Few interesting things happened while this thread has been sleeping:
-- Nikola motors sued Tesla because of their truck (see here:
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/02/...s-suing-tesla/)
in what looks like patent trolling
-- Nikola motors made a change of course and now focuses on hydrogen powered trucks having some ambitious claims (1000 miles range truck, 700 hydrogen stations nationwide)
I had nothing to do yesterday so I have read their twitter /not every tweet/ and would like your opinion:
1) hydrogen stations:
- according to Nicola corp
twitter their hydrogen stations will produce up to 8000 kg of hydrogen per day
- Nicola Corp. also says
here they will be in 10 to 100 acres size. They intend to power them from sun and wind locally.
This sounds too good to be true to me.
- to produce 1 kg of compressed hydrogen you need around 65 kWh of electricity (50kw for electrolysis, 15 kW for compression) (source
here)
- That means 400-520 MWh of electricity per station. Assuming 12 hours of constant sunshine every day, you need something like 45 MW power plant.
these are not pixies:
wind power needs about 10 turbines, while
solar power needs about 180-200 acres (source
here)
2) hydrogen truck
according to
this tweet the 1000 mile range, 1000 hp truck will carry 80 kg of compressed hydrogene onboard. (12500 hp*mi/kg)
The only available hydrogene vehicle I am aware of - Toyota Mirai - has 152 hp, 312 mi range with 5 kg of hydrogene. (9500 hp*mi/kg) (source
here)
Their claims are, to say politely, quite ambitious.
I am not an expert. I could have made a mistake in my assumptions. What do you think?