Hydrogen Fool Cells COULD be as cheap as batteries

A recent post in Autoblog Green can be summarized thusly: In 5 to 12 years, by taking advantage of FRACKING, cost of refueling a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle COULD get to as low as $10 to go 100 miles, which the article says is about what electric cars get NOW. The Tesla Model S gets 85 mpge, 85/4(cost of a gallon of gas) x 100 = $4.70 to drive a Model S 100 miles. Less than 50% the cost to drive a HYPOTHETICAL, best-case-scenario (which again depends on fracking), hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, in 5–12 years (how long have we been hearing that HFCs are just a decade away?! Decades!).

I mean, what are we even talking about here? In 5–12 years where will li-ion batteries be? How much cheaper will they be, especially bearing in mind the existence of Tesla’s gigafactory or gigafactorIES. Also, even if you don’t care about fracking, low priced natural gas would cause the cost of the ENERGY to go down, which means that it would drive down the cost of driving a battery electric car as well! That’s the beauty of battery-electrics: they are the ultimate hybrid—they don’t care where their electrons come from, whether it’s a natural gas power plant, nuclear, solar, wind, etc. Even according to Honda’s own math (matching the cost of battery electric at some point in the future) justifying HFCs makes no sense to me, which makes me wonder why they’re REALLY pursuing HFC over li-ion. And how much do you want to bet that the performance of the cars doesn’t come close to matching the Model S’s sportscar level performance? The obvious answer is that it somehow better suits their BOTTOM LINE. In other words, delivering value to the consumer is taking a back seat to guaranteeing larger profits, which of course they’re fully within their rights to do, however, that doesn’t mean the consumer should fall for it.

Over ten years ago I had a discussion about fuel cells with my college roommate’s father, the VP of Advanced Powertrain Vehicles (I think that was the name of the division at least) for Chrysler who claimed that in 10 years HFCs would be viable. I, being at the time more in favor of battery-electric vehicles, argued that the reason why big autos touted HFC technology was precisely because it would not be viable for a long time, NOT because they sincerely believed that they were doing what was in the best interests of their consumers or the planet. Remember, the employees (including the CEO) and board members have an obligation to their shareholders to generate as much profit per share as possible. It’s beyond naive to imagine that a massive corporation would invest an out-sized portion of its R&D to develop vehicles that will, in the end, only compete with their existing HIGH MARGIN offerings. So now it’s 10 years later, and again big autos are telling us that in 10 years HFCs will be viable, though even by their own math, it will lag significantly behind existing electric offerings, without even discussing the fit, finish, performance, etc. with respect to all of which the Model S (Tesla’s first, again FIRST EVER, offering) already competes with the highest quality offerings from Porsche, Mercedes Benz, BMW, etc. Do we really think that HONDA is going to be able to match those? Do we really think that Tesla won’t use the experience and knowledge it has gained from building the Model S to continue to deliver even more impressive cars in the future? The beautiful thing about this absurdity is that there is already a product on the market that delivers superior cost/mile, performance, and luxury: the Model S, and by 2017 the Model 3 will be for sale which will cut the costs associated with owning a luxury sport sedan in half, plus feature Tesla’s trademark “awesomeness” (will it have retractable door handles? falcon-wing doors? Something completely knew we can’t even imagine?), and for which the cost to operate will not depend on fracking, but can be propelled by any conceivable power generating plant (yes, even natural gas and coal plants, which is why it’s also important to support renewable energy efforts). Musk has assured us that the Model 3 will have lots of cool new features, and given his track record, and the suite of awesome features his cars already have, there’s no reason not to get excited ☺