The Clarity is NOT half a million dollars. It is leased for
$600/month for 3 years for a total lease price of $21,600 and that
includes maintenance. The Clarity is made in a dedicated factory.
If Honda eliminates the high cost materials and improves the
reliability at the same time, mass production will bring the price
down even further. Honda thinks it can figure out fuel cell cars
faster than it can figure out BEVs and I agree with them on that.
Honda has been making quantum leaps with fuel cell technology.
All of the automakers are saying that 2015 is the year for the fuel
cell car. The automakers, including GM, are planning to try and commercialize fuel cell vehicles in 2015. That is 6 years away,
not 10,20,30,40, or 50 like so many people think.

Hydrogen does not go through any material you use or fuel cell
vehicles wouldn’t work at all. You can’t use mild steel for
hydrogen pipelines, but when I talk about a $500k a mile pipeline
it isn’t made of mild steel. It is a carbon fiber pipeline with a layer
of aluminum. In the future a hydrogen carrier will probably be used
so that hydrogen can be easily distributed. Yes PEM fuel fuel cells
are limited in their temperature range and incapable of heating a
hydrogen carrier to 350C easily, but hydrogen ICE’s aren’t. I’m
sure that a solution will be found to address the temperature
problem so that solid and slurry storage of hydrogen can be
used in automotive applications. Even without a non gaseous
hydrogen system, fuel cell cars are well on their way to being
commercializeable. Obama shouldn’t have cut funding for hydrogen
research, he should have increased it.

As far as a long series of breakthroughs is concerned, you are ready to claim that hydrogen needs many breakthroughs to
reach the mainstream when these breakthroughs are
happening, but you deny that any breakthroughs are needed
to make battery electric vehicles practical. The fact is, a fuel
cell vehicle has and probably always will have greater range
than a battery electric vehicle. E-REV’s go further than both,
but E-REVs use gasoline or ethanol which are highly toxic when burned.

It is not fuel cells or battery electric vehicles. Fact, fuel cell cars
and battery electric cars use many of the same parts. Think,
electric motors, there are small batteries in fuel cell cars, there
tend to be regenerative braking systems on both BEV and
H2FC vehicles like the Chevy Volt Hydrogen. Honda made 100
vehicles and leased them in Southern California for $600/month.
I know that those vehicles didn’t cost $1 million a piece or there
would be a $980k loss times 100. How can Honda absorb that
kind of a loss?

You are willing to rip on hydrogen, but you deny that there are any
problems whatsoever with battery electric vehicles. Well, there are
many problems with batteries. The batteries one needs are
still too heavy pound for miles and they still wear out too quickly
for the price you have to pay for them. Worse, Lithium is a limited
resource unless we find a way to mine the ocean which is environmentally unwise.

Fuel cell cars have a distinct advantage over BEVs in that they are
electric cars without the heavy and expensive battery and they are
able to travel much further. The Clarity only stores hydrogen at
5000 lbs per square inch and on 4 kg of hydrogen it can go 200-240 miles. There isn’t a reasonably priced battery electric car on the market that can do that. Jump to 10k PSI hydrogen storage, you have the Toyota fuel cell SUV that can go 516 miles on a single fill of hydrogen. With fuel cell cars, range isn’t the problem. The only problem that is blocking commercialization of fuel cell cars
right now is the lack of hydrogen refueling stations and some
solvable cost issues.

As far as plug-ins cost advantage, I can buy a lot of gasoline for
$8-$10k dollars. On paper, the gen1 Volt isn’t going to pencil out
if it sells for $40k or more. Most people spend $15-$17k on a slightly used car, so the Volt won’t be sold to the masses driving
the cost up. I’d rather spend $8-$10k extra on a hydrogen fuel
cell car than a battery electric vehicle because I can get further
on hydrogen than I can on a battery and hydrogen will probably
be cheaper than gasoline.

I take issue with your 98% efficient transmission line comment.
I bet that half of the energy that is transmitted is lost, especially
on low voltage long distance rural lines. If this isn’t the case,
why have so many people opted to go off grid that live in remote
areas discovering that that is cheaper than having utility lines
dragged in?

Obama, fool that he is, has politicized the debate about whether
fuel cell cars or battery electric cars are the future. They have
been developing together where cutting funding for one will
hurt development of the other. Hydrogen in gaseous form or
some hydrogen carrier that PEM fuel cells can work with is the
future. I don’t see a 7 fold increase in battery capacity
happening anytime soon let alone a major cost reduction.
Lithium ION batteries are already mass produced, the cost savings
of mass production have already been realized.

“Only hydrogen can be extracted from practically anything”
No, both electricity and H2 can be made from the same energy sources, including fossil fuels and renewables. But to make H2 from renewable energy sources or nuclear power requires making electricity first. The combination of electrolysis, compression for storage, and fuel cells is only 23% efficient at storing electrical energy, but charger and batteries are 85% efficient. Going the H2 route would require 3x more electricity, that means less electricity from renewables left over to displace fossil fuel use!

“only hydrogen plus a fuel cell has propelled a car for 200+ miles without a drop of gasoline”
No, there are several EVs that have gone over 200 miles per charge, and the Tesla Roadster is EPA rated at 244 miles under normal driving. No gas there.

“I bet with a good hydrogen pipeline that it’s more efficient to pump hydrogen than it is to transmit electricity”
Not even close. The transmission grid is 90% to 98% efficient, depending on distance. Electrolysis wastes far more energy, more energy is lost to pump the gas through the pipeline, and the fuel cell itself looses energy. Moreover, as the smallest of all molecules, H2 leaks through any crack and diffuses through any material, meaning energy losses through leaks. The efficiency of going the H2 route is horrible. For those reasons, the per mile fuel cost of driving electric will always be much less than the per mile fuel cost of driving on H2.

“Do you really want to swap your battery for another one that has more miles on it than yours does?”
If it is leased, why would you care, it’s not yours, it belongs to the leasing/battery swap company.

“Do you want to stop every 40 miles to swap your battery out?”
No, but you wouldn’t. A 40 mile pack would only be used for a plug-in hybrid like the Volt, or a slow speed NEV, neither one would use swapping. Battery swapping only makes sense for pure BEVs with much longer range that are designed for it.

“What happens to all these batteries when they wear out”
They get recycled, as will fuel cells because they wear out, too. In fact, fuel cells don’t last as long as standard LiIon batteries, and some new types of LiIon (like the ones used in the Volt) should last over 10 years or 300,000 miles.

“If the Clarity hits the market for $30k or less and the Volt stay above $40k”
Won’t happen, the Clarity has a half million dollar fuel cell, and the carbon fiber H2 storage tank alone costs more than the Volt battery – and don’t forget, the Clarity has a LiIon battery, too!

Sorry, but it would take a long series of major breakthroughs to bring the cost of H2FC vehicles down to affordable. Plug-ins start with a huge advantage in both cost and efficiency, and it is very unlikely that H2FC vehicles will ever overcome that advantage.

It isn’t just .10 cents to allow charging at 220 as well
as 110, it’s a whole lot more money in the form of
battery replacements because you are wearing the
battery out faster. There is a limit on how quickly
a battery can absorb energy, the rest has to be
accounted for in the form of heat. By the way, there
are losses in transmission lines that have to be
accounted for as well when well to wheels efficiency
is calculated. I bet with a good hydrogen pipeline that
it’s more efficient to pump hydrogen than it is to transmit
electricity. Once you have hydrogen, use it directly.

Fast charging isn’t feasible and battery swapping is
unacceptable. Do you really want to swap your battery
for another one that has more miles on it than yours
does? Do you want to stop every 40 miles to swap
your battery out? What happens to all these batteries
when they wear out, and they will wear out? If people
say we’ll just use the range extender, petroleum dependence
will become permanent. The environmental devastation will
become apparent long before we run out of OIL. Say we get
through 100 years on the OIL that remains, that is probably
far too optimistic. There aren’t very many new refineries and
worse it is getting harder and harder to find high quality crude
OIL.

Yes to the Honda FCX Clarity, I expect it to go nation wide within
6 years time. I also expect to see a fuel cell offering from Toyota
which has a fuel cell SUV that can go 500 miles on a single fill
of hydrogen. I can’t emphasive enough that fuel cell cars refuel
in 3-30 minutes depending on the compression efficiency of the station they are being fueled at. For fuel cell cars the major
problem is a public relations one. Battery electric cars on the other
hand are plagued by major engineering obstables that include range and durability limitations. If the Clarity hits the market for
$30k or less and the Volt stay above $40k, you can bet that I’ll
be buying a Clarity.

I disagree with the notion that Islamist terrorism is merely a matter
of OIL security. It has nothing to do with OIL. Islamic extremists
hate Christians and other non muslims. Only a fool thinks, if we
don’t need to secure OIL there won’t be a problem anymore.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-hydrogen-hoax

“The problem with this expenditure is not simply the waste; the government throws away vaster sums on any number of other useless programs all the time. Rather, the real issue is that the myth of the hydrogen economy has masked the administration’s total failure to address the nation’s vulnerability to energy blackmail. In consequence, despite the obvious relationship between oil dependence and the war with Islamist terrorism, no competent policy for achieving energy security has been put forth. If we are to achieve any progress on this most critical issue, the myth of the hydrogen economy needs to be debunked. It is bad science, bad economics, and bad public policy.”