How Nissan and Honda's $60 billion merger talks collapsed.
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There are a lot of other personal uses for vans and pickups and other heavier duty vehicles in rural areas which require more power to haul things beyond farmers. Moving large amounts of wood and cleared brush, having off road capabilities that include lots of torque, and other stuff that has nothing to do with highway driving are common outside of cities.
The exemptions should be handled in a way that discourages owning such a vehicle for personal use in an urban setting without being tied to a business. Hell, that could involve who the vehicles are being advertised/targeted to for in addition to literal vehicle types.
The problem was not changing up when it became apparent that the outcome was discouraging high mileage small cars for commuting. Overthinking the how to discourage laerger trucks misses the point that car companies leaned into large vehicles and advertise to convince the population that they needed larger vehicles. They could have been barred from advertising large vehicles.
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Didn't the Bolt come out 6 years after the Leaf? It should be a lot better in that case as the pace of development has been pretty rapid in EV space relative to normal ICE development
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Sodium ion is a dead end for ev. Heavy and not even remotely close to energy dense enough. It never will be.
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I thought it was something like 75% as energy dense? If you're targeting a commuter with a max needed range of 150 miles, it seems more than sufficient.
It's not going to solve the range anxiety problem, but it's inexpensive, which is perfect for a cheap, around-town second car, which is precisely what the Leaf should be.
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100% agreed. There are multiple ways to solve this problem, yet we looked at none of them.
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Usability wise for energy storage by weight, it's more like 150wh compared to 250. They also don't handle moving around as well, which is bad for vehicles. Then because sodium is a larger ion, they're also always going to take up more space. So heavier and bigger makes them even less power efficient to move a vehicle and means heavier suspension and more tire wear.
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I think those tradeoffs are fine assuming a huge cost difference. I'm under the impression that sodium ion batteries cost something like 1/3 of a lithium ion battery. And since the battery is most of the cost of a car, a commuter could be very cost competitive.
I don't know about cold weather efficiency, but honestly, most of that 150 mile range is to account for winter range drop. A commuter only really needs about 75 miles usable range year round.
People would put up with a lot for an attractive price.
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Hydrogen remains a solution desperately in search of a problem.
If your aim is to generate locally, why not just use batteries? They're cheaper, more efficient, and more reliable. Why have the lossy and very high maintenance electrolysis and hydrogen storage/transfer process involved?
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There have been some recent advances on hydrogen production. I don't think this (sorry for the MSN link) is the one I heard of, but is an interesting example where cheaper catalysts are improving the efficiency of hydrogen production.
Now, I don't know if or when hydrogen will be more cost-effective than batteries, which are also experiencing massive advances. This is why I'm going to take the comment someone on Lemmy made about buying used EVs for the next little while - it's cheaper, they're lasting longer than predicted, and the advances lined up for the next few years are significant.
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How about YAY!?
We need more smaller brands, not less bigger brands. It ALWAYS without exception leads to a destination where consumers get screwed.
I celebrate this failure, let them compete and let more smaller brands pop up, please
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Charging is a huge hassle in a big city where everyone lives in apartments but 75 miles a day would be enough. People living out of big cities where they can charge at home often have to travel over 75 miles a day.
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Battery-powered vehicles require an unreasonable amount of water to control a fire. 1 burning Tesla needs 1 fire truck of water, so imagine what a bigger vehicle would need.
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Yeah, this is assuming you can plug in at home or at work. My commute is 25 miles each way, which is about as far as I'd consider going, and I can charge at home, so it would totally work for me and the people stuck in traffic with me.
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Of course, then you're also stuck needing to have two vehicles, because unlike someone who lives in New York city and may go a decade without leaving, you likely make a trip or have to got to a few places that would ad up to over 150 miles fairly often. Often enough that you'd need a vehicle for it.
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Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go? And for running a warehouse overnight? I find that hard to believe.
But even if true, you need to take range into account. Hydrogen cars get better range than comparable BEVs, and that would surely add up for a truck hauling a massive load.
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We're going to have two vehicles regardless, and that's pretty common for families and couples. The average cars per household is around 2, and above that in many states.
The Leaf wouldn't be targeting single vehicle households, but family units where one is a dedicated commuter and the other is a family car.
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I don't think the size of the vehicle matters, but where it's placed. A sufficiently large battery (e.g. something powering a warehouse) is unlikely to be right next to a bunch of important stuff, so they'll just let it burn out. A Tesla, however, is much more likely to be next to a bunch of other cars, so they need to contain it.
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Are they cheaper? Even over 1M miles or whatever a truck engine is expected to go?
Yes, significantly so. Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries. The compressed gas tanks are also very expensive and have a limited lifespan (albeit a relatively long one, compared to the fuel cells).
And as hydrogen scales up, it'll get cheaper. It's currently a bit more expensive than gas (about 3-4x), but that's with hydrogen transported from some plant somewhere. If it's locally generated from solar, it'll probably be quite a bit cheaper.
Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it's possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.
Locally produced electrolysis hydrogen suffers from very low efficiency rates; about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process. Assuming you don't have an enormous overabundance of power being generated, it's more efficient to store the power locally in batteries (which don't have to be lithium ion if it's for static storage; other chemistries become competitive if they don't need to move around) than it is to store it as hydrogen. And if you're generating a huge overabundance of power such that throwing 2/3rds of it away seems sensible, in most cases the question would be why you don't make a grid connection and feed in anyway (extreme remote locations notwithstanding).
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Hydrogen fuel cells have a much shorter lifespan and higher manufacturing/replacement cost than lithium ion batteries
Hydrogen fuel cells in retail cars are intended to last "the lifetime of the vehicle," or something like 150-200k miles. Lithium batteries last 10-20 years, which is pretty similar (assuming 10-15k miles/year). They seem to be roughly equivalent in terms of longevity, at least from a quick search.
I don't know what fuel cells cost to replace, but hydrogen cars cost about the same as an equivalent EV, maybe a little cheaper (Toyota Mirai is ~$50k and apparently drives like a Lexus), so I have to assume the fuel cells aren't that expensive relative to lithium ion batteries. Also, lithium ion batteries lose range over time, whereas I'd assume fuel cells don't, but instead lose some generation capacity (i.e. lower top end output).
about 2/3rds of the power used to produce the hydrogen is lost in the process
I thought it was generally about 75% efficient. This article claims the current rate is 39.4kWh for 52.5kWh input. Is that incorrect?
So outside of storage losses (should be minimal if it's constantly being cycled in and out), 75% seems really good. Current fuel cells seem to be about 40-60% efficient, and I doubt we'll get significantly higher than that, so is that where you're getting the "2/3" number from? (40% of 75% = 30%).
The benefits of hydrogen over batteries are:
- faster refuel times - 2-3 min and a truck/forklift/etc can be on its way
- relatively small space requirement - more dense than current battery tech
- probably easier maintenance? Working on a fuel cell isn't particularly dangerous, assuming the tank is empty.
These don't really matter for regular cars (can recharge at home over night, etc), but it's quite useful for an org with high mobile energy needs looking to switch to green energy.
Market rate hydrogen is currently about as cheap as it’s possible to get, because it is almost exclusively from fossil fuel sources which are gradually winding down.
Assuming the same process (i.e. extract from fossile fuels), right? Direct electrolysis comes down to the cost of the energy you use to generate it, and if that's essentially "free" (i.e. solar power that would otherwise be wasted), that starts to be really compelling.
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There's no situation I would call Nissan a "smaller brand" of anything.
