#VW cancels plans to build a dedicated #EV factory. #Volkswagen has been racing to cut costs after falling behind #Tesla and China in the electric car market.
There is simply not that much demand for BEVs. It is mostly a fad driven by subsidies and virtue signaling. It's a matter of when, not if something will give. VW and other car companies will have to cut production and move away from BEVs. Likely towards #hydrogen cars.
Ok, Let’s talk about #hydrogen Fuel Cell Electric Vehicles (#FCEV) as an alternative to Battery Electric Vehicles (#BEV).
A FCEV uses the same electric motors as BEVs but gets its power from chemically reacting H₂ with O₂ from the air in a way that produces an electric current - a fuel cell. None of this is new technology Fuel Cells were a mature and reliable power source by the time the Apollo program was landing people on the moon. The issue with fuel cells is the same as with Enteral Combustion Engines(ICE) they are most efficient in a very narrow energy band great if the goal is to power the life support on a space craft, but not for the extremely variable loads needed to drive a car.
For this reason, FCEVs are hybrids with the same Li batteries as BEVs and ICE Hybrids like the Prius. Like ICE Hybrids they use the battery to accelerate and as storage for regenerative breaking with the fuel cell providing a constant recharge.
Why I’m skeptical of FCEVs
Greenwashing Hydrogen. FCEV advocates will point out that the only tailpipe emission is water vapor. The question is where does the hydrogen come from. By far the least expensive way to produce hydrogen gas is to crack the hydrogen atoms off of petrochemical hydrocarbons. As a mater of basic chemistry it takes far less energy to crack hydrocarbons than it does to electrolize water. And unlike the electrical grid where technologies like solar, wind and nuclear are already deployed and becoming an increasing share of our electric grid. Processes to produce hydrogen from water at anything close the the cost to strip it off fossil fuels is in the same development stage as cold fusion. at least for the next decade green hydrogen will be a premium product only available to the wealthiest buyers.
Hydrogen storage is hard. To fit enough hydrogen on a moving passenger car for it to have a 300 mile range requires pressures of 10,000psi (700 bar). The kinds of pressure vessels that can safely handle that pressure are expensive, and need regular inspection. Having had to keep a compressed air tank of just 200 psi in a fixed certified, I can tell you that there will be significant costs to regularly inspecting a 10,000 psi tank full of flammable gas that needs to survive a collision with one of the 2023 lineup of full sized puck up trucks.
But that is just the start. Hydrogen leaks. No matter how good you think your valves and fittings are the smallest molecule in the universe stored under huge pressure will find a way out. Ask anyone who has experience in the space industry where hydrogen is already the fuel of choice and they will tell you that hydrogen leaks are just a fact that has to be engineered around. On a vehicle this will be a small annoyance but at a fueling station this will be significant. The farther Hydrogen is transported and the longer it must be stored the higher the losses. There is also the energy factor of compressing that gas. To the best of my knowledge the prodigious amount of work done to pressurize the fuel is never recovered
FCEVs and BEVs both started to be produced about a decade ago, and while Tesla has scaled out its supercharger network world wide in that time. Hydrogen has less than 100 filling stations all in California. While these stations can fill a car in 5 minutes, they can only fill 2 to 5 vehicles before spending an hour refilling their high pressure storage tanks. One could argue that all Hydrogen needs is an eccentric billionaire ready to lose money for a decade building out infrastructure, however I think the infrastructure challenges with hydrogen exceed even Musk levels of ambition.
Cost. My M3 already costs noticeably less per mile that the equivalent ICE vehicle. Baring a huge technological leap, hydrogen will always be more expensive. because the least expensive hydrogen is processed out of the same fuel that runs ICE cars and provides less energy per molecule than those hydrocarbons when reacted with O₂ hydrogen cannot help but be a more expensive fuel.
So why are hydrogen FCEV still a thing? Well the vehicles are lighter, fueling times are comparable to gasoline, and the petrochemical industry is desperate for them to succeed. The oil industry can see the writing on the wall as states like California will ban new ICE vehicle sales in 2030. While holding out hope for a green hydrogen future a generation away, they can continue to have a market for their product as gasoline and diesel phase out. “Hydrogen will become the green fuel of the future” explain their sock puppets knowing that dirty hydrogen from their product will always have a price advantage. And to be fair, turning a mobile source into a point source of emissions does provide the opportunity for carbon capture (so called Blue Hydrogen), but all this still add even more cost while BEVs already have a price advantage in their fuel - not to mention that every home in the developed world has the infrastructure to charge BEVs.
Why write all this? Because when you get down to it most of the #FUD being spread around #EV s is coming from FCEV advocates who are trying not to let hydrogen become the betamax of the transition away from ICE transportation. In doing so they are making it harder than necessary for the world to move away from ICE transportation.
🚨Elon Musk just lost $28bn as Tesla took a beating🚨
Toyota’s chairman Akio Toyoda, tells the EV market "I told you so", as sales slow dramatically.
Toyoda has long advised the industry to hedge its bets on EVs by continuing to invest in hybrids, hydrogen-powered cars, & other alternative eco-friendly vehicles.
UK insurers have hiked premiums to unaffordable levels because of the high cost of EV repairs.
"The priority should not be to replace every car with its electric equivalent but rather to rethink #mobility in general.
"Placing so much focus on the automobile and even now the electric automobile is not the way that we solve our mobility problems, but rather it's time to invest in #transit, in #cycling, in walkable cities, to get people out of #cars altogether," they said."
BEVs regularly are being powered by diesel generators. This is the truth: Just because something can be powered by green energy, doesn't mean it is. In fact, BEVs struggle to match on-site power demand with renewable energy availability. In reality, #hydrogen cars will end up being greener and a lot sooner too.
More evidence that BEVs are not for everyone. Hydrogen cars are needed. Also, imagine thinking that only one solution can be allowed to exist as many BEV fanatics think. This is result of being a corporate stooge: practical green transportation gets held back, not advanced.
Reminder that large scale adoption of BEVs is still a fantasy. We simply don't have the grid capacity, and building it will take a long time. And if we did build it, we will find out that the cost is extremely high, and it completely kills off the notion that BEVs save money.
Biden admin announced new actions to expand ownership electric vehicles, make it cheaper for people to install EV chargers at home & accelerate expansion of EV chargers on America's highways.
…invest $325 mil..to improve public #EV charging stations, enhance EV tech, help train workers to deploy and maintain the emerging charging network across the country…+ investing $46+ mil in a program called Ride & Drive Electric to strengthen EV charging industry https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2024/01/19/biden-administration-electric-vehicle-costs-EV-charging-network/7821705662579/
I have gotten the impression over the last year that the fossil fools are expending a lot of effort towards turning Americans away from EVs towards ICEVs so-called hybrid vehicles.
I'll let y'all in on a secret that they want to keep from you. We have to stop burning fossil fuels just as quickly as we possibly can and putting a fossil fuel burning engine into new vehicles is not helping towards that necessary goal to address the existential crisis we're facing.
Can someone explain how it makes sense that an #Opel#eVivaro / #Citroen#eJumpy Crew Cab #EV van (3 second rate seats in the rear) is more expensive, even with fewer features, than the equivalent #Zafira minibus / people carrier with lots of bells and whistles?
Not sure if that’s the case elsewhere, but certainly it is in Finland. It feels like the van versions are 10K more expensive than they should be.
Very interesting to hear what #Toyota NA CEO Ted Ogawa has to say about #BEV investment in the US.
Essentially, Toyota is ignoring EPA guidelines about BEV mix and focusing entirely on customer demand, and they will not make BEVs in numbers higher than expected demand lest they waste their resources.
Toyota’s now-well-known reticence in jumping into the BEV bandwagon, preferring to sell #PHEVs instead, may prove to be the better bet. The EPA is likely to reduce their mandate for 50% BEV new car sales by 2030. If they do, then Toyota’s strategy would have been proven right.
Well, at least if you buy a Tesla, you're not supporting big oil companies like Exxon — oh wait...
"Oil major Exxon Mobil (XOM.N) is in talks with Tesla (TSLA.O), Ford Motor (F.N), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) and other automakers to supply lithium, Bloomberg Law reported on Monday citing people familiar with the matter."
We are inclined to forget that any technology designed to make life better comes with a cost—not just a monetary cost but also a cost in health, psychology, the environment, or social values.
EVs require six times the mineral input of an ordinary car. Mainly because of the heavy lithium battery, EV production releases nearly 70 percent more greenhouse gases than are produced in an ordinary car’s manufacture.
Genuinely curious as most of my followers are #infosec and somewhat logically minded (just somewhat) - how many of you have #solar panels, batteries, an #EV, or even gas/diesel generators at home? Or more than one? Curious.
I'm fine with the soft, whirring spaceship sounds that some EVs emit as a safety feature to alert people that they're moving. The new Dodge Charger EV comes with a deafening 126 dB roar, which is just plain obnoxious.