Reply #21: Hydrogen at home...

[Bob Wallace]

I have to vent my storage batteries to the outside to keep hydrogen from building up to dangerous level in a normally constructed room.

Tesla S should be available for purchase in a few months. They are now going into production. The Roadster price did go up about 10%. There were higher priced Roadsters which had more 'goodies'.

There's a route to switching from oil to hydrogen rather than electricity. It's an economic question as to whether it makes sense to choose that route. If we go the hydrogen direction then we're likely to see hydrogen fleet vehicles first, just like we're seeing some natural gas fleets. Then we'll see a few hydrogen stations in the first places where FCVs will be sold, just like we're seeing Level 2 and 3 charging stations installed in EV markets.

You do realize that you are building your FCV case on "could happen" stuff, don't you? We might be able to make hydrogen from water efficiently, but no one has done so in a real world condition yet. We might learn how to store hydrogen more efficiently, but there are none of these systems up and running. We might be able to get fuel costs down and lifetimes significantly longer, but we haven't so far.

There are significant problems yet to be solved with hydrogen and fuel cell technology.

EVs are on the road and electricity in the grid. If batteries get no better in order to give us great range we could either go the Volt route with PHEVs or the Bright Place route and do battery swaps for long distance driving. These are up and running technologies.

Honda is introducing an EV next year with a 123 mile range and batteries rated to last 400,000 miles. Nissan is promising increased range and lower prices in 2014. Over the next few years we are likely to see increases in EV range and decreases in price. FCVs would have to get to the cheap point first to grab market and I don't see signs of them doing that.

Lots of us thought hydrogen FCVs would be the dominate technology for future driving a few years back, but then EV battery technology made major gains. It's all about the batteries, get capacity up and price down and we have an affordable, clean personal transportation solution.