$15,000 worth of fuel card sounds generous until you find that hydrogen stations have jacked up prices to $36/kg.

still means nothing, what is the mileage or $/mi there?

Apparently 1kg of hydrogen is about 60 miles range, which seems like a lot, but apparently fuel cells are that good.

Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.

By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.

> This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric

Is electric charging more expensive in the UK than petrol? That's nuts.

According to [1] it breaks down like this:

EV at rapid/ultra-rapid chargers: 25p/mile

Petrol, diesel: 15p/mile

EV charging at home: 8p/mile

This is because there's a government price cap on home electricity, but not on commercial electricity - and rapid chargers are all commercial (and of course for-profit).

[1] https://www.rac.co.uk/drive/electric-cars/charging/electric-...

It is if you use a rapid charger. If you're fortunate enough to be able to do what you need with a car within 50 miles or so of your house and leave it overnight to charge, it's cheaper.

At present, EVs do not solve any problem I have.

Very few people would use 100% rapid charging. Even on a long journey, they can arrive home with, say, 5-10% remaining, and recharge at home. (The car calculates this automatically.)

The range of most EVs is only about 120 miles, which isn't especially useful when they take around six hours to charge.

Maybe most EVs in the wild, but no way for EVs being sold today. There are only 5 cars on this list below 200: https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons..., and more than half above 300.

"Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consu..." on this server."

But I mean, you say that but if you test a car advertised as having 200 miles real-world performance then in practical terms that's about 120 miles.

You might get 200 miles if you're driving in a perfectly straight line on a perfectly flat motorway at a steady speed.

That's... weird? Maybe it's blocked in your country? The link opens just fine for me.

Those were tested numbers, not advertised though. I don't see how you'd get a drop from 200 to 120 miles, that's a 40% drop. Maybe in a gasoline powered car, but EVs can regeneratively break, so I don't think it'd make that much of a difference.

Reading some more, there are a handful of different ratings. the old European one: NEDC, the new European one: WLTP, the US EPA, and China's CLTC.

Generally the ratings from lowest to highest go EPA, WLTP, NEDC, then CLTC. The EPA rating is just a tad high I've read when you look at fast highway driving (e.g., 75 MPH), but should be within ballpark range.

I think you're under estimating the range of modern EVs.

I've driven some brand new 3-digit-miles Kia Niro EVs, which start off indicating 200 miles range but have dropped to 150 by the time I get across town, and after about 100 miles total driving they're screaming at me to find a charging point.

The real-world performance does not match the advertised performance.

If you can get a cheap electric overnight home charging tariff in the UK, then the electric cost is lower. Mid week, I charged 43kWh for the cost of £3.04 (7p per kWh). My home charger does 7kwh in a hour. Usual mileage is about 4 miles per kWh (typical rush hour drive into Edinburgh). That should give me about 170 miles of range.

Scaling it to 400 miles (400 miles at 4 miles per kWh is 100 kWh which at 7p each is about £7. Pretty much an order of magnitude better than your estimate. I admit home charging is the best arrangement and I am fortunate to have it. I did a holiday trip to the highlands and used public/hotel chargers which were closer to your numbers but also much faster (up to 150kWh per hour capacity).

I think that even discounting hydrogen engineering difficulties, the infrastructure for electric is pretty much in place and the race of the technologies is over.

The problem is that using an EV makes living in the Highlands far more expensive even allowing for the cost of diesel, because you're forced to use rapid chargers at great expense - if they're available, and actually working - or a quick trip to the shops becomes an overnight stay.

Full tank capacity of a Mirai is ~5 kg / (120 liters in volume).

I think a few people were expecting the same cost curves that happened with batteries to happen with hydrogen but it seems the challenges are more difficult to overcome. Otherwise I think a Solar PV plant combined with Captive hydrogen production for refuelling on major highways sounds interesting, at least in countries like US, Australia etc. I believe this is not just about PEM or AEM electrolyser or specific tech, it never got the scaling boost.

Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.

For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.

Forget the type of electrolyzer, even if they were free hydrogen would still be expensive. The challenges with hydrogen getting cheaper are thermodynamic and can’t be innovated around. The amount of energy required to electrolyze water simply cannot drop by 10x.

The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.