Electric cars or Hydrogen cars?

Question

I've been thinking lately about the new types of cars that doesnt require gasoline. The two i wanna compare are the Electric car and the Hydrogen car. Which one would you guys pick and why?

Answer 1

*** Electric ***

With solar panels you can use it to recharge your batteries and have 0 fuel costs and 0 emissions of any kind.

Hydrogen has all sorts of issues including the need to use LOTS of energy to separate, compress and store the hydrogen.  Also it is a very tricky substance to handle as it needs to be kept under extreme pressure and it tends to leak easily.

See this for some more concerns about hydrogen vehicles:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIvCOR-yW...

Unfortunately both types of vehicle technology are more expensive and have range issues compared to gasoline/diesel vehicles so more improvements are needed before we will see them become popular.

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Some corrections to earlier answers:

* Some hydrogen production does create CO2.   Some Hyrdrogen fuel cell vehicles like the new Honda FCX plan to have a home fuel creation station that separates hydrogen from natural gas releasing carbon in the process.

See this:

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

* Not all hydrogen vehicles are fuel cell based.  You can burn hydrogen has in an internal combustion engine.

See this:

http://rotarynews.com/node/view/468

Answer 2

I would say go with electric.  In the future hydrogen will be more widely usable.  Few things to clarify:

Producing hydrogen does NOT produce carbon emissions.  Hydrogen is separated from the oxygen in water by an electric current.  The main reason for electric cars is that why use the electricity to create the hydrogen when you could use it to power the car directly?  Also, Hydrogen burns without any ash or soot so it has not affect on the atmosphere.

In the future electricity may be more readily available in large amounts making hydrogen a convenience.

Answer 3

Hydrogen hands down!

The prospect of swift electrocution when the storage system shorts is a big turn off to me.

The US grid can not deliver the electricity increase to keep our elderly cool in the summer how will it handle a demand that would be 3 or more times what it is today?

Nuclear power is NOT required for either option.   We need nukes to maintain our ability to annihilate our enemies along with ourselves.

What do we do with the 800 million internal combustion engines in existence?  convert to electrics $30K each or convert to hydrogen $3K each.

It's the thought of coming out to my drive and seeing one of my loved ones electrically put to death that turns me off of electrics.

Answer 4

both are pretty much the same. they just use different methods to store energy. Hydrogen cars use fuel cells which run on hydrogen and oxygen while other electric cars use more conventional galvanic cells. the main difference is the weight of the fuels, Hydrogen  is very light but there are problems with storage because of its large volume while current battery's are heavy and dint store much power.

in the future hydrogen cars will probably be used because it can still be improved where as current electric cars have parity much reached there optimum efficiency.

Answer 5

If I live in the city and drive short distances, I would choose the electric car, but not until we can build Nuclear Power plants to supply the electricity. Until then, I prefer a small hybrid.

If I drive long distances, I would prefer the Hydrogen Fuel Cel, but not until it has more testing and the price of car and H2 becomes more affordable.

Tom, better calculate the size of solar system needed to charge in any reasonable amount of time. It is enormous.

Answer 6

What about a hydroelectric car.

Answer 7

The hydrogen cars that I have seem ARE electric cars!

The fuel cell combines Hydrogen and Oxygen and uses the electrons to flow through wires and make electricity.

Answer 8

No question I would pick the electric car.  

For hydrogen to work, we have to retrofit all of our current gas stations to hydrogen.  

Producing the hydrogen will also create carbon emissions that increase global warming.  In this sense, hydrogen doesn't seem to emit any less CO2 than gas cars.  You would just transfer the CO2 emissions from the tail pipe in a gas car, to the production plant of a hydrogen production plant.  

For an electric car, there would also be no emissions from the car's tailpipe.  While much of this country's electricity is produced by coal-fired power plants, which emit a significant amount of CO2, the nature of electricity production can be changed to nuclear, solar and wind in the future.  All three of these technologies do not emit CO2.

Answer 9

Between hydrogen and electric battery powered cars I would currently choose electric.

Electric is easy to charge at this current point and you can always buy clean energy or make your own clean energy with small wind turbines or solar panels to charge the car,  with new battery technology the cars have fair travel distances on a single charge.  

With hydrogen there currently is not alot of fueling stations, many fueling stations out there create hydrogen from natural gas leaving little real benifit.  There are a few solar powered hydrogen fueling stations but as I said there are few, Have you seen any around? also fuel cells are currently extremely expensive although the prices would drop eventually.

One option you might also consider is an air powered car that is currently being produced for around 15,000 in europe.  I'm sorry I lost the website address but the cars are fueled up with compressed air and have a range of a hundred miles or so per fillup.  The only downside I saw was the cars are very light weight and I don't know how well they would fair in a crash but it would be something to look into, especially if you still have gas stations that give free tire inflations.

Answer 10

the electric car

Answer 11

With all due respect, Gengi is not completely correct.  While hydrogen and batteries are both storage mediums, there is a big difference: efficiency.  

It takes energy to make hydrogen, either from electrolysis of water, or extracting the hydrogen from natural gas (the carbon leftover is often emitted into the atmosphere).  This process is not 100% efficient, as in it takes more energy to create the hydrogen than you put into the reaction. Then the hydrogen is stored and transferred somehow to a car.  The hydrogen produces electricity in a fuel cell (again at less thatn 100% efficiency), then the electricity powers a motor in the car to make the car run (also less than 100% efficiency).  The efficiencies pile up, and make hydrogen less efficient of a storage mechanism than just using batteries to directly power an electric motor.

Answer 12

You might also want to look at the world's cleanest running car  that uses compressed air.  Not too sure on the price but should be more affordable than the hydrogen car.

Answer 13

For at least the next few decades, electric cars will be the best solution for the following reasons.

1) Fuel source.  Currently the only efficient way we have of getting hydrogen is from natural gas, and the process creates as much CO2 as burning gasoline, so there's no benefit.

Theoretically you can get hydrogen from water if you break the atomic bonds, but this requires an absolute ton of energy.  Far more than you get out by burning the hydrogen as fuel.  If we can figure out a way to weaken the bonds before using electricity (electrolysis) to seperate the hydrogen, this might make the process feasible.

Scientists are also studying a method of getting hydrogen by combining water and an aluminum alloy, but they don't yet know if this will work on large scales for cars.

http://www.physorg.com/news98556080.html

On the other hand, electricity is readily available.  While the US power grid is still 52% coal, electric motors are so efficient that EVs create fewer greenhouse gas emissions than even hybrids using the current power grid mix, and we can always make the power grid greener by building more renewable and nuclear power plants.

2) Infrastructure.  You need a way to transport and store the fuel so that cars can refuel with it.  We have no method of transporting and storing hydrogen.  The aluminum alloy method discussed above could potentially solve this problem, but again it's uncertain if it will work on large scales.  If it does, it may provide a solution in a few decades.

On the other hand, the electric power grid is already in place.  We could install high-voltage rapid recharge stations anywhere that's connected to the grid (gas stations, for example), and electric cars could then recharge in 10 minutes.

If you could have a system whereby electric cars were recharged by 100% renewable energy, it would allow for transportation with zero greenhouse gas emissions.  We wouldn't even need hydrogen cars, because you can't do better than zero emissions.

Of course, you would need a whole lot of renewable energy sources to make this possible.  So the question becomes, how much can we reduce greenhouse gases emissions by using electric vs. hydrogen in the future, and it's impossible to say right now, especially with the uncertainties about hydrogen.  However, it's clear that over the next few decades, electric cars are the far better option.

Answer 14

I agree with the other posters; whether it is electricity supplied from the grid to charge a battery or H2 used in a fuel cell to produce electricity both types of cars are driven ultimately by electric motors.

When you look at advantages and disadvantages of each type you have to look beyond just the fuel source.  Electric cars which are charged from the grid use batteries to store the energy and have the advantage on lower cost per mile but the "gas tank"(batteries) weigh a lot, but a fuel cell powered car produces electricity from "fuel"(hydrogen methane or other fuels), can store more energy on board, travel further without "refuelling" and doesn't take nearly as much time to "fill up".

Electric cars can also be refilled at just about any plug whereas H2 fuel cell cars don't have a distribution infrastructure for fuelling yet.

So each one has its plusses and minuses, it will come down to whichever one hits the market cheaper.  Short term, probably batteries, long term will most likely be fuel cells.