Lotus Technology announces hybrid technology

[Jinba ittai]

Lotus should be looking ay Hydrogen, that's the way to go.

Battery technology is going to sufficiently improved before the hydrogen economy can be built out. My 2 cents anyways.

 

[Tomwa]

Agreed. While I would love for hydrogen to work, because it means we can keep ICE and sound and feel around, it means engine development and improvements from centuries of effort and advancement continue.

I just don't think it's likely. The infrastructure just isn't there and the economy of energy is not favorable. While "gas stations" conceptually would not change, the problem is, what you are left with is, stations what? Doing their own electrolysis to store compressed hydrogen in tanks.

Shipping compressed hydrogen around as a regular as we do for gasoline doesnt make sense. But the electrolysis energy requirements also don't make sense and there's no current known benefit of scale. If you've got that much electricity, storing it to batteries is easier and comes with less losses. (70-80% Energy loss converting water to Hydrogen)

Then we get hydrogen into the cars, the size of tank needed to support combustion is quite a bit larger than a gasoline tank. While hydrogen is over 2.5 more energy dense than gasoline, storage density sucks. You need a very small amount of hydrogen to go fair distances, but without cryo temps to push hydrogen to negative hundreds of degrees C, you are looking at pressures like 350psi but even then you are looking at a storage volume approximately 5x what gasoline needs.

Then... Well that large volume might get you pretty far, and environmentally it's clean (sufficiently so, I'm sure there's oil vapor and that would burn so there would be some minimal hydrocarbons.) but, burning hydrogen is only 20-30% Energy efficient. Maybe we could push that to 35-40% with improvements and technology, but .. that's 20% of 70% in the worst.

Batteries by comparison, electric to chemical, back to electrical, at this point is something like 65% efficient at the worst, and is more like 80+% efficient today, and stations don't need to store energy tanks on site, you can plug in at home.