Elon Musk does not believe that fuel cells are a viable technology. His words, from here:
He doesn’t go into specifics, but but this echoes the criticism I’ve seen of the notion of mass-market fuel cell vehicles supported by a whole new hydrogen fueling infrastructure. There’s the cost, the allegedly low performance of fuel cell vehicles, and the extreme difficulty of working with hydrogen (besides the fact that most hydrogen comes from natural gas, making it not a green tech at all). Or, if hydrogen is mass-produced via electrolysis, the process is rather inefficient and maybe we’d just be better off simplifying things by sticking with battery powered vehicles.
And then there is the claim that the best-case fuel cell vehicle can’t match the current state-of-the-art in evs, which is still improving steadily- is that true?
The question is: is this a gimmick? Is Elon Musk saying these things because he doesn’t want competition for his electric car company, or is the fuel-cell vehicle truly some kind of canard to distract attention away from ev’s, or perhaps some fossil-fuel industry scheme to keep dirty energy powering transportation? Is this a viable alternative, or are they really just “fool cells”?
I think Elon is making the point that while there is considerable room for improvement of the battery technology, we’ve reached the apex of the hydrogen cell technology and no further efficiencies are to be found in the future.
That, or he’s got a mega-watt ton of money invested in the former and is talking smack about the latter.
I wouldn’t take Toyota’s presence in the market as much of an indication of anything. They seem to be pretty happy to go whichever direction the market decides to go, making a car for every future path, so that they have the technological base ready to go, whichever platform ends up becoming the winner.
But as to fuel cells themselves, I can’t say anything about the technology. I have heard that getting hydrogen in large enough quantities might be too costly to ever compete against gas. But I think the bigger issue is that converting gas stations over to hydrogen is a massive step to take. We’ve already got a power grid and we already have petrol stations, so electric, gas, or gas-electric seem like the best bets.
And the instant someone discovers a way to increase the energy density of a battery by even double, all other technologies instantly lose. If hydrogen was a great fuel to produce and burn, you’d still be better off to burn it in a power plant and run the car off electricity that had been produced at the plant.
For anyone interested, here is why it takes 10 minutes to fill one up (it’s currently a multi-stage process with all sorts of safety and security built in, and it’s still pretty experimental).
I only read the snippet from Elon Musk in the OP, but I think his objections are not really the one’s I’d say are valid, and are more geared towards his own leanings and biases. The objections I’ve heard about fuel cells aren’t in range, performance or fill up, but in storage of the hydrogen and the fact that hydrogen is not an energy source but a carrier…you’d need to make it all, and that’s energy intensive (you’d probably still end up using hydrocarbons anyway, since that seems to be the most efficient way to do it). You’d also need to build out an entire new infrastructure (as seen in what it takes to make the 28 or so current hydrogen fuel stations in California work), which is going to be costly.
What this technology does give you is that it’s a similar process to what people currently do wrt filling up the vehicle at a station, driving it around while watching the fuel gauge and going back to the station when the gauge gets down towards the E thingy. People today grew up with this model and so it’s fairly intuitive to them, while AEV requires you to ensure you plug the thing in every night and give some lead time if you are close to empty, or have specialized equipment to either quick charge or swap out batteries. Also, there are more range and performance limitations compared to the current performance curves of ICE vehicles, even if we are talking about the top end TESLA vehicles. Fuel cells get around most of those issues from a performance curve perspective, at least that’s what I’ve always read/heard.
In the end, the market will of course decide which (if either) we eventually go with.
Musk obviously believes that electric cars are the future and that other tech is just a distraction. He doesn’t want competition, but not in the way that’s conventionally interpreted–Tesla’s recent opening of their patent portfolio proves that. It’s more that he thinks other tech will compete for limited clean-energy dollars and will slow down electric car progress.
Established auto companies have a long and sordid history of doing the absolute minimum they need to comply with various regulations, like those in California. I’m sure that Hyundai’s car costs two or three times as much as they would ever make on it. The only purpose is legal compliance and green marketing.
It’s hard to see how fuel cell cars make any sense. Unlike electrics, the fueling infrastructure has to be built completely from scratch. And you can’t even fuel them from home. Hydrogen comes entirely from fossil fuels, unlike electricity where a good portion comes from clean sources like hydro or nuclear (in principle you can do electrolysis, but essentially no one does this industrially yet). Fuel cells systems are volumetrically inefficient–just look at the picture of the Hyundai. The system takes the entire volume under the hood as well as much of the rear. And that’s for an astonishingly low performance vehicle–0 to 60 in 12.5 s! I’m not sure that’s even safe.
