HARPOONS THRUST IN THE SKY

Wow, so Boomer, much fun.

If life ain’t just a joke

… he said: "Son, when you grow up …

Germany?

It still won’t work.

We already need lots of hydrogen for various industrial use cases. We currently get it from methane. First thing we should do with green hydrogen is make it replace the fossil based hydrogen.

Once that’s done, we might have the abilities to expand the facilities to create more hydrogen. Those are expensive, so they won’t just run if the electricity is almost free. You don’t buy such a machine and have it idle most of the time - up hydrogen won’t ever be free, for the cost of the electrolysers alone. The tech overhead needs to be paid for. Same goes for transport.

You know what can be done with surplus electricity more easily and with the existing infrastructure? It can be put in batteries.

But as I write, it’s all probably moot, because the conditions will arrive too late, so batteries will probably have taken over everything.

It won’t be because hydrogen’s late but because batteries are - in cars - the less complex, more reliable and cheaper solution.

But maybe in planes because of the better weight energy ratio, and maybe also in trucks to be able to have higher load capacity. And as I write instead of fuel cells, the hydrogen can be used directly in jet engines, but also in an only slightly modified ICE car.

It makes sense for planes, I never argued against that. Especially because the weight is reduced while you use the fuel you’re carrying. I don’t see it for trucks simply because the infrastructure for battery electric trucks is already everywhere, but yeah, charging several hundred kWh takes time and such large batteries have a price tag attached to them - but that’s not what we were talking about, no?

Disregarding the problems you describe there are actually hydrogen fuel cell cars on the roads, that have been sold commercially and been available since 2021.
For instance the Toyota Mirai:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Mirai

So kind of weird to claim a product that is actually available now, isn’t possibly feasible in a future where it can have basically free fuel!
It probably boils down to which form is cheapest to create AND store, hydrogen in containers or electricity in batteries. Batteries will always be more expensive than a container, but hydrogen has way greater loss. So it’s not an obvious calculation with one solution that fits all cases.

I’m well aware of hydrogen cars existing. Hydrogen based cars have been around for so long that most of them got discontinued quite some time ago, such as the Mercedes GLC F-Cell. It’s not that I say that you can’t build them, I just say that there’s no economically viable use case for them. There won’t be free fuel for them because hydrogen will remain rare as manufacturing and transporting it will remain difficult. Fuel cells and tanks that withstand 400 to 800 bar pressure aren’t free either - and neither is the whole infrastructure to distribute it, which goes way beyond the transport as a fuel cell gas station is a much larger hassle to set up than hooking up a charging station to an existing energy grid. The point remains that even if electricity gets to be free at times, it’s much more efficient to just store it in batteries than to translate it to hydrogen, ship that around the country or to another continent, store that in a cryo tank for days or weeks and then translate it back to electricity to then be stored in the battery your fuel cell based car still needs to operate (albeit smaller than those in BEVs, granted). It just doesn’t make sense to assume that hydrogen, with the given overhead attached, will ever be free. Even electricity often isn’t when it seems to be (e.g. I might see a price of -2 cents at night but the bill then includes a 12 cents “network fee” per kWh), so it surely won’t be the case for hydrogen either. And then, with all the overhead attached, you still need several times the energy to move the car the same distance as a battery electric car which makes it even less of an economical use case, assuming there’s always a price attached to the energy you need (which there is - even for my own photovoltaic setup, I usually calculate about 6 cents per kWh to account for the depreciation of the modules).

So yes, it’s an obvious calculation. Batteries aren’t free, I get that, but neither are fuel cells, containers and smaller batteries. Just as with ICEs, the running costs will be the defining aspect of the TCO of a car and there’s just no way for hydrogen to ever meet the price of putting electricity in a battery because a fuel cell car does that, too, plus all the conversions. Its operation is literally a superset of a BEV, so the running costs will be higher, unless you use fossil hydrogen, which i hope nobody ever seriously suggests as a large scale solution to de-carbonify traffic.

Love it. But:

But you see, they’re on me, they are not my family my employee

However the Hydrogen car may actually still be the future, that future is just not yet

Hard disagree here.

Conversion always costs energy. There is no way around it. We’re talking about physical properties, not something that can be optimised away. With batteries, electricity is stored and released, but transfer through the existing infrastructure has been optimised to death and there are no conversions during the transport.

For fuel cells, you not only have exactly the same tech in the car (including a battery, as the fuel cell usually cannot deliver the peak power required to quickly accelerate) with the overhead of the conversion from electricity to hydrogen and back again, you also have an energy carrier that’s hard to store and transport, leading to even greater losses concerning the energy efficiency. To move exactly the same distance, a fuel cell car either needs a lot more electricity or it needs hydrogen from other sources such as methane, which suddenly turns the whole climate neutrality of those engines upside down. There’s fundamentally no way around this. So no, I really don’t think there’s an economically viable way to run fuel cell based cars.

The infrastructure may be a thing, depending on where you live. I’m in Central Europe and can’t confirm that over here.

The cold climate is something I can’t confirm. If anything, I prefer my BEVs over the ICEs when it’s cold, just because I don’t have to wait for the engine to get warm until the heating works. Range is reduced during winter, true, but tbh I don’t usually have to charge over the course of a day even during winter. Still, I guess the best argument against your point is Norway. That country’s cold, but BEVs have clearly taken over the market there.

Toyota has clearly made a massive bet against BEVs and on hybrids and FCEVs.

You sure this is the correct template?

8 players is tough… We play quite some couch cooperative games, so here’s some recommendations. None of them except a single party game for 8 at once though, I’m afraid.

• overcooked was already recommended. I second that. It’s great. But man, it’s intense, too… You can only play this with people who can laugh at themselves. I’ve heard purple say that this game might jeopardise friendships and I get it.
• lovers in a dangerous spacetime is a game I’m madly in love with. It’s a coop roguelike which mixes space and lasers (which worked well for some of our kids) with pink rainbow unicorn aesthetics (which worked well for the other kids) and is just all around great fun to play.
• boomerang fu was already recommended. I like the design and the the music has some real bangers, but it’s a competitive game which might lead to some conflict, depending on your group dynamics.
• unrailed cost us quite some hours as well. We really liked it, but imho it gets quite tough quite fast - we rarely got to the third of iirc ten biomes. Maybe it’s because we always play it with our kids. Maybe we just suck at it. Despite this issue, we sunk quite some hours into it because it just still works well.
• Trine is three players coop only… It’s a platformer. I didn’t like the design so much, but my kids love it, so I guess that’s still a good verdict.
• pixel cup soccer is our go-to soccer game. It’s obviously a simple arcade game, but it’s fun.
• Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed is our Not-Mario-Kart Kartracer and it works well. Not a fan of the tanks in there for a kid’s game though.
• the Jack’s party box games or whatever they’re called are a kind of mixed bag, but drawful is great fun. It’s also the only game on this list for 8 players. You draw stuff on a phone or a tablet and there’s a well-working mechanic to make people guess what was drawn.
• while I haven’t played it yet (waiting for a deal), Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is supposedly a great take on classic streets of rage style beat em ups.
• Rayman: Origins is a beautifully made and well designed platformer that can be played cooperatively with up to four people. True classic imho.
• for a quick party session, our kids love ultimate chicken horse where you build a level and then race through it. Tbh, for me it didn’t really provide too much replayability, but hey, if the kids like it, who am I to judge?

So slower by 0.7 sec? Unless only you are allowed to cherry pick from the data.

The Subaru is specifically the rare higher performance engine, so comparing them to the higher performance versions of comparable EVs would be the only fair thing to do.

the driving dynamics of EVs and ICEs is basically the same when actually in use.

Absolutely not, but hey, whatever you want to believe that makes you happy.

It’s worth it; it feels like driving an EV with how quickly it picks up speed

Doubt.

Just checked it and if I got the right model, 0-100 is between 7.2 and 8 seconds, depending on the model year. Mid range EV SUVs such as the Enyaq are between 5.5 and 8.7 seconds, so way below the outback if you don’t pick the low end version. Performance-centric EVs are below 4 seconds. And they all have a more or less constant torque which just isn’t possible for ICEs.

If you like your car that’s fine. But combustion engines aren’t even close to how EVs drive.

Dude, read the spoiler in the post you replied to.

Glad to know I wasn’t alone.

I’m sure it’ll be bearable once she dipped it in the coffee.

She’s just still so mad that her drinks are all shaken up.

The radiation chosen specially to kill Kuzco

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