What kind of range would we be looking at if the vehicle was equipped with just advanced lithium ions and the whole package cost $862,000? 1000+ miles?

I still can't understand why the major vehicle manufacturers decided with certainty that battery electric vehicles were too expensive, killed all production and R&D then wholeheartedly signed on to a technology that requires billions of dollars of research and development to make practical and still costs 10x what a current technology "too expensive" EV costs... plus will require billions more public/private funds to research, develop and build the new supporting infrastructure, then maintain it.

You'd think it would be much cheaper, easier and quicker to bring an $86,200 vehicle that doesn't require radical new infrastructure into an affordable price range than one that rings in at $862,000.

You just have to wonder...

Wouldn't it be nice if they diverted just 1/10th of the Hydrogen research budget into PHEVs and EVs

Erik:
Appearance of incredibly powerful and robust Ni-Mh batteries (about 10 years ago) made Hybrids technologically feasible. Some drawbacks of Ni-Mh batteries – high self-discharge, high internal resistance, etc. – make them unsuitable even for PHEV, not to mention pure electric vehicles (except for purely niche applications, of course). Li batteries promise that PHEV will be feasible in near future, when Li batteries technology will mature. Billions of dollars and thousands of engineers and scientists are working on it right now. Before battery technology mature, development of mass-produced PHEV is waste of money, and mass produced pure EV is not even on horizon. GM ignored this, with well known result. Why so many companies are wasting huge amounts of money on fuel cells, when key problems of FC still are unsolved, remains mystery for me.

Yeah, why fuel cell? Why not power cell?

Anyway, fuel cell vehicles still running on electrical motor, we can always replace the missing puzzle: the battery.

400kg for their system? 400kg of batteries would be just less than what the Tesla roadster has available...in 15 years time it seems they may be able to get that down to 200kg to match what the fuel cell is expected to be at.

...and Tesla is currently using a more "run-of the mill" lithium battery if I remember correctly.

yeah, tesla is using commodity batteries.

a BEV crossover would require much more battery capacity than the sports car version, so you'd have a much higher price.

tesla may not be able to move out of the electric sports car niche until battery prices fall significantly unless they can convince people that a shorter range is acceptable or build a hybrid of some sort.

porsche occupies a small niche and is happy there. maybe tesla should do the same.

The old tried and tested rule-of-thumb for car company “aren't-we-clever” spin;

2 year goal = it might happen
5 year goal = very unlikely
10 year goal = pure fantasy.

BEV's still need a quick fill solution though, to compete with PHEV's for those longer trips. Even with all the inefficiencies of FCV's it may be a better plug-in hybrid solution than today's ICE version... I don't think that this is what the car companies have in mind though!

Have a look at the lotus APV as shown in the Lotus engineering newsletter (if not other places) and you have your Tesla White Star (re dressed somewhat, of course).

As for its BEV range, it's about weight and roadload (rolling resistance and aerodynamic efficiency). Plus I bet that in three to 4 years time those liths will have 30% more energy and cost 40% less.

Mike

BEV's are a much better solution, and although EESTOR has an impressive capacitor (maybe) the problem is the linear voltage drop off in a capacitor. The A123 battery is a far better solution with a slightly lower capacity than traditional Li-ion but greater charge/discharge rates. A five minute charge is possible with each cell, so a 20-30 minute charge would be perfectly feasible (given the heat dissipation and amount of current that has to get moved through the buss bars in the vehicle). Having worked with the A123 at VDS, I believe them to be an excellent solution, along with other recent nanoscale electrode batteries. The only downfall to them is that they are cylindrical cells which are not as nice from a packaging standpoint.

Have a look at PML's mini, with a 250cc ICE. This is the way to go.

Li ion cells already have enough power density and enough energy density for good PHEVs. Lifetime needs to treble and costs need to halve. This is much more likely than than a miracle discovery of H2 in the ground, coupled with a 100 fold reduction in the price of fuel cells.

Alexander Terrell:

I agree with you that Fuel Cells have a much longer road to go than affordable, quick charge, electrical energy storage devices.

Even if Fuel Cells could be developped as quickly and be cost competitive with on-board electrical energy devices, the hydrogen production and distribution network required would cost $ billions more than upgrading the current electrical power grid/network.

Secondly, why not use clean sun and wind power to recharge our PHEVs and BEVs and by-pass most of the GHG created with the production and transportation of hydrogen.

A mixture of upgradable (with time as batteries become better and they will) PHEVs and BEVs makes more sense. The wide support for Fuel Cell for every day vehicles is misleading and mystifying.

A quick calculation of the rest energy EESTOR's capacitor: suppose the voltage of the capacitor drops from 3500 volt to 200 volt during a ride (assume the electric motor cannot run on voltage below 200 volt). Then the capacitor has delivered 99,68% of its energy, and there is only about 0,32% energy left in the capacitor.
Conclusion: it is not a problem that the capacitor voltage drops steadily, considering the left-over energy. It will be more problematic to convert this continuously dropping supercapacitor voltage into a constant low DC motor voltage.

H2 is a boondoggle for transportation. What fuel would be good for tomorrow's affordable FC car?