Really think about the time you spend stationary when stopping for fuel on a road trip. It's not just pumping fuel, you also go to the bathroom, get some food, and stretch your legs.
Extremely fast charging a Tesla trick, Hyundai Ionic 5 (starting around 45K before incentives) can charge 10-80% in 18 minutes, which is enough to travel around 330 km. That's roughly 3 hours of driving in most counties.
I could see hydrogen making sense for fleets with local operation that need to be operated nearly 24x7, like the support vehicles at an airport, city busses, and taxis in cities with strong night life. It also makes sense for heavy industry. Doesn't make sense for passenger vehicles; the cost of batteries has crashed too far and the power grid is way too ubiquitous.
This is not very impressive, and exactly where I see hydrogen have the upper hand. I suppose it's a matter of opinion, but _having_ to stop for 20 minutes every 3 hours isn't ideal at all for me.
Those are three _mandatory_ breaks, that add up to almost an hour, in ideal circumstances. To answer your question, not a whole lot, but in that 1% 6 hour drives aren't uncommon at all.
So if you really want to optimize you can actually do it with shorter 10 min stops. Check out Kyle from inside EV.
And until you can seriously deploy Hydrogen vehicles, it would be a few years down the road. Until then the next generation of battery an charging will be significantly faster already.
Practically speaking most people simply don't drive like that, people need to eat, pie and so on. With an EV you simply stop at a charger do all the things and go back. That usually takes 10ish minutes.
And to be honest, every road trip with at least on other person usually means a break every 3h anyway.
And even more in a day to day application, most people charge over night, so never having to go to a station and having a short break every few hours is vastly preferable to having to constantly go to the hydrogen station.
Of course hydrogen would also be significantly more expensive.
All in all, it simply doesn't make practical sense to optimize everything for this one specific thing.
I don't think I am. Camping vacations in Europe are very common. 1500 km in two days really isn't as uncommon as you might think. For clarity, I'm not saying it can't be done with an EV, I'm just saying the relatively many, long, mandatory breaks aren't nearly as convenient as the relatively few short ones that regular cars, and perhaps in the future, hydrogen cars, offer.
And again, taking a quick break to stretch your legs a bit, is not the same as needing to take a 20 minute break in order to be able to continue your journey. This might seem like a small detail but I really don't think it is.
I have traveled threw Europe all my life and the idea that 15-20min stops every few hours are a major deal-breaker is just nonsense. You want to pie, you want to eat, you want to go to the shop and get some drinks.
Simply stopping, plugging in, going to pie, get a drink in the shop and stretching your legs for 5min already adds enough to drive another couple hours.
And even if you are a case, where you really are driving like that, 1-2 times a year where you do journey like that the extra 30min you spend on the journey are really not the end of the world. I honestly can not describe it any other way then a small detail that wouldn't matter to the waste majority of people.
And even if that is still a problem, a few years from now batteries will be better, charging will be even faster and density will be higher. Hydrogen would not be the right answer.
Here in Canada things are way, way further apart than Europe and car travel to vacation is often many hours or days apart. I have taken a number of EV road trips and I have not had to stop more often or stay longer than I would have in a gas car. Charging speeds and range are only getting better, but they are already well into low/no impact territory.
Okay. I can, and do so a few times a year. Also, the 3/4 hours people keep referring to, is that in a fully loaded car pulling a caravan while occasionally driving through mountain ranges with an average speed of 100 km/h?
And for the last time, wanting to take a 20 minute break is different from having to. We often postpone/skip planned breaks in order to stay ahead of rush hour, or to reach the campsite before closing time, just to name two common reasons. Mandatory 20 minute breaks greatly reduce your freedom while traveling. No matter how little of a problem this is for you personally.
The waste majority, 99.9something people will never drive with a caravan and most don't go threw the mountains.
You simply need to accept that you are representing an expedition, this has been studded. Most cars only very, very rarely do long travel at all. And when they do they don't do it very often. And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.
You can simply accept that an EV is not for you for the moment because you are apparently a special case. Most people don't stop wanting to pie so they can beat rush hour to a campsite. That is simply not the case for 99.9999% of miles driven.
I agree, and this is what I said in my first post. My entire point is that, for most people, a car needs to meet _all_ needs, not 99% of them. Don't get me wrong, EV's are a great step forward, but perhaps hydrogen can solve some problems EV's can not. They might very well introduce more problems than they solve, fair enough. But it seems silly to just brush off possible solutions in favour of an incomplete one. Yet this is what happens every time hydrogen gets mentioned.
>And when they do they stop reasonably often anyway.
You are ignoring the optional vs mandatory difference. Whether it's a problem for you or me personally is irrelevant, the fact is it limits your freedom considerably.
[edit]
I will soon be diving 1600km. Google suggests the route will take 14h. I expect to make it in 15. Friends with Teslas suggest it would take nearly 20.
Google doesn't account for stops required for toilet breaks, eating and drinking. Of course, you can just not drink, so you don't have to pee. You can eat while driving even though that's isn't a good idea from a safety standpoint. You can skip taking any breaks and get tired, which is also a bad idea from a safety standpoint.
It also depends on the available charging infrastructure, of which I have no clue at your destination.
In my own experience with driving about 1200 km with regular breaks, it took about an hour longer than it did with my diesel. It just took more planning. Most times, a charging stop meant peeing, drinking a coffee and then the car would be finished charging. The biggest issue was that some chargers aren't near a rest stop.
The EV cannonball record was set this winter in a Porsche Taycan at 44 hrs 26 minutes and that included some charger trouble and much less than ideal temperatures. Google's estimate for that route is 42 hours without any stops of any kind.
Here is a route plan for Lincoln, NB to Las Vegas NV. 1989 km with 17:43 driving and 2:29 charging for just over 20 hours total. That's an extra 400 km covered from your rough estimate and includes going up and over some pretty serious mountains.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=71dfd1e1-a134-46c...
2 drivers.
A serious question from someone who knows little about electric cars, and who still thought it would take anywhere between 30-240 minutes to charge, depending on charger type - can electric cars really now charge faster than the < 180 seconds I'd spend refilling with petrol/diesel?
If so, I think the industry needs to make more noise about this, to make it more know.
Over the course of the 50 weeks of a year that I don’t take it on long trips I spend 0 seconds waiting for a charge. I plug it in at night and it’s always full in the morning. A typical errand running day for me is 200+ km and I have more than enough range for that.
The one or two times I take it on a road trip I usually time it with pee breaks and filling my self with coffee.
Net/net I spend less time over all waiting to refuel my car.
Yes, of course this depends on me having a place to plug it in at night.
I roll into a charger and plug in, then immediately head to the bathroom. Grab food if it's a lunch or snack break. Walk around to stretch my legs. By the time I'm ready to go so is the car.
When pumping gas I can't leave the pump unattended, so bathroom time gets added on top of refuel time. With charging the car is adding range no matter what task I happen to be doing while the car is stationary.
The other charge need is daily use. Charging at home is a game changer that absolutely beats gas pumps. It takes me 10 seconds to plug in as I leave the garage. I wake up to a full "tank" every single morning. Daily errands cannot possibly use up my 400 km range, so I never have to think about charge unless I'm on a road trip.
Within reason, this seems like it would be a good tradeoff for many people.
Say you're on a rare long journey and need to stop and charge - minutes-wise how long are we talking about?
* 5 minutes to get synced up with the distance between chargers (it's a very rural route; on more major routes you have plenty of choice about where to stop)
* 20 minutes
* 15 minutes to make sure I can make it back to the charging network since my destination is super rural.
I have made that same journey to visit family many times in a gas car and we stop in the exact same places for pretty much exactly the same amount of time. The first one is in the town my grandmother lives in, so we'd have stopped to say hello anyway. The 2nd is where we have always stop for a meal. The 3rd stop is where we always take a bathroom break.
https://abetterrouteplanner.com
Select a car and enter a route. It will be a pretty accurate picture of the necessary charging. You can play with things like temperature, arrival and departure charge state, and load.
That extra five minutes on road trips is far far far less than the amount of extra time that has cars take day to day, needing to stop at gas stations rather than get plugged in at the garage. The tradeoff is hugely in EVs favor, IMHO.
What's especially frustrating is what happens when I arrive at my destination, where I don't have access to charging and the nearest Tesla supercharger is an "urban" charger with 72Kw max. I'll typically pull into that charger between 1 and 2am and spend nearly an hour there to get the car up to 80% so that I have a charge for trips during the week. The last thing I want to be doing then is sitting in an empty parking garage, waiting for my car to charge when I just want to get some sleep in my bed. I'd love to have a quick refueling option.
I feel like the risk of freeloaders keeps hotels from installing more of them too.
"Charging" with gasoline is like 2 minutes. With electricity AFAIR it is more like 30 minutes (in case of fast charger or longer in case of ordinary one).
The time difference is huge (e.g. if you travel with kids, every minute counts).
E.g. vacation travel in Poland from south to north (very popular during vacation) takes ~8h (depending where you start), during that time I need to tank gas twice, EV would need at least 2-4 times, this would increase travel time by 1-2h.
E.g. I do cross-Poland travel only to get from the mountains to the sea. And I have two small children -> they best travel when they are asleep -> travel during night.
My car has small tank, so I have to tank twice on the ~700km trip, and in the night it takes literally up to 3 minutes to tank and pay for it.
If I would use an EV (which I would like, very much, but they are prohibitively expensive here, I mean they cost 2-3x normal car) I would probably need to tank every 200-300km, so it would make 2-3 stops that last 30 mins (and that is assuming given gas station has EV charging, if not then I would need to borrow power from someone else and do charging for ~8h from a normal wall socket).
And this is considering that I use teslas superchargers, all other last longer than 30 mins. Not to mention if there is a queue to the chargers (fortunately at night it is not likely), if you have bad luck you would need to wait 30mins for the person before you and 30mins for your own charging - that makes it completely unsable for anyone.
If production ever hits a point where it is not battery supply constrained, I could see tesla offering a battery insurance pool system with swapping capabilities, were they pull any pack under ~85% capacity and turn it into a power wall.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0-sHtlCZ7M
https://insideevs.com/news/329836/tesla-battery-swap-locatio...
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/In-Gear/2015/0312/Tesla-b...
With gasoline, you have to go weekly for your regularly commute. It can be annoying, but the upside is that you only have to stop for 5 minutes on a long trip!
With EVs, you just charge at home or the office which is really convenient. But the downside, is that those 5 minute stops become 25+ minute stops and you typically have at least 1 more of them. On top of that, the locations aren't as prevalent which increases planning needs.
With Hydrogen, you get the negative of weekly stopping, the negative of fewer locations, and the only benefit is that it can be refilled... almost as well as a gasoline for about the same $$.
So why would I choose hydrogen over either other choice?
That’s expensive as all hell.
With hydrogen you get: fast refuels (if the station has pressurized itself after the last customer), good range, but the cost is redonculous and the distribution is nonexistent in most countries.
There are more Teslas in space than there are publicly available hydrogen refueling stations in Finland :D
That 1% use case should be priced for the externalities.
I'd like to see electric vehicle purchases heavily subsidized by taxes on fossil fuel vehicles and taxes on gasoline. If you really need to pollute 100% of the time you're operating your vehicle just in case you need that extra 1%, it should be priced in a way that really makes you think hard about that 1% scenario and whether there are really no alternatives.
I actually think a lot of people will prefer a 10-20 min fast charge on a BEV (I certainly do). Due to the volatile nature of hydrogen I can’t imagine many places will let you run to the toilet or get a coffee while pumping either; these are all just fine to do with fast charging.
For me the choice between BEV and the alternates is more about availability of home charging - if you can wake up each day with reliably ~250 miles of range already in the car, you virtually never need to fill up/charge on the road anyway!
But when you have near autonomous truck that runs closer to 24 hours per day or have a co driver in cab splitting duty then fuel cell will have an edge
Now I should say, I know basically nothing about battery tech. But unless full charging time can be greatly reduced, by which I mean under 5 or at most 10 minutes, I still feel hydrogen could have the upper hand even if it is more expensive and less efficient.