The Real Reason Tesla Doesn't Make Hydrogen Powered Vehicles!

The Real Reason Tesla Doesn't Make Hydrogen Powered Vehicles!

Last video: New 4680 Battery Cell Production Update!

►You can use my referral link to get 1,500 free Supercharger km on a new Tesla:

Welcome to the Tesla Space, where we share the latest news, rumors, and insights into all things Tesla, Space X, Elon Musk, and the future!

#Tesla #TheTeslaSpace #Elon

[johnkarakash]

Nice comparison but you left out a tiny matter when you were talking about refilling (well, you hinted at it). 99% of the 'fillups' from your typical driver (compared to ICE cars) vanish when you recharge overnight. The only time someone will need to charge away from home are a) longer trips and b) forgetfulness. If you have your future EV automatically remind you to plug in when you get home, you're golden!

[ourcolonel]

When I was about 8 years old, my dad took me to his work. Circa 1963. He showed me the fork lifts charging with electricity. These were wet cell batteries, 4' X 4' X 4' and about 1, 000 lbs. These fork lifts were used indoors because no emissions.

[ChaJ]

Hydrogen is just an energy carrier when used with electrolysis. So let's see how it stacks up to a battery, what you probably should have spent this video doing:
1. Safety: Battery is good. Maybe it can catch on fire, maybe it can't. Depends on the chemistry and other safety factors around it. Not the easiest thing to get to burn, even if it is a chemistry that can. This is overall better than say gasoline, which is highly flammable. Hydrogen is bad. When hydrogen goes wrong, it goes really wrong, as in big boom. There have been some station explosions around the world and it has been catastrophic. This has led to hydrogen being banned in some developed countries. Hydrogen cannot scale up because of safety issues. Eventually you have big explosions and it gets banned.

2. Cost efficiency: Batteries are either moderately or very highly efficient depending on how exactly the batteries are setup. This tends to lead to batteries being cheap to operate. This is key for something like trucking where you need to keep costs of energy down as moving a truck down the road uses a tonne of energy. At this battery electric, at least when done right, is extremely low maintenance, leading to even lower operating costs. Hydrogen has very poor efficiency and will never be good. This leads to high costs in addition to the extremely expensive hydrogen fuel cells. Just way too expensive for a semi-truck in a competitive market. At this trucks run fixed routes and truck drivers, at least in the USA are required to take breaks every 4 hours or so. So for batteries it is easy to plan electrical charging stops to coincide with breaks truckers are mandated to take. At this at least historically hydrogen fuel cells in addition to their great expense have been somewhat delicate. If you have ever paid attention to the trucking lane in a lot of places, it gets pretty torn up from all of the heavy / overloaded trucks going down the road and thus a great way to break a super expensive hydrogen fuel cell. So cost efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells is terrible and not something you want to run your for profit trucking company with for example.

3. Corrosion: Battery chemistry used for automotive use is usually a pretty hardy chemistry that can last for a while. A hydrogen fuel cell system needs to be made with special materials as hydrogen is highly corrosive. Any quality control issue with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can lead to massive fires and explosions.

4. Range extension: With battery tech, there have been demonstrations on how to do wireless charging going all the way back to Nikola Tesla over 100 years ago. Wired power transfer has been around a long time to. We certainly have ways to make a battery electric vehicle have basically unlimited range without stopping by electrifying the main thoroughfares, leaving batteries for the surface streets. It is just a matter of selecting a standard and mass implementing it, such as wireless power transfer in the roadway. We have a wireless charging standard for our cell phones already. With battery electric, you can also do things like have a camping trailer with batteries and solar onboard and connect the electrical systems of the towing vehicle and trailer so that the batteries in the trailer act for range extension. Then when you get close to your destination, top off charge and go the last mile on internal power alone so the trailer has plenty of battery for off grid camping. If on grid camping, the trailer can be depleted getting to the destination and then plugged into a NEMA 14-50 outlet, charge up, and also have the vehicle plugged into the trailer overnight so they both charge off of a single outlet. Even the AC Propulsion T-zero back in the day had range extending trailer options built and demonstrated, granted that was more focused on a gasoline engine / generator deal. With hydrogen, all you can do is add more tanks of highly compressed hydrogen rocket fuel, which sounds dangerous to me. Could you imagine for example hauling a big hydrogen trailer around and getting rear-ended or having a hose leak? How many times have you seen a trailer going down the road with something dragging and sparking at the connection point between vehicles and could you imagine if that was a hose with hydrogen compressed to 10, 000 psi?

[dannypope]

The hydrogen fuel cells aren’t the issue. The storage and transport of massive amounts of hydrogen around the country is the problem. It’s very expensive, dangerous, and inefficient.

It’s much for efficient to get your vehicle’s fuel directly from the power grid.

[gavinkemp]

And even for semi it is debatable. First the drivers have mandatory breaks, in france it 45 minutes every 4 and a half hours, I don't know if that hits a sweet spot but that time that can be used recharging. In europe we are also exploring electrifying the motorways to alloy for charging while driving.

[salvadorcoling]

Elon has already determined that hydrogen maybe abundant but it is costly to handle to work on mobile devices. For 3 decades, fuel cell has been studied almost throughly.

[rinaldocatria]

Great content. Explore all possibilities. Sometimes the early leader is overtaken by a slow starter. Who knows how changing prices of the raw materials and evolving technology will change things as we go.

[Shindinru]

This spike in lithium cell materials is a good thing. It may finally spur someone to get those alternative chemistries (sodium, aluminum, geaphine, etc.) out the lab and on the market.

[jk]

Interesting. I agree, there is a place for both technologies. My issue with EV's is in the mix of energy used to generate the electricity. Great if it's from renewables i.e. zero carbon but if the majority of your energy mix is coming from coal, gas or biomass without carbon capture then you are driving a low carbon and pollution free vehicle but the problem still remains at the source of electricity generation. I think if there are times when renewables are generating excess energy and it can't be stored then why not make some clean hydrogen on the way?

[kevinfletcher]

If you own an ICE or hydrogen car, you need the massive production industry behind you to make your fuel. With a BEV, many owners will have the option to make their electricity at home via solar cells. I think this is why big oil would like to transition to big hydrogen to keep us dependent on them.

[nickcook]

There is a very good reason for focusing on energy efficiency that rarely gets mentioned.

We are currently in a race against time to reduce our GHG emissions and there are fundamentally 2 actions we can take to achieve this;
A. Use energy from zero carbon sources
B. Use less energy

Both BEVs and HFCEVs can use zero carbon fuel in operation but, due to efficiency losses in hydrogen production, distribution and the fuel cell, an HFCEV requires 2.5x to 3x more green electricity for the same number of road miles.

[marianneleone]

Thank you for helping me better understand the hydrogen case. I don't think that it is as stupid as Elon thinks, but he is coming from a whole different point of view with all that he knows. Like you said there's room for both in the market. It will be interesting to see how the next decade evolves.

[Zilayza]

Seems like hydrogen is an obvious choice for airplanes and shipping, which would be a massive improvement. For the rest electric vechicles have me convinced

[TecMacRun]

This conversation again?!
I am getting tired of it.
First off, Good video. You pointed out a good chunk of the factors and subjects that are involved.
But a few key one are missing.
Here we go:

1.
As mentioned in the video, Current modern Rechargeable batteries (RB) like li-ion have a vrey short effective lifespan (roughly 2 years in most E-Cars).
Adding to that, RBs are susceptible to temperature changes, Resulting in a loss of efficiency and charge holding capacity.
Depending on the scenario RB-Cars can lose up to 65% (or even more) efficiency. Also it ages the cells faster, shortening their lifespan greatly.
Making them not reliable and extremely inefficient over time in the majority of the world.

2.
Most of the Electric grids around the world (which especially first world countries are affected by) cannot support a full conversion to RB-cars. Meaning the Infrastructure needs to be upgraded which is a enormous, expensive and time consuming undertaking.

3. There are other Hydrogen conversion methods besides fuel cells. Like Hydrogen Combustion engines.

4. Hydrogen as said in the video, is a better medium to store energy in / is more energy dense than BRs.

5. As pointed out by others. Hydrogen could be produced in regions that experience a higher energy surplus.
Or more Efficient methods of electric energy generation could be used. Like molten salt trinium reactors.

Furthermore multiple studies have shown that "renewable energy" solutions like wind-turbine-parks are actually not efficient and seem to have a different negative impact on the environment.

In short No.
Hydrogen is not "Stupid"(which by the way is an extremely weak argument).
Its just the industry around cars, that a short while ago, started to invest more and more into BR-Technologies and doesn't want to be told that they have bet on the wrong horse.

[Herbwise]

It depends on where you start to measure efficiency. Do you start after the battery is installed or when the minerals are mined? Do they calculate the energy used to find, mine, ship to manufacturers, make them and then ship them to the assemblers in the efficiency measures?

[winnythekahuna]

Batteries are still too heavy and take up a lot of space. Once the tech to split H2O to gain hydrogen matures, then fuel tankers wont be required because the fuel stations will just supply and manufacture the hydrogen direct to consumer. The advantage of hydrogen is that it can be more useful for large machines like ships, trains, airplanes etc. As for the conventional designed family car, maybe batteries have the edge at the moment. Although a hydrogen powered turbine engine has a high efficiency, can also produce lift or downforce, whilst possibly also generate current for a capacitor to power an electric motor.

[liamspiers]

I've often wondered about hydrogen cars and I now have a better understanding

[DataSmithy]

There has been a lot of news in the last few years about improved catalysts to improve the efficiency of the electrolysis process.

[Orlaz]

Green H2 is great to use as a storage for the uneven renewable energy production, make green H2 when the spike comes, then use it in the heavy industry

[Matz]

"Casted" at 1:00 is wrong. The past tense of cast is cast. You don't add e d.