Despite hybrid vehicles being the standard of green vehicles today, the debate rages on. The big debate in the future of automobiles comes down to these two major technologies – electric batteries or hydrogen fuel cells.
Let’s get this straight, they are both electric vehicles. But the differences are how the electricity is generated and stored. Electric vehicles get and store electricity from an outside source, such as a household power outlet. Hydrogen Fuel Cell vehicles generate their own electricity by converting pressurized hydrogen into energy.
So what’s better?
If you happened to catch the latest Top Gear episode on BBC or BBC America, the UK boys bashed the Tesla Motors’ Roadster for being irrelevant and unreliable. We know now that the unreliability was staged, and the ‘being irrelevant’ is just the Top Gear boys’ opinion. I loved it especially, when they traced the power source of the household power plug all the way to a heavy polluting power plant. It is very, very suggestive and misleading. Mr. May and Mr. Clarkson also suggested that hydrogen fuel cells are the wave of the future and introduced the Honda’s new FCX Clarity. Maybe, Top Gear is drinking Honda flavored Kool-Aid.
Can Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Top Gear crew tell us how they process pressurized liquid hydrogen? Or how the hydrogen might be delivered to the filling stations? Not to mention retrofitting the current gas stations to facilitate liquid hydrogen storage and dispensing. Electricity can be produced with solar, wind, and/or with hydro-power plants, which last time we checked, does not pollute our environment. A key factor that no one seem to be bringing up is that in order to produce liquid hydrogen, you need electricity!
In a ideal world, we would have two types of vehicles in our garages… or two types of mobility. One should be a electric personal mobile, commuter, or errand-runner. Much like the Segway, you plug it in to recharge at night then you take it to do errands or go to work in it. A fine example of this would be the Toyota iReal (see left). The other mode of transportation should only be used when you need space for more than one person and/or need long cruising distances. That could be either gas, electric, or hybrid drivetrain. But realistically, most people can or will have one vehicle. If that’s the case, make it electric. As the battery technology improve, so will the performance of the electric vehicles. With hydrogen fuel cells, you might have to replace the whole entire fuel cell or the vehicle, itself, for the same improvement of upgraded batteries on pure electric vehicles.
Sometimes, we make simple solutions get out of hand and make it complicated somehow…
-KF