Well, here on this lazy Sunday morning, $4 gas has officially arrived in Arkansas. The $3.99_9 signs look surreal in what has always been a top-5 state for cheap gas. Seems like most stations are trying to hold the line without that dread "4" going up, but a few have crossed to the dark side since Friday. This while EV's hum all around China with footprints less green than a '62 DeSoto, because of the hideous coal-fired plants that fuel them. The Chinese and Indians build one of those a
week between them. That's been going on for decades, and I can only scratch my head at how stupid it all is, how ridiculous most people's ideas are about what "green" means. I'm proud of Arkansas, at least we were smart enough to keep our nuke plant online. Drive a Leaf here and you really are fairly green, not just driving around with what amounts to lipstick on an electric pig. Natural State indeed.
I'm rambling. Seems like a good time to talk about where the future really needs to go, and
will go despite all the lipstick and dumb ideas. The marketplace will always recognize a superior concept, no different from ditching that horse-and-buggy for a Model T. The marketplace will also identify and reject lipstick. Would anyone care to guess why EV's need subsidies?
EV's actually are the future, just not the plug-in kind. The only place I see plug-ins surviving is muscle cars, where range isn't an issue and the controllable traction of high-horsepower electric motors is an advantage no other power source can match. Watch an e-Prix race and you're looking at the future of speed. It definitely isn't the foot-palpable thunder of a NASCAR straightaway, but I personally find the scream of all those tortured electrons just as appealing in its own fashion. Maybe Elon can come up with some cool sound effects for all of us.
For everyone else, the notion of waiting even 45 minutes to "gas up" seems a little goofy to most, and the infrastructure cost of covering the world with CHADEMO stations will make the Green New Deal look like Little Orphan Annie next to Daddy Warbucks. Not to mention the undesirability of having only one, centralized source of fuel and transport. If you hate the power company now, you'll really hate them if you ever empower them to turn off your transportation by throwing a switch. Gasoline is fungible, and the fungibility of any future fuel is something we should frankly insist on. Whenever I ask myself what makes America better and freer than the rest of the world, I always arrive at the same answer: Six-guns. We don't actually carry those anymore, but we're still a six-gun culture, and we all still own a six-gun. It's in our driveway. It's the ability to pack up and go where we please without interference, and do it
cheaply. Whatever compromises that also compromises the American character. I dunno about you, but I happen to like my character, and I have zero desire to become German, or even Canadian.
So with all that in mind, what does our "future car" really need? I see it this way:
1) An actual green footprint, not a phony one
2) Fungible and plentiful fuel
3) Fuel that can be replaced during a bathroom break
4) Fuel that can be easily and inexpensively adapted to existing gas stations
5) Producibility that displaces as few existing industries as possible, and uses as much existing tooling as possible
6) Market acceptance that doesn't require intervention or subsidies
7) Repairability at reasonable costs
Number 7 is actually the thorniest, because the only way it can happen is by way of number 6. The new technology will basically need to take over the world and no longer be a "specialty" item for the rich-and-guilty, like EV's are today. There's a reason the lug nuts for an Altima cost $5 and the lug nuts for a GTR cost $500, and it isn't really the materials. The economies between building 1M of something and 1K of something are much bigger than most people realize. However, if we look at all the aspects of a hydrogen hybrid, the
only one that isn't yet ready for prime-time is the fuel source. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai have already trial-ballooned fuel cells, and from an energy-conversion standpoint, their output is sufficient to push a car even if the battery is flat. Most people will settle for reduced performance if it means they can be on their way. So except for the Hindenburg problem, the whole electric drivetrain is already engineered and usable. Even the widely-touted IDTechEx report that trashes hydrogen hybrids proceeds on the mistaken assumption that we're stuck with the Hindenburg. We aren't, as you can see from the link I posted earlier. Catalytic fuel cells or onboard methane crackers are the bridge between the hydrogen economy we all want and the impracticality of handling hydrogen. It's coming, and here's why the market will like it. Let's take it by the numbers.
1) Water out the tailpipe, and a disposable "soot trap" you can compost in your garden. Nothing else. The operating footprint of a methane FCHV will be
actually green, not lipstick.
2) Enough methane under South Dakota alone to keep the world happy for about 500 years.
3) We know how to handle flammable-gas transfer quickly and safely. You probably already have methane in your house. We may end up back in the 1950's with gas station attendants, but you can still take a leak and be on your way.
4) The gas utilities already have a vast network of house-gas pipes underneath the entire country. Running them into every gas station isn't going to be expensive or require rocket-science. Methane tanks for boondocks stations will be no different from the propane tanks that already adorn most boonies houses.
5) The oil companies already own a great deal of the natural gas infrastructure and won't have any problem simply vending a different product. The car companies are already tooling for selling and servicing electric drivetrains, so the only thing new will be the fuel-cells and support hardware. So there won't be a lot of industry resistance, an important factor in making numbers 6 and 7 happen. Everybody's happy except the EPA. Probably 20% of their 14K employees could be out of jobs, but maybe they can be re-trained to build fuel cells.
Happy motoring indeed!