That's the idea. Basically the idea is that you do most charging at home. When I'm planning to go on a long trip I'll set up my Tesla to charge to 100% before I leave home so I spend less time at the supercharger on the way to my destination. Battery swapping doesn't make a lot of sense except for long trips, for example between SF and LA.

They've been doing that for years in my city to brackish water to supplement the water supply. The problem is that these last few years have been exceptionally dry. You can't just build desalination plants overnight, especially for the amount of water we're talking about, plus it needs to be transported quite a distance and is very expensive. Most of the water is used for agriculture. California produces around 1/3 of all of the food in the country.

Originally it was built with street cars until those were ripped out to be replaced by buses, funded by the likes of Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil (Chevron), Phillips Petrolium (Conoco Phillips), Mack Truck and others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

San Francisco is one of the few cities that retained its street cars and is much better because of it.

In Los Angeles, given the limited available land area and high prices and how painful it is to shut down lanes, freeways can be far more expensive to build, probably more like 150-00M/mile. And don't get started on rail. I think extending BART is costing upwards of $1B/mile in places. LA freeways also need to be built to withstand major earthquakes which also increases the cost, especially for bridges. With earthquakes, two tiered freeways are a lot more expensive or you end up with problems like this.

With all of the land being so densely populated, putting through a new freeway becomes extremely costly, especially since nobody wants their neighborhood to be split by a major freeway.

One of the freeways I take to work had a choke point where it went from 4 to 3 lanes. Once they expanded it 4 lanes the entire way traffic didn't move just 25% faster. It was more like 200% faster during rush hour. I'll never understand why people always wait for the very last instant to merge, slowing everyone down.

Wrong. The fact that they are public residential roads does not mean that they're designed for the kind of traffic that's flowing over them. They were designed to service the residents who live there. It becomes a public safety issue when emergency vehicles cannot get where they need to go over city streets due to the streets being clogged with traffic they were never designed to handle. Also, the gasoline taxes do not cover the cost of the roads, especially at the federal level where the federal program is getting close to being insolvent.

My neighborhood was getting filled up by people parking for the nearby BART station when BART started charging fees for parking. They made it impossible for locals to park and were dumping trash all over the place and causing a lot of other problems. It made it impossible for construction vehicles to park or for people to visit. They went so far as to start cutting the local trees and bushes when they got in their way. The City said if 90% of the homeowners could agree for a no parking during a two hour window they'd implement it. They had no problem getting over 90% of the homeowners to agree to this. Other cities solve this using parking permits.

It's not just Tesla with their gen 3. Nissan and Audi are also planning 200+ mile EVs and Nissan is looking at keeping the costs down as well. GM, Ford and BMW aren't sitting still either. It's just a matter of the battery prices to continue their downward trend in cost and upward trends in capacity and performance. The writing is on the wall for fuel cell vehicles and has been for a while. Tesla's gigafactory alone should drop their battery prices by at least 30%.

Try driving any of those cars outside of the few hydrogen filling stations. Oh wait, you can't. By the end of next year only a few cities will be linked up by hydrogen filling stations. I can drive my Tesla from San Diego to Vancouver today, or across the country. By the end of next year most of the nation will be covered by rapid chargers where only a few major cities will be covered by hydrogen. I can also charge any place there's an outlet or at most RV parks if need be. Most of my charging happens at home. I spend 5 seconds at night to plug in and 5 seconds in the morning to unplug and have a full battery with over 200 miles of range, all in the comfort of my garage. I never have to set foot in a service station and only need to charge for long-distance travel. http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...

Hyundai has a new FC car out that I can lease today. The Toyota Mirai is coming soon. show me a worthwhile EV car that's not a $90k space ship.

Those cars are very heavily subsidized. They cost far more to build than what they're charging. For $57K the Mirai is a mediocre car. There's no way anyone would pay the true cost of the Mirai. They're also only selling 700 cars next year. Tesla sells far more cars than that every week with plans in 3 years to make 500K cars per year. There's also a reason why they subsidize the cost of the hydrogen because right now it's the equivalent of $5/gallon of gasoline.

costs are on track to drop below gasoline on a per-mile basis. There are many H2 pathways that are very green and these are being scaled up rapidly. Also remember that FC cars are much more efficient than gasoline cars, so any metric has to be on a per-mile basis.

Bullshit. The cost of hydrogen right now is very heavily subsidized. It can't be made cost competitive with gasoline. It is far too energy intensive to make it. You can't transport it to service stations like you can gasoline since the volume of hydrogen required is much larger and the tanks must be much smaller and heavier due to the extremely high pressures involved. Those narrow tanks have a wall thickness of about an inch so they're also quite heavy. It pretty much must be made on-site and that is expensive to do and energy intensive. Making hydrogen from methane is a very mature technology and there's not much room left to cut costs. It is far more expensive than gasoline.

depends where you are. in the PNW electricity prices are 3.5 cents / kwh. if you're smart you can play all sorts of load-balancing and green credit games to get prices down really low. As a benchmarks, it is 60 kwh to make a kg of H2, including compression.

60KWh will get an electric car 200 miles or more. A HFC car will only go a fraction of that. Most places don't have electricity anywhere near that cheap. In my area the cost is closer to $.20-$.30/kwh. The best wholesale rate you might get is $0.10-$0.12/KWh, nowhere close to $0.035/KWh. Right now making hydrogen from water is the equivalent of $6-$11/gallon of gasoline assuming economies of scale which currently does not exist.

There are plenty of H2 pipelines. also plenty of tube trailer trucks. The people who move H2 all around the country think it's viable cuz they do it.

Tube trailer trucks can't transport all that much hydrogen, certainly far less than a gasoline truck can carry. There also aren't very many of them capable of transporting hydrogen. They are also extremely heavy due to the very high pressures involved and the very thick tanks. Hydrogen is a very low density energy carrier. There are very few H2 pipelines. You can't just convert a natural gas pipeline to transport hydrogen. Hydrogen embrittles metal and will leak at the joints unlike most liquids or gases. Electricity, by comparison, is trivial to transport with the infrastructure largely in place.

20 fuel cell buses ran in Vancouver for 3 years. 5 fuel cell buses run in palm springs. it's much more viable than batteries. also, FC's have the power needed to do some heavy-duty HVAC, while it destroys the range of a battery vehicle to turn the AC on.

3 years is nothing. A typical car should last at least 10 years. Also, how do they hold up in places like Montana where it gets quite cold, especially with the byproduct being water which tends to freeze? Also, the AC doesn't destroy the range of the battery like you claim. In fact, it would have exactly the same impact on range with a HFC vehicle as it does for a battery electric vehicle. I barely noticed the impact of the AC when I drove up to Lake Tahoe and it was 106F in the central valley, and that's with the AC set to a comfortable 72F. Fuel cells degrade. State of the art fuel cells lose 10% of their performance after 2,500 hours under ideal conditions. There are already Teslas that have surpassed that by a fair amount with far less degradation of their batteries. Also, those hydrogen tanks have a limited lifetime and need to be replaced.

the AC Transit leak should have been NBD. all they have to do is open a valve and let the H2 bleed out. it was a bfd because the fire department wasn't trained on what to do and they had a shizz fit and treated it like a big hazard. What everybody learned from this is to make sure your first responders are properly trained.

That may be, but given how easily hydrogen leaks and ignites compared to gasoline fires will be a serious safety issue, especially if any serious amount of hydrogen is stored on-site. Hydrogen is far more flammable than gasoline. It also will leak. Hydrogen is very hard to contain. It seeps through just about anything. It embrittles metal. Gasoline is trivial to deal with by comparison. Now what do you think will happen with a hydrogen filling station with joe public compared to one dedicated to buses?

prices are down 8x and there's plenty of room to keep improving. it's an area of continuing fundamental research.

They're still not there yet and have a long way to go. They are still far more expensive than batteries and batteries have far more potential to drop in price.

it's clear you know nothing about the cost or the performance of the mirai, so you should refrain from making uneducated statements.

I think it is you who needs an education. The true cost of the Mirai is not $60K. It is significantly higher, especially given that they're only selling 700 of them next year. The performance of the car is also quite mediocre, especially for a car in its price range. 0-60 in 9 seconds is barely better than a Prius. Also, you are far more limited than you are with even a Leaf since there are so few places you can actually drive it. I have a friend with a Leaf who is planning a drive from the Bay Area to Vancouver. It will take him a while, but he can do it. With my Tesla it's far easier since the infrastructure is in place. Today I can drive across the country, along the entire west coast and east coast using superchargers. By the end of next year most the major routes across the country will be covered. http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...

nobody cares what tesla does. they're a boutique company selling the fantasy of owning a spaceship car. live in the real world not your fantasy world.

Then why is everyone trying to copy them, like BMW, Audi, GM and Nissan? The other car companies definitely took notice. When Tesla releases their $35K car with a 200+ mile range in a few years it will be game over for fuel cells. BMW is also planning to build out their own rapid charging network to catch up with ChaDeMo. Their so-called 'boutique' car is outselling the gasoline equivalent luxury cars.

loooool battery swapping is doa and will never happen. battery companies are only fake pursuing it as a canard to have a bullet point argument against other fuels.

The first battery swapping station opens in two weeks. The cost of a battery swap will be significantly cheaper than an unsubsidized fill-up of Hydrogen and take less time.

so? then make it on site. there are many technologies to do so.

All of those technologies are also rather expensive to implement. The cheapest method is quite mature and still far more expensive than gasoline.

dated article is dated. technology moves on.

in short, instead of hating on other things you should quietly reflect on why you have such a nasty reaction against anything that's new. what other promising technologies do you reject out of hand for no real reason?

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/... is another good article on fuel cells and their true cost and is much more up to date. Many of the points in the article have not changed since you can't change the laws of physics.

I'm just saying that the actual physics and chemistry makes hydrogen an expensive dead end. The infrastructure for EVs is years ahead of fuel cells. All you need is electricity. You also need far more hydrogen filling stations than you do rapid chargers. A rapid charger is only needed for long distance travel whereas a hydrogen filling station is needed for all HFC cars. Most EVs charge overnight and it takes only a few seconds to plug in and unplug.

The cost to build a nationwide supercharger network able to handle all of the nation's long distance passenger vehicle travel would be around $4B. The cost of building out the required hydrogen infrastructure is around $500B. Within three years Tesla will have cut their price of batteries by at least 30% There is still tremendous room for improvement for batteries, for cost, capacity and performance with no end in sight. HFCs are an expensive dead end technology.

Toyota is planning on selling tens of thousands of fuel cell vehicles by 2020. Tesla is selling that today. By 2020 Tesla will be selling at least 500,000 cars a year. In the long run battery electric vehicles just make a lot more sense. They will be far cheaper to operate and have far more infrastructure already in place. EVs will also be far cheaper to build and far simpler than a HFC vehicle. EV charging stations are going in everywhere and even rapid chargers are quickly building out. By the time hydrogen stations are able to handle a few cities and maybe a few thousand cars, Tesla will have most of the country covered. Tesla's also not alone in that. Companies like eVgo, Chargepoint, Blink, etc. are all building out networks as well. Then you have companies like BMW partnering with eVgo to build out their rapid charging network, which Tesla should also be able to easily support since only their physical connector is different.

Show me a worthwhile fuel cell car? The pace of battery progress is quite high. The cost are dropping rapidly and the capacity is increasing while charging times are dropping. Right now any fuel cell car is very heavily subsidized. They will never sell given that the cost of hydrogen will always be significantly higher than gasoline while being less green to boot. Right now a decent hybrid will release less CO2 per mile than any hydrogen fuel cell car and there's not a lot of room for improvement. Making hydrogen from water is and always will be cost prohibitive due to the enormous amount of electricity required no matter the catalyst and fuel cell efficiency in a vehicle is maybe at best 60% efficient. Hell, it takes 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen just to compress it to 5000PSI. In the best case making CO2 from methane is 70% efficient with the byproduct being CO2. The cost of hydrogen filling stations will always be quite high due to all of the safety aspects. You can't transport hydrogen over regular pipelines and you can't economically transport it by truck like gasoline. There's still also a lot of unknowns about fuel cells like how long the PEM membranes will actually last and how they'll hold up in various climates. For example, how well does a fuel cell stack survive a Montana winter, given that the byproduct is water and typically PEM membranes must maintain a certain humidity range. What happens when these cars leak, especially if they're in an enclosed space like a garage? Hydrogen is one of the most flammable substances known, requiring extremely little energy to ignite. It's explosive over an extremely high range of mixtures, higher than methane, and given that it will rise, in an enclosed space it will tend to accumulate at the ceiling.

Then comes the problem of hydrogen filling stations. Nobody will want to invest in them because they are so costly to build unless they are very heavily subsidized. They're pushing cars with free hydrogen because they know that's the only way they'll sell. If people knew the true cost of hydrogen nobody in their right mind would buy a fuel cell car, The only way hydrogen can possibly be at all economically feasible (i.e. not 10x the cost of gasoline per mile) is to reform methane on site, and it still will be much more expensive than gasoline. HFC cars are a dead end. The safety issues alone will be costly. Hell, they've already had one hydrogen fire at the hydrogen filling station in my county for buses, and that isn't used by the general public. Fuel cells are still costly to build and still require platinum and there's a lot of additional complexity as well. Hydrogen has an extremely low energy density and the only way to store enough of it is to store it at very high pressure. Compressing hydrogen takes a lot of energy, roughly 20% of the energy contained in the hydrogen for 5000PSI. Tanks will need to be distributed all over the car since the volume of hydrogen needed to get any decent range will still be quite high, so the cost of those tanks will be quite high, especially if they're going to be safe in the event of a crash.

Battery technology is rapidly dropping in cost, increasing capacity and decreasing charging time. EV charging stations are popping up everywhere. Walgreens, Whole Foods and Target are installing stations for their stores. Home charging is fairly easy and the time it takes at home generally doesn't matter since it's done overnight when there's a glut of electricity and prices are at their lowest. HFCs will never come anywhere close to the cost of an EV. The true cost of the Toyota fuel cell car is likely over double what they're asking and the car they're selling is mediocre at best. Rapid chargers are also being built out. Tesla is building out their network very rapidly and soon others will be following. Tesla's also using grid storage to even out the load to significantly reduce their peak demand. Once they get their gigafactory going and 35K 200 mile EVs are out fuel cell vehicles will be dead.

I can charge my Tesla just about anywhere and adding more charging stations is cheap. They're putting them in everywhere, at shopping centers, parking garages and at the workplace where it doesn't matter how slowly the cars charge. It cost millions of dollars to build a hydrogen filling station that will likely need to be manned while in operation due to safety issues. It takes a few thousand to put in a public J1772 and at most a couple hundred thousand to build a rapid charger. There's little maintenance required for the chargers as well. In a couple weeks Tesla will be starting their battery swapping. Once that goes in then the last advantage of hydrogen fuel cells is over. I can swap my battery in 90 seconds, faster than it's possible to fill up a gasoline car or hydrogen car for that matter, all without having to step out of the car. while a swapping station is expensive it will be far cheaper than a hydrogen filling station. For one thing it doesn't have all the major safety issues to contend with. An EV charging station can be built any place that there's electricity which is just about everywhere. Hydrogen filling stations will require that the hydrogen be made on-site since you can't effectively transport it. It embrittles pipelines and you can't just add an odorant like you can natural gas. It also leaks like crazy and is very hard to contain safely.

Everyone is planning on EVs with at least a 200 mile range. Tesla is just well ahead of the pack, but the likes of Nissan and BMW aren't standing still. Tesla's supercharger network is expanding quite rapidly now and other manufacturers are planning to build out similar networks of combo plugs and ChaDeMo chargers. Within a few years the price of an EV with at least a 200 mile range will have dropped to far more affordable levels.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/..., while a bit dated is still a good description of the issues involved with hydrogen. While they've developed some new catalysts and brought down the cost of the fuel cells, they'll never be able to keep pace with the cost of batteries.

http://green.autoblog.com/2014...
http://www.fool.com/investing/...
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

Hydrogen will lose big time. There is just no way to make hydrogen cost competitive with gasoline. If you're producing hydrogen from methane you're hydrogen powered car will release more CO2 per mile than a good hybrid. Hydrogen production and filling stations are not cheap and will always be far more costly than a gasoline station, especially with all of the safety requirements. As it is, the local hydrogen filling station in my county used for filling buses already has had one hydrogen fire.

Cracking water to produce hydrogen makes even less sense. Even with the best catylist it is still very inefficient.

Hell, you use 20% of the energy capacity of hydrogen just compressing it. Automotive fuel cells themselves are typically only 60% efficent.

EVs are far simpler. Battery technology is steadily improving while the cost is steadily decreasing with no end in sight for capacity, charging and longevity improvements.

Plus you can charge your EV at home, work or while shopping. Electricty is everywhere and building charging stations is quite inexpensive. Charging stations are also popping up everywhere. Retailers like Walgreens and Target are in the process of installing them at all of their stores. Rapid charging stations, while considerably more expensive to build, are still a fraction the cost of a hydrogen fueling station and require far less maintenance and have far fewer safety issues to worry about. Plus with an EV, if you charge at home you never have to spend time waiting at the gas pump and it is far cheaper, even in my location where we have about the highest prices of electricity in the country (PG&E). Hydrogen will never be able to compete with this. The charging times for EVs will continue to decrease and with grid storage at the charging locations they'll be able to smooth out the load (Tesla is already doing this).

The only thing Hydrogen offers is the same paradime of having to drive to a filling station and filling up quickly but this advantage is shrinking rapidly.

In a few weeks Tesla will be opening their first battery swapping station. Now you can go from empty to full in 90 seconds if you want, far faster than the fastest gas or hydrogen filling station, without ever having to step out of the car, insert a nozzle, etc. Eventually the other car manufacturers will catch up with EVs.

If you're only used in big cities you're better off just going pure electric. The efficiency is much greater, the vehicle cost is lower and it's far more convenient to charge up at night than to have to wait in line at a hydrogen filling station.

According to this site converting from methane to hydrogen is around 70% efficient. You then lose another 20% of your efficiency compressing the hydrogen to 5000PSI. When you calculate the well to wheel efficiency you're better off with a hybrid car rather than a fuel cell car.

Which is already happening. Tesla is in the process of installing grid storage at their superchargers.

I have time of use metering for my power and have a separate meter for charging my Tesla. Most EVs allow you to set what time charging begins and I have mine set at 11:05pm when the rates are the lowest. As for peak demand for rapid charging, Tesla is addressing this by adding grid storage at their charging sites to even out the load.

Tesla is addressing the "duck curve" by installing grid storage at their charging locations in order to even out the power draw. Even with hydrogen storage, producing hydrogen by cracking water is horribly inefficient and will require four power plants for every power plant needed to charge an EV.

http://www.thenewatlantis.com/...

Hydrogen just makes no sense.