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car service in the future - sammy1

Although a long way off I wonder what will happen to the garage service industry with presumably no oil changes and ever increasing reliability of component moving parts. I read they are testing Hydrogen trains so cars can't be far off? Hydrogen, if practical, certainly seems a better bet than your electric scenario with all the range and charging permutations.

car service in the future - badbusdriver

Hydrogen cars are already a thing, just not a very big one. The technology is there, but the infrastructure is hopeless. Car manufacturers don't want to push fuel cell cars because of this, but the companies who operate motorway services don't want to invest in hydrogen refuelling points because there are so few cars to use it, catch 22!. If fuel cell cars become a big thing, and frankly they should, then the prices will inevitably tumble as the technology becomes mass produced. There are currently only a handful of places in Britain to refuel a hydrogen fuel cell car, though bizarrely there are 2 in Aberdeen, which is only 30 miles away!.

But the current options are the Toyota Mirai, th Hyundai ix35 FCEV, and the Honda FCV Clarity. Possibly in the not too distant future there will be the (British) River Simple Rasa, a very small, very, very efficient, and very environmentally friendly 2 seater, not entirely dissimilar from Honda's original (and brilliant) Insight hybrid.

car service in the future - Terry W

You need to learn how hydrogen is produced. It only emits water at the point of use but most at present is made from a base stock of natural gas - not green at all!

It is also worth noting that every time you convert raw energy (oil, gas, sunlight, wind, tidal etc) into something useful you get conversion losses - eg: converting petrol in the tank to motion creates frictional and heat losses, converting gas to hydrogen creates losses and further losses when hydrogen is converted to electricity.

As things stand the only worthwhile uses for fuel cells are very specialised - in mines, to provide a power source for very remote sites, etc. They are a technically interesting blind alley - the only question you need ask is whether making hydrogen economically is more or less likely than improvements to battery technologies.

car service in the future - Bolt

the only question you need ask is whether making hydrogen economically is more or less likely than improvements to battery technologies.

I think both will happen eventually as so much R&D is going into both technologies and certain makers seem more convinced now than they were years ago, and as they say in the tech world nothing is impossible, plenty of doubt but not impossible

car service in the future - nick62

With solar, wind and tide the energy is always "lost" if you don't use a device to "capture" it surely?

Edited by nick62 on 20/06/2019 at 20:59

car service in the future - Sofa Spud

With solar, wind and tide the energy is always "lost" if you don't use a device to "capture" it surely?

Not sure what your point is here!

car service in the future - Andrew-T

With solar, wind and tide the energy is always "lost" if you don't use a device to "capture" it surely?

Not sure what your point is here!

The point is that every conversion of energy from one form to another is never 100% efficient. An obvious example is electrticity transmission. Some is lost between power station and the users by heat in the overhead lines. Solar or wind electricity suffers the same losses as any other. There is a practical limit to how much natural energy we can capture. Photos on today's news showed a field - which might be growing an edible crop - covered with a couple of hundred solar panels instead.

There is still a lot to be said for putting liquid fuel in a car's tank in terms of convenience.

car service in the future - Andrew-T

There are two big snags to hydrogen: it has to be stored under fairly high pressure (unless kept extremely cold); which increases the danger of a severe explosion. The same applies on a vehicle as well as a filling station. Zero exhaust pollution is a nice tempting idea but there is a big downside.

car service in the future - Bolt

There are two big snags to hydrogen: it has to be stored under fairly high pressure (unless kept extremely cold); which increases the danger of a severe explosion. The same applies on a vehicle as well as a filling station. Zero exhaust pollution is a nice tempting idea but there is a big downside.

There are downsides to everything if you look hard enough, electricity in itself is a killer so what's the difference, we have to go with what's developed which could be both Hydrogen and EVs.

which as yet no one knows and my guess is it will be both, Hydrogen possibly may get the sales for its mileage compared to EVs assuming its development is as fast as all electric

It is and will be interesting to see what happens over the coming years