I bet we see a few running around soon. Thumbs UP! plus Arnie is fixing it so they can run up and down the state
You might see a few if you live in California. Honda is only building 100 - 200 over the next 3 years, and has admitted the cost of each car is close to $1 million. Nobody can buy one, they are all being leased by Honda, and only to a select few.
you people really need to get up to speed, honda is puting hydrogen cars on the street in Cal. and they are building solor powered hydrogen refueling stations to refuel them.
They aren't looking to make money, though. They are doing it for research and PR, nothing more.
The facts about hydrolysis are simple. The most efficient industrial scale units need 50 kw/h to produce 1 kg of hydrogen. A theoretically perfect system, which can never be built in practice, needs about 35 kw/h, iirc. Typical systems in use now use about 60 kw/h.
Electricity has been in mass use for well over 100 years. Huge amounts of money have been spent researching cheaper ways of producing electricity. Renewables like solar and wind cost more than coal. I don't think the price of electricity is going to fall massively soon.
Eventually though tech advances may make it work out long term.
I'm not so sure. For hydrogen to work we need 3 major advances. A cheaper way to produce it, a better way of storing it, and better fuel cells to use it.
The most efficient way of powering a car is by electricity. For that we only need one major advance, a better battery.
The head of the European Fuel Cell Forum laid out why Fuel Cells aren't the answer for transport:
Hydrogen is an artificial, synthetic fuel. It has to be made from other energy. If you look at renewable energy, most of it is harvested as electricity, some as biomass and some as solar heat, but basically most of the renewable energy is harvested as electricity. Hydrogen has to be made artificially by splitting water by electrolysis. This requires more energy than you will ever recover from the hydrogen. However, hydrogen has to be compressed or liquefied for handling, it has to be distributed, and then reconverted back to, guess what, electricity. That means electricity derived from hydrogen has to compete with its original energy source, electricity. If you go through a hydrogen chain, you find that after the fuel cell only 25% of the original electricity is available for use by consumers. A hydrogen economy is a gigantic energy waste. We cannot afford this in the future. Therefore, three of four renewable energy power plants are needed to balance the losses within a hydrogen economy luxury.
With the same amount of electricity, original electricity, be it from wind solar energy, with the same amount of electricity you can drive an electric car three times farther than a hydrogen car. On 100 kWh of electricity you can drive an electric car 120 kilometers while a hydrogen fuel cell car of similar size can do only about 40 km. If we want to have mobility and a sustainable future, we have to go for electric cars and not for hydrogen cars because we electric cars are less costly to operate. It is not the vehicle technology, but a question of energy cost of the fuel. Hydrogen must always be much more expensive than electricity needed to split water by electrolysis etc.
