Shouty Kilmer says hydrogen cars are the future.
 

I guess this should not surprise me, he is obsessed with Toyotas, and they have been developing hydrogen cars for years, although I do not understand why. I have read many times on here that hydrogen cars are electric cars with fuel cells instead of batteries. Shouty says you can convert a gas car to burn hydrogen, but that does not seem like it is nearly as easy as he claims.

He also seems to ignore the extreme energy required to produce hydrogen and the difficulty storing and transporting, but he said that even a Tesla supercharger takes an hour to fully charge a car, while hydrogen pumps are far faster. He also suggested twice that there might not be enough lithium to make enough electric cars for everyone in the world.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uJaHhxGymRA

This guy says that eighty million cars are made each year and if we consider that by the time the worldwide car market reaches a hundred million, which could really happen with China and India approaching levels of car ownership in the U.S., and if we assume that every car is electric and, on average has a battery the size of a Tesla pack, we could make electric cars for 16.9 years.

That is just lithium and he discussed alternatives, but no, there is not enough lithium to replace petroleum-burning vehicles, power storage, etc. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gre...-ion-battery-m

The future is nacho fries.

Enough lithium, easy. Enough cobalt? No, not even close.

Hydrogen is stupid. It will be like buying gas at $10 a gallon.
Compressed natural gas powered cars and electric cars look great, cheap, affordable and refuelable compared to hydrogen you can't find or afford.

Since starting to drive an electric car my self have found that some of the uneducated, unwashed masses think that electric cars are more dangerous than gasoline cars because you occasionally hear of one catch on fire. Their words not mine.
Try to sell hydrogen cars to them.
You don't hear anything about gasoline cars catching fire because anything smaller than a gasoline tanker catching fire is not news.

I used to get that same fire argument from friends who are technically fairly well educated. Then I'd ask them if they knew that one gallon of gasoline contained more energy than the entire battery pack of most of the electric cars on the road at the time. After they thought about the fact that they drive around sitting on top of a small bomb all the time they quit arguing with me. JJ

If you ask me, the whole "Future is ..." is just advertising one proprietal solution.

There is not enough lithium to convert all petrol cars to electric
There is not enough platinum to make hydrogene cells for all cars nor not enough resources to produce so much hydrogene.
There is not enough corn to run all petrol cars on ethanol.

The era of dominance of one system is over, thats all. All the "alternative fuels" will probably gain more percentage, but I assume none will be as dominant as internal combustion engines were as alternative forms will be more cost-effective in some scenarios.

We will see more diversity. More electric cars, more hydrogen cars, more CNG cars, hopefully even some compressed air cars too.

Probably some unification too. I can imagine some "powerpacks" for trucks. Long haul in arctic areas? take this petrol. Long haul in mild climate? take this diesel. Need to do california city delivery? Than we offer you this hydrogene powerpack. Do you have your own CNG station? Take this turbine. All that fits our standard Cummins MotorMount(TM).

-- the only problem I see is political interference skewing the natural selection.

Compressed air cars are only going to be about as powerful and fast as a golf cart.

Even if he's right...it's still Scotty Kilmer.

Fuel diversity probably is the future. Or, maybe asteroid mining will take off.

There's no such thing as running out of anything. Supply and demand will balance through price.

Shouty is wrong even if he's loud.

I also believe integrated solutions will be more relevant than some one-size-fits-nobody.. err.. one-size-fits-all approach. And the internal-combustion engine is likely to remain relevant long-term, even if it becomes more used as a backup generator instead of the prime motive power. When it comes to CNG, since nearly every organic matter residue can be turned into a feedstock for biomethane, it may become more relevant soon and eventually take over the market share of ethanol.


Not so sure about such "unification", since most options didn't effectively replace Diesel and it remains relevant for heavy hauling on a worldwide basis. I'd also not hold my breath for hydrogen anyway, even in California it might make more sense to use CNG as long as EPA and CARB become less stringent when it comes to certification of aftermarket conversions.


Political interference is a PITA, since it doesn't often involve long-term planning. They actually need to keep some problems to sell a false solution, just like the goat-in-the-room metaphor.

Agreed, but they can still find their uses - as a means of transport in explosive environment perhaps? From all the "alternative fuel" technologies, compressed air does not depend on rare resources. Although probably greenest, I admit it shows least potential.

I still say the only way that hydrogen power would make sense would be in tiny nuclear reactors, but if people do not accept that stationary reactors are safe, why would they allow nuclear missiles--cars?

Electric cars with 50 to 75 kwh batteries will likley put an end to the hydrogen car.

There's nothing wrong with fuel cells. I like fuel cells. They can also run off other fuels but they are not as efficient and require a lot more warm up.
But being able to fuel your car up with methanol would be a lot more appealing than hydrogen.
They wouldn't do real great up north.

Personally, I think, unless we re-invent the gasoline engine, hydrogen is out of the question.
I watched Mr Shouty's vid, and couldn't agree less with it.

A while back, there was big research done on alternate engine types, like the Duke engine, or the wave disc engine.
While the duke runs very nice, it's longevity is been questioned, since it has rotating cylinders that would most definitely cause centrifugal wear.
The wave disc engine, while it can't be used in variable speed scenarios, would make an excellent driver for a generator at a fixed load!

The wave disc engine would be much more efficient than even a rotary engine; if the rotary engine was only still manufactured today!

There is a future for the wave disc engine in generators, due to it's small size, high efficiency, low weight, simplicity and low cost.
And we all know generators have a future in electric cars.

Perhaps a wave disc engine would go well with a CVT, varying the output speed at a fixed input rotation.

Anyway, fuel cell is out of the question for the future.
And Electric is an emerging market, but research has determined we already are running at ~96% efficiency on lithium batteries.
Chances are very low we will find alternate forms of storage that would improve on Lithium.
We all know that electric cars cost about 1/3rd too much. They're only good for Europe, where gasoline costs 3x as much as here in USA.

Research indicated (youtube), that in the UK, and with $10/gal of fuel cost, an electric car would get out of the initial cost within 50k miles.
In usa, this is well over 150k miles, or the lifetime of the vehicle.

And about 400k miles, if you need to purchase a new battery from the dealership, as for the price of a new battery, you can easily get a new 4 cylinder car ($20-26k).

Not even if we reinvent the engine, since the main problem is hydrogen storage. Remember those BMW prototypes with a regular engine converted to hydrogen?


For a fixed-load operation, gas turbines might be a more realistic approach instead of those, let's say, "unconventional" engine designs.

It seems Shouty is stuck in the early 90's. Maybe he's like me and never got around to reading issues of Popular Mechanics when he got them, and is just now catching up. Will be interesting to see what his videos look like when he breaks into the year 2000's magazines.

I didn't really care about hydrogen-powered cars until some 20 years ago when the mainstream media was highlighting fuel cells, and some 15 years ago I still believed someday a hydrogen-fed fuel cell would become an effectively viable replacement for reciprocating engines on cars. Nowadays even if hydrogen had a remote possibility of going mainstream, I'd rather bet on 3D-printed ceramic microturbines over fuel cells.

I cannot find any reference online, but in early 90's there was quite huge effort of using hydrogene in cars. Mercedes,iirc, with some other german tech companies, were running a kind of pilot project on ? Berlin airport? . Passenger buses, fuelling stations, logistics. There was a lot of hype around when they started. The project was abandoned silently few years later, but not becuse of fuel cells. Additional expenses l think. All the losses in transport, storage, "gas station" equipment costs orders of magnitude more than hose and funnel, ersonnel salary as you cannot let average Joe handle sub-zero pressurized nightmare.
All this made hydrogene cost prohibitive for average-sized "gas station" even befor the hydrogen could actually move a car ( save pathetic effeciency of fuel cells of that time).

You actually have hit on the obvious solution.
 

Store excess electrical energy as hydrogen bonded to a carbon or two.

The inefficiencies are only acceptable if you have unused excess, of course.

There currently are some research being done, in solid state batteries.
The research is promising, so far.

Also, Super capacitors will help a lot in electric cars.
Instead of limited to 200-240V batteries, super capacitors have internal voltages of thousands of volts.
They store the power into a large array of caps; meaning, they can suck a lot more power out of those DC fast chargers; and 'technically' charge a battery in a matter of minutes.
What they do is store the extra power in the caps while charging the battery.
if you unplug the car, the super caps will provide the electric motor for power, while charging the batteries.

In other words, those super caps capture energy very rapidly, while releasing them slowly. They also are great buffer banks for regenerative braking, as even with a full battery, they can always store more energy (the DC circuit will just increase the charge voltage over the caps).

The con is that supercapacitor banks contain high energy, but offer a very low range. Meaning, Li Battery packs can become smaller, lighter (as capacitors are lighter than Li batteries), and fast charging them will be faster too.

These, next to silicon batteries are the only research being done today.
Silicon batteries are a great alternative, but only good for temporal solutions.
They can contain much larger energy densities as Lithium, but because silicon expands so much, it's crystalline structure also will be more prone to wearing out.
They definitely are cheaper to make, and I can see a market for it in the CHinese products, where quick money schemes make more sense than durability.

The latest supercapacitors on the market are not capable of thousands of volts. In fact, they have a very low voltage capability closer to 2.5-2.8v. Furthermore, combining them in series to boost voltage severely reduces overall capacitance.

They are able to be both charged and discharged extremely rapidly since they operate on static electricity rather than chemistry. There's no point in charging a supercap rapidly and then slowly charging a battery, since you could simply store the energy in the supercap and forego the losses associated with chemically charging a battery.

I'm not holding my breath on "solid state" batteries because the current ones have pathetic storage per volume and cost a fortune. The technology would need to get thousands of times better while not increasing price by much.

... and there are plenty of battery technologies being researched besides solid state and silicon. I have a buddy that studies lithium-ion chemistry, for example.

Redpoint,
You're right, and I was wrong.

Supercaps indeed have multiple caps that can charge up to only a few volts.
But because they are in Parallel (I never mentioned they were in series), they can generate massive amps instead of voltages.
While the voltages are low, hundreds of caps can easily suck up thousands of amps momentarily.

Not always will the energy in caps be used for driving.
A car might be charging, then gets unplugged. The remaining energy in the caps can be used to charge the battery when the car isn't driving.
That way, when you plug it in again, it again can draw large currents off the net.

The initial technology was invented in Belgium, my home country, the idea was initially to fast charge the cap, which then slowly charges the battery for smaller devices like Cellphones (or a Roomba or so).
Think about dropping your phone down for a charge and in 10 seconds it has enough charge to last a day?

Supercapacitors for cars are now being manufactured in Iceland.
But I agree with your statement that this technology makes no sense for 120/240V chargers; and only the DC fast chargers in cars.
Who knows, in the future we might have 6000V fast chargers? It would be beneficial for the electric companies, since a lot of their high-voltage lines are rated at 6kV, and you could use only 1 lead to charge the car (since it's AC); a lead, and ground the car, or 2 leads.

Supercaps are fantastic for things like capturing regenerative braking energy. There might be a use in such an application.

I'm a big fan of supercaps and have replaced the battery in my motorcycle with 6-series caps, but there are severe limitations too. My bike can only sit for 3 days before the electronics drain the caps too far to start the engine.

Supercaps also introduce the problem of supplying the high-rate electricity needed to charge them in seconds to minutes. CCS chargers are already putting out something like 55 kW of energy, and that high rate still takes an hour to charge a vehicle. If we're going to charge faster than that, where are we going to get half a megawatt of energy, and how thick would the conducting wires need to be?

I think supercaps will serve useful functions in the future, but not as primary energy storage for a vehicle.

SuperCaps have their place.
 

You highlighted some of them. Their ability to absorb and dispense large currents is notable. Using this ability allows us to apply them to niche applications.

A local San Diego company, Maxwell Technologies, has battery assist units that are connected in parallel to the batteries of large diesel units to aid in starting in extreme cold where batteries lose their abilities.

They were also tested in a UPS hybrid design where the capacitors could quickly and efficiently absorb the braking energy from the motor/generator for use when the vehicle needed to accelerate again.

I built a 5-series (3400F Maxwell caps) supercap bank to aid in starting my diesel truck. It was killing the 2 large Pb batteries, which are expensive to constantly replace. I intend to eliminate the large Pb batteries next time they die and replace them with a very small Pb battery and the supercap.

Did you document this build?
 

I would be very interested. I have two Dodge diesel trucks as well as a Freightliner diesel van. Batteries die on a constant basis out here in the heat of the desert.

It's a sore subject for me still...

My Dodge/Cummins batteries bit the dust, and my dad had been driving it. I told him to hold off buying batteries and that I would replace them with a supercap/battery, and I bought the parts.

He went out and spent a couple hundred on new batteries anyway rather than give me a week to replace them. He hasn't had a job in years, so it's not like he's flush with money. Just impulsive when it comes to spending, and he still relies on newspaper "sale" prices rather than the internet to actually find good deals on things.

I've got the supercap built, but it's not necessary since the truck has new batteries.

I'll see if the batteries can be repurposed for tractors or something and pick up where I left off, and document the build. Will be slow going because I have many projects, a 3 month old baby, and need to move to in the next couple months.

I've also got a Li-ion battery to test the virtual alt delete idea from the other thread, but haven't got around to that project yet either. I need to fix the infotainment/NAV issue first in my Acura.

I used a large capacitor on my car (a 2 to 3 Farad cap), because in Florida, car batteries generally last 2-3 years tops.
It definitely helped starting on a low charge.
However if the car stands still too long, those large caps do drain the battery.
Even small banks of caps do.
But if you drive it daily, I see no reason why not to install one of those 3 to 5 Farad caps they sell for audio equipment for like $25-40.
Generally 2-3 Farad is more than enough.

Strangely enough, my car didn't give me an indication anymore when the battery was needing replacement due to the cap. Perhaps it thought there was plenty of power left in the battery?

I don't think a 3-5 farad cap will do much for starting. My 6-series supercap in the motorcycle uses 400 Farad caps, which results in a series rating of 66 farads. It's barely adequate to start the motorcycle.

Certainly can't hurt though.

Not sure. Farad rating goes together with the rated voltage.
The higher the cap can handle voltage, the lower the farad rating.
I believe the 2-3 Farad cap I have, handles up to ~1000W of energy for 1 second,or at 13 v helps out the battery with about 76Amps. That's quite a bit!
It's also not meant to start the car with, but merely a helper to the battery. It proves a starter with greater initial energy, and charges up again after the starting process is done, and the alternator takes over.
The cap is also larger than any motorcycle battery.
About 4 of these fit in a large size car battery.
I'm sure the 400Farad ratings are a bit off, as a similar cap of 400 farad would be the size of an entire motorcycle.

Those NECAR prototypes and the NEBUS
https://media.daimler.com/marsMediaS...nd-NEBUS.xhtml

Heh, I just heard another automotive journalist put the smack down on Kilmer.

Frankly, I think hydrogen cars are just too impractical. Storing the hydrogen is a real issue. If you don't drive it regularly, it will run itself dry. Electricity, at least, is widely available compared to hydrogen and although not ideal, it's a lot more workable.

Shouty released a video called "The Fatal Flaw of Tesla Cars." This is one of a few dozen videos he has released where he answered several questions live with far fewer details than his normal videos, which rarely seemed like they had enough details.

He just said how difficult it is to transport electricity. We have been doing it for over a century! He said that it takes fifty-eight minutes to fully charge a Tesla using a supercharger, so that is a problem, but I do not see how anything that he mentioned was a fatal flaw.

Because it isn't. It takes over 90 minutes to charge a Tesla Model S to 80%. After that, it'll slow charge. And generally, Chevy mentions, to not fast charge batteries often, but preferably slow charge them on a 120V-240V outlet.

So, you are saying that I need two Teslas?! :)

The Model S can charge to 80% in 40 minutes or less, with a max charge rate of 120 kW, which is roughly 8 miles per minute of charging.

What bothers me actually more than Tesla flaws is this: Who pays him to say what he is saying?

Musk draws no paycheck from Tesla. He is compensated by having ownership. As I said above, he has a proclivity towards thoughtless tweets.

No, I mean who pays Shouty Kilmer to say hydrogene cars are the only future and Tesla is flawed.
Seems like you intended to reply in Tesla 3 thread??

Ah yes, got my threads crossed.

I assume Shouty gets paid by Youtube for views. That in itself creates an incentive for people to say shocking things that aren't necessarily grounded in reality.

Hopefully. There are known cases here in my country when these influencers took money to promote companies or politicians. ...or basically whoever is willing to pay.

The only thing that's true is some ones getting paid.