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by aranw 1796 days ago
I'm betting for anything bigger than a family vehicle to end up being hydrogen just cause the recharge times, weight restrictions, and other factors such as costs
5 comments

Hydrogen has lost and it's not coming back. Every home and business in America has power lines. Making hydrogen work would either involve new pipelines to homes (a MASSIVE undertaking) or replacing gas stations with hydrogen fill-up stations, which again needs either new pipelines or a fleet of new hydrogen carrying trucks. That infrastructure hurdle is huge compared to electric cars -- everyone has a plug at home, and adding chargers to places like gas stations is not some hard thing.
Tesla is going to start shipping their Semi next year. I think you’re gonna lose that bet as I’m pretty sure a Semi is a tad bigger than a family vehicle. Granted, they’re developing a new “mega charger” for it, but still. The higher torque allows them to pull the same loads up higher grades faster. Just because they might not (yet) be the best for longhaul trucking doesn’t mean they won’t be amazing for medium to shorter range heavy freight.
Perhaps this is off topic, but I am curious about the future of construction equipment. If all the ICE cars are removed from the picture, including ICE freight trucks, will diesel fuel become vastly more expensive or harder to get? I plan to get some construction equipment within a couple of years. I've never seen electric prototypes for this size equipment, nor hydrogen. Maybe this is already being worked on? I've seen mini-EV-excavators, but never seen an EV in the mid to full sized excavators.

[Edit] Correcting myself, looks like Komatsu/Proterra are working on a bigger EV excavator. [1] I hope this becomes affordable because the noise reduction of electric would surely make my neighbors happy and I would love to not breath diesel exhaust.

[1] - https://www.proterra.com/press-release/komatsu-electric-cons...

In China I have seen some work on methanol construction vehicles. Methanol of course is made from gas usually, like hydrogen, or coal in China.
At 300Kw charging speed, EV charge fast enough to drink a coffee after 400 miles and continue the trip with 200+ miles of range.

We'll probably upgrade the charger to higher speed (Ionity already support 250+Kw) but what's the point?

As for the weight, do you know a Model 3 weight roughly as much as the BMW Series 3 (closest competitor)? https://carbuzz.com/compare/bmw-3-series-vs-tesla-model-3#ca...

It's cheaper, too: https://insideevs.com/features/517960/tesla-model3-bmw-3seri...