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Home / Research / Fuels / Honda to Launch Production Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car in 2008 /
Kudos to Honda for bravery in attempting something different. Shame on them for being so stupid.
The problem with hydrogen (H2) is that there is no natural source of it on our planet. It must be manufactured and that takes a lot of energy just to make it.
If you start with natural gas, it will waste about 25% of the natural gas to just produce H2 when you could just burn the natural gas in an internal combustion engine (ICE) like the Honda Civic GX.
If you produce it by electrolyzing water with electricity (whether from solar, wind, gas, coal, etc), you waste about 80% of the electricity and only about 20% actually goes to the road. A plug-in hybrid (PHEV) or pure Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) only lose about 20% of the electricity so you will go a lot more miles with your energy source.
As far as the fuel cells themselves go, they are a very complex and expensive system. I doubt you will ever see them for less than a few $10's of K - just for the motor. The cars will likely never cost less than $100K and the first ones will probably cost over $500K although I'm sure they will be subsidized for a while.
Contrast this with cheap electric motors and even batteries are quite cheap relative to a fuel cell.
Regarding the H2: H2 is the smallest molecule in existance. Therefore, everything is permeable to it. H2 will leak out of any tank so it can't be stored for very long without losing it. This means that it cannot be stockpiled or stored but must be produced a few days before it is used. While subtle, this will make any H2 infrastructure very complex and expensive.
Hopefully, Honda will prove me wrong but H2 looks to me like a ruse to keep producing old fashioned gasoline fueled ICE vehicles for another few decades before having to actually do the right thing (PHEVs and BEVs).
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