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Comment by Beldin | Hacker News Reader

Hmms. 2k km isn't bad, but i don't consider this amazing either: my 12-year old big and heavy car can do 1300 km on a full tank. Sure, that's in ideal conditions, but so is this. And there is plenty of simple improvements that would make my car more efficient (weight & aerodynamics mainly).

2k isn't bad, but it's something that ought to be almost achievable with a modern and optimized ICE car as well nowadays.

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Hydrogen combustion doesn't produce co2, optimize a petrol-fueled ICE all you want and it's still a problem WRT emissions.

I think the assumption is that hydrogen fuel would be produced via "green" electricity sources like wind/solar/nuclear.

There is that subtle issue of how do you get hydrogen.... Takes energy to make it.

You can just break apart water with very small tiny little hammers.

Finding the miniature dwarfs to do this is the tricky part.

gotta feed them though so still energy needed

Takes energy to mine+process the contents for and charge batteries too.

Batteries have 1000+ cycle life time (LFP batteries even more) and charging is very efficient. Not at all comparable.

A full hydrogen tank contain in the area of 5kg of fuel, which is a lot less fuel than the 70-100L of fuel your car presumably has on board.

A normal range for cars these days is 500-900km on a 40-60L tank, as carrying excessive fuel is bad for efficiency. 2000km is a very impressive metric, all things considered.

Fair enough - though my car "only" has a 60L tank, so I'd expect much better for modern cars (driven in optimal conditions).

A Toyota Prius in good conditions gets better than 4 liters/100km mileage - so you only need an 80 liter, or 20 gallon, tank to make it a 2000km vehicle.

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