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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I always imagined that portable future wizard (??nuclear??) power would be as simple as unscrewing a 5 gallon cannister from the back of a vehicle and exchanging it at the power/charging station for money. Like the small 20 lb LPG cooking gas tanks. I still think that electric cars are a phase of tech that cannot be sustainable in terms of money and environmental cost and waste for too long and that it is just transitional in our quest. Hydrogen power was always supposed to be the future in my mind.
Well, you'd need to standardise battery formats and legally mandate that they have to be easily switchable. I imagine that would get pushback from the car lobby - they do so love to make proprietary branded parts if you let them. If they can't force you to only use original parts for repairs because some part is generic by law, they'll lose out on precious markups.
That said, the car lobby can go take a hike for all I care.
The other issue is that it would have to be easily reachable, even if your trunk is loaded up. The underside is difficult to get at with any kind of setup you'd let amateurs touch. Maybe something on the side could work like you've already got for gas, depending on the weight of the battery. I'm sure it's a solvable problem, if there is some will to see it done.
I'm all for the idea, mind you. This isn't me arguing against it, but rather trying to consider what's stopping us (and the answer is probably "rich people that don't like sharing" as usual).
Hydrogen power is the past not the future it's just a past that never came to be so we sort of feel like it's something futuristic.
It's a great idea in theory but there's so many problems with the idea not least of which is where do you get the hydrogen from? The amount of power that you would need to compress hydrogen into liquid on an industrial scale would practically necessitate dysonsphere.
I think Toyota and Honda... maybe somebody else was developing a Hydrogen cell car. I remember seeing James May on Top Gear talking about it and driving it. It was in California. It seemed really promising and very exciting at the time that's why the memory imprinted on me a bit.
Toyota at least was getting their hydrogen from natural gas which rather defeats the whole point really.
In order for hydrogen power to be sustainable it has to come from electrolyzing water. But the power requirements are prohibitive since the process is unimaginably inefficient. Something insane like 80% of the power goes to waste when converting water into hydrogen and then you've got to find a way of compressing that hydrogen and transporting that hydrogen.
I'm not saying it's impossible but in a world where you can recharge an electric car in 5 minutes what's the point in even going to the effort of solving those problems.
Hydrogen has extreme structural problems. Hydrogen tanks need constant maintenance, due to how small the molecule is - it's very difficult to contain and prevent corrosion. You then have significant conversion loss between the powerplant-native format of electricity, and the hydrogen. So nothing can be as cheap as pure electricity. Fuelling the car with ammonia that then gets converted to Hydrogen inside the car is the solution to the first problem, but further increases the loss on the second.
What you're describing sounds like a small, high-capacity battery to me! Like a super AA battery. Maybe in 50 years :)
Hydrogen has the same problems tho. Well, except metal/bor hydride, but they have low enery density.