Consider getting a bike that you can't charge anywhere.

Interesting!
...but no thanks.
For one thing, 100 km range is not even unprecedented any more.
 
Takes a simple, widely-adopted product and changes it to a unique power source that is only barely available and needlessly complex by comparison. Ask Toyota how its Mirai sales have been going. Especially since there are zero refueling stations in the USA available outside of California.

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=HY
This is a French company... only 29 refueling stations in all of France.

https://www.glpautogas.info/en/hydrogen-stations-france.html
 
m@Robertson said:
Takes a simple, widely-adopted product and changes it to a unique power source that is only barely available and needlessly complex by comparison. Ask Toyota how its Mirai sales have been going. Especially since there are zero refueling stations in the USA available outside of California.

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=HY
This is a French company... only 29 refueling stations in all of France.

https://www.glpautogas.info/en/hydrogen-stations-france.html
Click to expand...
Exactly! Try pulling into your local bike shop, and telling them your hydrogen-powered bike is acting up!
 
If you have your own solar array in the backyard, DYI hydrogen production is nothing new:
 
For the foreseeable future hydrogen is a technology that is not going to achieve any level of mass use. And for some pretty ironclad reasons. Namely the fueling stations mean manufacturers will not be selling tech that people can't use and therefore don't want to buy. If you have a fixed fleet and can have your own dedicated refill station in your motor pool parking lot (for example a garbage truck fleet or similar where everything starts and stops at the same place every day) that is the only remaining path to feasibility. And even then you have to deal with the safety concerns inherent in storing pressurized hydrogen (i.e. 'Boom').

https://electrek.co/2022/02/15/study-hydrogen-fuel-cells-cannot-catch-up-battery-electric-vehicles/
electric-car-vs-hydrogen-fuel-cell1-e1509049014192[1].jpg
 
FWIW, I think hydrogen makes a lot of sense for commercial use. It is a viable clean alternative to diesel, for example, where electric is not.

On bicycles? Electric is about perfect. I can't see any advantage to an H2 bike over electric. Even on a motorcycle it is iffy.

Cars? Maybe once some infrastructure is there from commercial use? Bravo to Toyota and California for getting the ball rolling. Toyota did the same thing with gasoline/electric hybrids in 1997 (?) and people thought it was crazy. Now, 25 years later, it is being copied a LOT.
 
Smaug said:
FWIW, I think hydrogen makes a lot of sense for commercial use. It is a viable clean alternative to diesel, for example, where electric is not.
Click to expand...
While its getting a bit harder to make that case (e.g. the USA BEV school bus production boom), thats where hydrogen is going to have its shot. Fleets that can all travel to a single in-house location to re-fuel. Garbage trucks, all-day bus routes, local truck delivery. Long term, maybe large shipping and short range passenger air routes.

Scalable solid state battery developments are finally happening that in maybe the next year will at last give us more than a small incremental improvement in storage density. It remains to be seen how much that will eat into hydrogen's remaining niche.
Smaug said:
Cars? Maybe once some infrastructure is there from commercial use? Bravo to Toyota and California for getting the ball rolling. Toyota did the same thing with gasoline/electric hybrids in 1997 (?) and people thought it was crazy. Now, 25 years later, it is being copied a LOT.
Click to expand...
Everything I have been reading about FCV's for the consumer market is focused on its failure. Akio Toyoda stepped down as CEO recently and the reasoning for this was widely attributed to his stubbornness in pushing FCV's and refusing to back BEVs, while the rest of the marketplace left Toyota further and further behind. Witness the company's almost immediate refocus to BEV development under new leadership. And last year, the US crossed the 5%-of-new-sales barrier for BEVs that is expected to be the tipping point - where a technology is no longer considered out of the ordinary or weird - with an accelerating consumer adoption trend to follow as a result.

Looking at Mirai sales since its introduction in 2014, its failure to grow in any meaningful way (and the failure of infrastructure to spread past the pilot dealerships selling the cars), and what the industry is doing about hydrogen in consumer vehicles, hydrogen for consumer vehicles seems firmly in the 'failure' camp. And not for lack of trying on the part of the world's largest automaker.
 
Smaug said:
FWIW, I think hydrogen makes a lot of sense for commercial use. It is a viable clean alternative to diesel, for example, where electric is not.

On bicycles? Electric is about perfect. I can't see any advantage to an H2 bike over electric. Even on a motorcycle it is iffy.

Cars? Maybe once some infrastructure is there from commercial use? Bravo to Toyota and California for getting the ball rolling. Toyota did the same thing with gasoline/electric hybrids in 1997 (?) and people thought it was crazy. Now, 25 years later, it is being copied a LOT.
Click to expand...
The problem is that so much more energy input is needed to make it, ie twice as much (so twice as many wind turbines or nuclear reactors or even gas turbines) as using electricity directly. A tangent but when we then look at heating with heat pump vs hydrogen the difference is even more because the heat pump gathers 2/3rds of its energy from the air outside (so six times as much source energy needed in that case).
 
Consider hydrogen a stopgap until our all electric infrastructure catches up. It’s still cleaner than gas or diesel ICE, right?
 
Everything can seem impossible or impractical until it becomes mainstream.
Until folks start to realize that self-sustainability is more important than being mainstream; every non-mainstream idea would remain impractical.
On the plus side, if you have a hydrogen vehicle, less likely to have it stolen if thieves can't fill the hydrogen tank easily.

I'll keep working on getting my house off-grid as much as I can.
One can't have enough 50 gal. water drums for free.
 
Smaug said:
Consider hydrogen a stopgap until our all electric infrastructure catches up. It’s still cleaner than gas or diesel ICE, right?
Click to expand...
Yeah but there is a much straighter line to power if its done via solar. And investment for a scaled up hydrogen collection/storage facility is so much more than a scaled up solar farm (that probably can fit on top of a flat warehouse roof). Hydrogen doesn't make economic sense versus other renewable options until you get into some serious scale, or you have power needs that solar/wind collection just can't accommodate.
 
briiian said:
https://www.designboom.com/technology/pragma-industries-alpha-hydrogen-bicycle-03-2017/

https://www.pragma-industries.com/light-mobility/
Click to expand...
It sounds like that ecar concept, where you drive into one of their battery replacement centres & within twenty minutes your driving out again with a newly charged fresh battery. The idea sounds doable but you end up relying on a company for your bike, battery, services, insurance & God knows what else. In the uk the government has been looking into number plates for bicycles, tax for using the potholed roads. Imagine a future where all ebikes aren't owned but rented, the price including charging, road tax, insurance, tax on tyre & brake pollution & a maximum speed of 15.5 mph & 250w
 
m@Robertson said:
Takes a simple, widely-adopted product and changes it to a unique power source that is only barely available and needlessly complex by comparison. Ask Toyota how its Mirai sales have been going. Especially since there are zero refueling stations in the USA available outside of California.

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/hydrogen_locations.html#/find/nearest?fuel=HY
This is a French company... only 29 refueling stations in all of France.

https://www.glpautogas.info/en/hydrogen-stations-france.html
Click to expand...
This H2 debacle reminds me of the fusion debacle, there are already really great alternatives availible.
 

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