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RE: Hydrogen is a BAD idea
By Mint on 10/25/2013 2:05:32 PM , Rating: 2
It's not a matter of stigma. It's about practicality.

To store 5kg of hydrogen (enough for ~300 miles), you need 25 scuba tanks (80-cu-ft, 3000 psi, ~30 lbs each). Increasing pressure reduces volume (even then, it's far bulkier than the 4-inch battery slab in the Model S), but not mass (walls need to be thicker). So we'll have to go to carbon fiber, and now we're getting into dangerous structures:
And we still have to include the weight/size of the fuel cell system.

You talk about the abundance of H, but to make H2 the most economical process currently is natural gas reforming. But with an EV, you can drive twice as far by putting that same natural gas into a CCGT plant. Electrolysis is even worse.

Chargers are an order of magnitude cheaper infrastructure issue, too.

There's no doubt in my mind that within a decade, we'll be moving to nuclear power, whether fusion (huge recent advances in inertial confinement and dense plasma focus) or, more likely, molten salt fission (uranium or thorium).

