[You Need a Thneed]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

They are competely and utterly different. You have to think about how cars are vital and engrained in our culture and how that is so.

Tesla runs on big heavy batteries, requires recharging often, and quite simply - Pure electric vehicles are not compatible to the way society has developed car culture or how our city infrastructures and road/highway systems are set up. To charge your car requires a very long time. You can't just refill and go. It's like charging your cellphone or your laptop overnight. You basically need 2 cars. One to drive for when the other one is charging. This is of course, not compatible to the way society drives or how the roads are setup. If you are halfway to your destination and you run out of juice, what do you do? Check into a motel and plug in your car? It's a nice thought to flirt with but what are you going to do when you have nowhere to plug in? What are we going to do with parking lots full of cars that are recharging (you can't just drive off and go in 5 minutes)? What about people stealing electricity? How are we going to generate all that extra power for a continent of electric vehicles unless we come up with a great alternative cleaner way to generate power (just expand nuclear as I usually advocate). Batteries also have a limited lifespan of charge/recharge cycles and are extremely expensive. Their weight also means the car is made unncessarily inefficient and uneconomical. Battery technology hasn't changed that much in 30 years. There is no reason to believe some magical battery will come along that will be light weight, occupy a small footprint, store tons of power, and can be recharged in one zap. We already have all those advantages when we look at hydrogen fuel cells and thusly the FCX Clarity.

- The FCX Clarity is going to be or is already on-sale in California where there are Hydrogen pumps at gas stations. This operates just the same way our society has been conditioned to gas and go and works the same way by giving us something similar to the milage to gas station ratio to highway/road design of modern cities. You can drive until your tank is empty and then just fill up again. The only emission is pure water. Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the entire known universe. Heck, it's 75% of the universe's elemental mass! The abundance is what makes using electricity to isolate hydrogen a much more efficient and logical choice to actually directly storing that electricity in inefficient batteries requiring metals and many polluting materials. It's not pure electricity vs. pure hydrogen. It's chemical/metal batteries v. hydrogen fuel. The earth is full of hydrogen sources, we just have to redirect all the money going to Oil & Gas research & development into coming up with more efficient ways of isolating it, processing it, and commercially transporting it to fueling stations until it becomes as cheap as dirt. At the moment, hydrogen in California costs about the same as regular gas.

The advantage over hybrids is that there are no emissions, there are no heavy batteries, no complicated mechanical parts so maintenance like we used to know it is greatly reduced (one moving part basically). With hybrids, you have all the negatives of batteries as well as I spoke about in the tesla section combined with the negatives of modern combustion engines in one car even though they are engineered well to complement each other. Hybrids are only a stop-gap to the future.

Charging your car does not take a long time. Tesla's website says it takes 3.5 hours from completely dead, two hours from an average 100 mile drive. Unless you are someone who drives more then the cars range every day, no change in culture is needed. Sure, there are some people for whom an electric car doesn't really work right now, but that is a very small percentage of people.

You ask how we are going to generate the extra power. Currently, that's a question that needs to be asked about hydrogen as well, as hydrogen is produced by using great amount of electricity as well.

You say battery technology hasn't changed in thirty years? Looking in any hardware store will show you just how wrong that is. The fact is, battery technology has increased greatly. Battery packs have greatly decreased in size over the last 10-15 years. Charge-discharge cycles (an issue in the past) are no longer an issue with Lithium Ion Batteries and computerized charge controllers.

The battery packs weigh more, yes, but the engine weighs much less then a gasoline car. The overall mechanical system doesn't weight more the na regular car. Hydrogen cars need virtually indestructable tanks to store that hydrogen, those tanks can't be very light either.

Also, you claim the cleanliness of hydrogen, but electric cars are every bit as clean to run. Modern batteries don't have all those heavy metals and acids that old batteries have. From Tesla's website:

Originally Posted by teslamotors.com

Unlike other batteries that came before them, Lithium ion batteries are classified by the federal government as non-hazardous waste and are safe for disposal in the normal municipal waste stream. However, dumping these batteries in the trash would be throwing money away. Even a completely dead battery pack contains valuable, recoverable materials that can be sold back to recycling companies for cash.

I'll agree with you that Hybrids are merely a stop gap system to extend the life of the gasoline engine. And they are fairly good at that, they are significantly more efficient then a non hybrid system.

I'm also not going to say that Hydrogen cars have no future, because they do. The technologies will improve, and this will probobly be the technology of choice for people who either drive long distances, or for some other reason where pure electric cars don't meet their needs.