.
I’ve heard it said that the front of the car’s shape is restricted by crash standards in such a way as to put a floor on how low the drag coefficient can go, and that it is around 0.20, but that floor is only in the context of the current automotive styling zeitgeist, which includes oversized wheels and the current in-vogue proportions dictated by stylists for aesthetics. Ignore those things in favor of lowering drag, and you can go lower. It’s not the front of the car, but the rear of the car after the airflow has entered the turbulent zone and risks flow separation where most of the drag actually happens. The rear ends of most modern cars are very far from optimized in this regard and it is here where there is the most room for improvement. Of course, there commonly is room for improvement all over the car, at least for most models, but you’re giving up a paradigm of style over substance in order to do it. Even the new Prius fell victim to this, deciding to shape the windshield of the car for styling instead of drag reduction, and that is likely to be the slipperiest production car that will be available when it is sold.
Just because an automaker hasn’t put to market a streamliner that can meet these standards doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. In fact, over the last 50 years, there have existed a large list of prototypes that were said to have met or exceeded the crash standards of their time while being greatly more slippery than what was typical. One example is the 1983 Volvo LCP2000, with a 0.25 drag coefficient, which was occupant survivable in a 35 mph head on collision, and with about half the drag as was typical for the time period. Today, modern cars are beginning to approach that figure, but that is in the context of oversized wheels, oversized grilles, flared wheel housings, various baroque styling cues, plastic cladding, and such that all raise the drag and provide no extra functionality. Even in the context of this paradigm, there exist modern cars approaching 0.20 Cd values, passing current standards.
I know that the rear is extremely important… Crashworthiness also shapes the rear of a car…
What do you think the form factor of a modern highly aerodynamic safe vehicle with reasonable packaging looks like?
That Volvo had a Cd of .25, which is not the .15 you are always purporting as attainable. The modern cars approaching .20 do NOT have the styling cues you are talking about. The EQS is an all-out aerodynamic shape cleverly colored to attempt to look normal (it does not).
I once again point out the XL1, which simply would have been more aerodynamic if it was reasonable to make it so. It already throws away practicality and conventional styling AND meeting a price point.
FYI, the “PNGV” cars, which I looked up, had half of the drag of a freaking Astro. They were exactly on par with the most slippery modern production cars.
The fact that we’re only seeing exceptional aerodynamic characteristics in big cars shows that we need huge vehicles to have both great aero and 4 seats. The Mach E isn’t in the same ballpark as a model S/EQS/air/XL1 but has fake trim to make it LOOK more slender and aerodynamic. No cladding to be seen there. Stubby shapes are not aerodynamic and nobody is going to be laying down to ride in their car.
I appreciate the benefits of good aerodynamics out on the open road, even if it’s just for a quieter cabin or a more stable ride. I fail to see that much return for most urban and suburban use cases where vehicles never make it up to speeds where it matters. Perhaps a well placed spoiler will help get through the drive through quicker. Weight reduction is absolutely a bigger contributor to improving efficiency, range etc. There is just too much junk in cars, especially luxury junk.
Also based on how many people I see remote starting their vehicles and leaving them to idle (0 MPG), I’m not sure people actually give a damn, even if complaining about gas prices is a national sport.
And the push for pure EV ignores that a PHEV with reasonable range would drastically reduce the emissions of your average person without massive buildout of charging networks. I know a lot of EV owners who have an EV and also a gasser for trips. If they could have both in one vehicle, it would be more efficient overall. And imagine what you could do with alternative liquid fuels and PHEVs.
“Volvo Is Going To Try Subscriptions”
Well, I was looking forward to the eventual EX60…
This might not be as bad as the headline sounds. It appears the subscriptions are for entertainment and navigation. I don’t use the navigation built into my current vehicle, but a navigation service that regularly updated might be of use for those who don’t want to use google maps or the like. And satellite radio is already a subscription service for car audio. If Volvo wants to add their own option to the mix, it probably won’t hurt anything.
That said, if it turns out these subscriptions go beyond that, I definitely won’t consider a Volvo until they reconsider.