Stellantis Abandons Hydrogen Fuel Cell Development (arstechnica.com) 37
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For some years now, detractors of battery electric vehicles have held up hydrogen as a clean fuel panacea. That sometimes refers to hydrogen combustion engines, but more often, it's hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, or FCEVs. Both promise motoring with only water emitted from the vehicles' exhausts. It's just that hydrogen actually kinda sucks as a fuel, and automaker Stellantis announced today that it is ending the development of its light-, medium- and heavy-duty FCEVs, which were meant to go into production later this year.
Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects. But in reality, that's pretty far from true. [...] Between the high development costs and the fact that FCEVs only sell with strong incentives, the decision was made to cancel the production of hydrogen vans in France and Poland. Stellantis says there will be no job losses at its factories and that R&D staff will be put to work on other projects. "In a context where the Company is mobilizing to respond to demanding CO2 regulations in Europe, Stellantis has decided to discontinue its hydrogen fuel cell technology development program," said Jean-Philippe Imparato, chief operating officer for Enlarged Europe. "The hydrogen market remains a niche segment, with no prospects of mid-term economic sustainability. We must make clear and responsible choices to ensure our competitiveness and meet the expectations of our customers with our electric and hybrid passenger and light commercial vehicles offensive."
Hydrogen's main selling point is that it's faster to fill a tank with the stuff than it is to recharge a lithium-ion battery. So it's a seductive alternative that suggests a driver can keep all the convenience of their gasoline engine with none of the climate change-causing side effects. But in reality, that's pretty far from true. [...] Between the high development costs and the fact that FCEVs only sell with strong incentives, the decision was made to cancel the production of hydrogen vans in France and Poland. Stellantis says there will be no job losses at its factories and that R&D staff will be put to work on other projects. "In a context where the Company is mobilizing to respond to demanding CO2 regulations in Europe, Stellantis has decided to discontinue its hydrogen fuel cell technology development program," said Jean-Philippe Imparato, chief operating officer for Enlarged Europe. "The hydrogen market remains a niche segment, with no prospects of mid-term economic sustainability. We must make clear and responsible choices to ensure our competitiveness and meet the expectations of our customers with our electric and hybrid passenger and light commercial vehicles offensive."
A sad day (Score:2, Interesting)
The concept does seem so promising. But fortunately, other carmakers haven't stopped.
BMW, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, and GM all are at some stage of development of hydrogen fuel cell cars.
Toyota and Hyundai both already have production models for sale.
The technology works, it's just that it's still expensive to produce.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Informative)
Promising? How? It's a concept that's only been kept limping along by the fossil fuel industry, that carries the best selection of the worst downsides: Expensive and currently fossil-sourced fuel like an ICE, high up-front vehicle cost and slow "refuel" times like an EV, a fuel with very few filling stations in the world that needs to be stored at enormous pressures, burns with an invisible flame, can escape through solids and embrittles steel on the way out like...hydrogen.
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Promising? How? It's a concept that's only been kept limping along by the fossil fuel industry, that carries the best selection of the worst downsides: Expensive and currently fossil-sourced fuel like an ICE, high up-front vehicle cost and slow "refuel" times like an EV,
It's not really that bad. You can put probably ~500 miles of range into a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in 7 minutes versus 200 miles in 15 minutes on a modern EV. It's actually pretty comparable to a gasoline-powered vehicle. But you do still have to stop, unlike with an EV, where 90% of your charging can be done plugged in at home while you sleep. So in that sense, it's slow.
a fuel with very few filling stations in the world that needs to be stored at enormous pressures, burns with an invisible flame, can escape through solids and embrittles steel on the way out like...hydrogen.
I've said similar things about NASA's Artemis mission for the same reason. Doesn't everybody want to use a fuel that is almost imp
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BYD's new electric vehicles can add around 250 miles of charge in 5 minutes now. Of course we're not allowed to buy them in the US, hooray for our "free trade" economy, right?
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I haven't seen details on the grid upgrades required to have 6-12 of such chargers running at the same time on one property. We're talking random gas stations needing massive infrastructure levels of power.
Fair to say the US grid is a decade or more of intelligent upgrade from that being viable - and realistically a lot longer.
Still not an argument for hydrogen, but the bridge to ubiquitous charging needed for true mass adoption seems fuzzy still.
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Do you really think they would have 12 chargers will be running constantly all together? I'd imagine you can set a queue system up, 3 at once or whatever - you plug your car in, and while you go off to pay/shop when one car is finished it will start charging yours, by the time you get back to your car yours would be almost done.
Added to the fact that gas stations typically have the chargers all together because the infrastructure mandates it, with electric chargers not so - you don't need a huge tank inst
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The train I used to go to work with was replaced by a hydrogen fuel cell train. It was such a shitshow in regards to technical problems and difficulties with duelling that it was mostly replaced by a bus after a few months and a diesel train after two years. Its range was also shit in the hilly terrain here because its recuperation batteries are too small so its fuell consumption is much higher than originally planned. The fuel cell cars will have the same proble - either high fuel consumption or large ba
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They tried a hydrogen train here in the UK too a few years ago. It quietly sank without trace.
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if hydrogen could be a drop in replacement for use in distribution pipelines, it would have a reason to be followed. But it doesn't. Rebuilding the infrastructure on top of it's $15-20/gallon equivalent cost is just never going to take off.
It will have a niche place out towards power grid edges and you need mobile fueling w/o solar+batteries, but that's where the cost gets justified.
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If I had the choice between: an EV I could charge up at home or indeed anywhere that has electricity, even via my own solar panels - or a Hydrogen car where I'm dependent on stations owned by a billionaire cartel + taxed heavily by my authoritarian government - why would I want hydrogen ?? Even if the two had identical performance?
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Informative)
The U.S. is somewhat lagging behind, because right now, it's some kind of anti-virtue signalling to go fossil despite the advantages of electric. This fad will ebb.
Completely disagree (Score:3)
"The technology works" only in so far in that it can power a car. It's more expensive, less efficient and has loads of other disadvantages compared to EVs. The companies that are continuing their efforts are just trying to get something out for their investments.
Hydrogen is flammable, corrosive, hard to transport/store and producing it is not efficient and a lot of it is still produced via fossil fuels. And as the summary mentions, the have even mostly abandoned the hydrogen combustion engines - you burn hy
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There is only one situation where hydrogen could make se
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Hydrogen fuel cells are already obsolete for cars and utility vehicles. With 1000kW charging, long range batteries, and battery swap tech that takes a few minutes, it's just not worth the extra complexity and inconvenience of needing to produce, transport, store, and transfer hydrogen.
They may still have uses in other areas. Possibly aircraft, or very heavy machinery. Even haulage is using batteries now though. They keep improving and the cost keeps falling. LFP is also very safe.
Hydrogen's main selling point... (Score:5, Interesting)
is a lie. Or at the very least a mistruth. Firstly it takes far longer to fill a hydrogen car than a gas car due to the careful rate control needed to fill the tank. If you have appropriate cooling and heating systems to maximise density while filling while also preventing the handle from freezing in place it still takes you >6min to fill a car. But there's different hydrogen refueling stations on the market with different capabilities. And certainly some out there take about as long as a refuel on a highway fast charger.
On top of that hydrogen refueling stations do not store hydrogen at bulk pressures required for vehicles since having a large 700bar tank is hugely expensive and dangerous, instead bulk hydrogen is stored at a lower pressure and compressed before being put into small temporary storage and loaded into your car. This means refueling stations are rate limited often to as little as a few vehicles per hour. Not a problem now, but certainly a problem if every car were hydrogen. This is less of a problem with trucks which run at far lower pressure.
People have this view that the hydrogen experience is identical to ICE. It's just not. It's more of a hybrid between hydrogen and older EV charging (the first MCS chargers for consumers are being deployed which personally I find insane, we don't need 750kW+ to fill our car in a blink of an eye. ).
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Good. (Score:2)
Hydrogen is not a great energy storage medium. More importantly, the primary source of hydrogen is a fossil fuel. Switching to a fully electric source of hydrogen is far more difficult than it is to simply charge batteries. Producing hydrogen is an unnecessary inefficiency.
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Hydrogen is not a great energy storage medium. More importantly, the primary source of hydrogen is a fossil fuel. Switching to a fully electric source of hydrogen is far more difficult than it is to simply charge batteries. Producing hydrogen is an unnecessary inefficiency.
And by "more difficult", you mean that there is a massively larger amount of efficiency loss. If you're lucky, you recapture 60% of the energy in the fuel, and multiply that times the 75% efficiency for electrolysis, if you're lucky, and you're throwing away more than half the energy that goes in. So if folks are freaking out about the power grid not being able to handle EVs, imagine what would happen if you doubled the power requirements.
A different kind of "hydrogen economy" (Re:Good.) (Score:2)
Switching to a fully electric source of hydrogen is far more difficult than it is to simply charge batteries. Producing hydrogen is an unnecessary inefficiency.
Then don't use hydrogen produced by electricity. Or at least not produced by electricity alone.
There's more efficient ways to produce hydrogen than with electricity. There's perhaps a half dozen promising technologies that use heat alone or heat with some electricity as the energy source. A sample of these technologies can be found with only a few minutes of research on the internet. Those that assume hydrogen is only produced by electrolysis of water, or some process that extracts hydrogen from fossil
Going somewhere to fill up is the opposite of good (Score:2)
The convenience of an electric car is every time you leave your house you already have a "full tank". "filling up fast" means you have to go somewhere to fill up that you don't want to be.
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The convenience of an electric car is every time you leave your house you already have a "full tank". "filling up fast" means you have to go somewhere to fill up that you don't want to be.
I agree 100% but this is something some EV advocates seem to miss: that convenience is out of reach for many people.
I live in an apartment complex and I have my dedicated parking spot in the underground garage but the landlord has no plan to install or allow tenants to install charging stations. A lot of people don't even have a dedicated parking spot and park on the streets with a residential permit.
Without the convenience of overnight charging an EV is not an option I'm willing to consider and I'm definit
Stupid Idea Anyway (Score:2)
Hydrogen died years ago (Score:2)
Energy density (Score:2)
As someone who likes cars, driving and motorsport, the big issue in battery EVs for me is the weight. When I've had EV or hybrid hire cars, you go "cool" when you hit the loud pedal, then you go "yuck" when you go round a corner. While I love a petrol engine, I'm OK with an electric powertrain (torque!). However, no one has mentioned energy density yet, which for me is the key thing in powering a car. There was a good scientific study a few years back (can't find reference right now) that compared the energ
Good. Fuck greenwashing the fossil fuel industry (Score:2)
Now hopefully people will see through their stupid plan, they will finally FOAD and the rest of us can get on with saving our civilization.