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-12 points

Answer: hydrogen

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37 points

Actual answer: Public transportation and bicycles

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18 points

Actual actual answer: WFH

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6 points

A job is not the only place any given person would have the need to transport themselves to.

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5 points

Seriously, unless you’re working a labor job in manufacturing there’s little reason to do 90% of all white collar jobs in person. It’s all staring at a damn computer screen anyway so who cares where you do it from?

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5 points

Seriously… Everyone is missing all the side b.s that comes with cars especially new cars…

My car was “cheap” for a new car and it still came with a lane change radar thing… Guess who has a $1200 windshield replacement now because some schmuck kicked up a rock with their car? $300 was expensive for a windshield but now I need a freaking sensor alignment too?

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1 point
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2 points

Yeah

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2 points

Knew it would be a matter of time before the fuck_cars crowd popped in. Not everywhere is a city, and I work potentially all over the state. I also have equipment and gear I have to bring to the job. I actually need a vehicle.

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5 points

Good for you, man. How would you like for most of the people, who don’t actually have exceptional use-cases, to not be on the road, in your way, in the form of traffic?

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-3 points

…are far too slow to be a practical substitute for a car.

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8 points

In the US? Yep! We really need working public transit that isn’t seen as a poor person’s “punishment”.

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3 points

This is highly dependent on what kind of built environment you happen to live in. In sanely built places, it’s very much not true.

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15 points

Hydrogen is only 30% efficient compared to 90-95% for batteries. Most hydrogen is currently made from fossil fuels, and contains less energy than the fossil fuels used to make it.

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1 point

I’d love to see the technology develop more but it’s definitely not viable today. It’s like when EVs started out.

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1 point
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Yes, but the difference is that it doesn’t move at all, which major companies are really pushing that technology, there was a hype, but now it just sits

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1 point
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but an electric car is heavier than a hydrogen car, so the electric platform is less efficient. imagine carrying an extra ton of a batterypack wherever u go. hydrogen could be made from renewable energy, and doesn’t require batteries to be stored. battery metals are finite. u can’t scale that up. 5kg of H2 translates to 400km mileage.

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12 points
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Most large combustion SUVs are heavier than most electric cars.

Sodium ion batteries are being produced with no rare metals in them, and will be in production cars within a year. Hydrogen is difficult to store due to is low volumetric density, it’s molecular size, and corrosive nature.

Hydrogen (fuel cell) cars all have a battery because a hydrogen fuel cell is slow to change it’s energy output, so can’t change its output fast enough to directly power the car.

Battery electric cars are about 90% efficient from charging from the grid to moving. Hydrogen cars are about 30% efficient from grid to moving when made from renewable energy. These efficiency numbers include the weight and rolling resistance of the car. The theoretical maximum efficiency of hydrogen storage allowed by the limits of physics is about 50%.

The volumetric density of hydrogen is so low that you would need 20 tanker trucks to transport the same amount of energy that 1 tanker truck of gasoline can carry. This is at maximum pressure or liquified.

Hydrogen only makes sense when the weight of the energy storage medium is critical. As demonstrated by American cars, it isn’t.

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12 points
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Twice as expensive to fill as a gas car and more expensive than a battery EV to buy, all while still producing tons of CO2 by steam reforming methane to make the hydrogen? Wow, sign me up!

Hydrogen is the answer, but the question is “How can fossil fuel companies keep making money while pretending to be green?”

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4 points

The technology is extremely underdeveloped. That’s why it’s so expensive and impractical right now. Batteries aren’t ecological saints either.

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4 points

Hydrogen is a pain to store and work with. Even on rocket engine that is worth millions it’s almost impossible to avoid leaks.

On the other hand gas can be carried in a plastic bottle and electricity is already available everywhere.

I don’t see any future where hydrogen car become mainstream.

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4 points
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Hydrogen trades volumetric energy density for gravimetric energy density. It is too difficult to build a car that can safely hold a reasonable amount of hydrogen without making it bigger or sacrificing cargo space, and building a distribution network on the same scale as gasoline is a problem we still have no idea how to solve.

I think hydrogen will be much more viable in shipping, where these problems are much less pronounced. Big trucks and container ships are less concerned with volume (weight is more important). And they move along common and predictable routes meaning you don’t need quite so many hydrogen gas stations. You distribution just needs to cover truck stops and ports.

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1 point
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The same infrastructure argument could go for electric though. It’s difficult to build infrastructure for these vehicles yes I agree but why would electric be any easier?

Also don’t quote me on this but i think there are ways to collect hydrogen at a home, which would reduce the need for these stations, at least in the city

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4 points
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It’s easier to build charging stations when we already have a massive grid for distributing electricity. We have no such infrastructure in place for distributing hydrogen. Producing hydrogen cleanly and efficiently is still a hard problem we haven’t really solved.

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1 point

DC fast chargers cost something like $70k each. Hydrogen filling stations cost around a million each.

Also, with battery EVs home charging does most of the heavy lifting, you only use fast chargers for long trips. So just a handful of fast chargers on the main roads between cities makes battery EVs viable for a lot of people.

It’s not enough to collect hydrogen, a filling station also needs to compress it to 10,000 PSI to actually get it into a vehicle’s tank. So there’s no home filling for fuel cell EVs, you need a similar footprint to gas stations. Nobody’s interested in spending hundreds of billions of dollars building all those filling stations.

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1 point

Also cars like the Toyota Mirai have a range of 400 miles, which is not bad at all considering that the median range for a car in the US is 403 miles.

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