http://www.cfah.org/hbns/2014/gap-in-life-expectancy-between-rural-and-urban-residents-is-growing

At the very least, this shows that the adverse health effects of nominal hydrocarbon exhaust/exposure is either negligible, or trivial when compared against other health factors.

Clever welsh reuse of existing components:

> The first clue to what’s afoot here is the fuel cell itself. The unit in the Rasa is an off-the-shelf component with a piffling 8.5kW output that’s best known for powering forklift trucks in Walmart warehouses. Compare that to the 100kW fuel cell in the Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell or the 114kW stack in Toyota’s Mirai.

It seems the hydrogen equivalent of the Citroen 2CV, and indeed 8.5kW is pretty much the power delivered by the engine in the model with a 425cc engine.

I would rather say “not necessarily” environmentally friendly. For example if powered with lead-acid batteries. Or if the charge to the batteries is from hydrocarbon fuels, they are not going to be more environmental than ICEs, and probably less as you say as the whole-chain is less efficient.

Because what makes the difference as to “poisonous” is the fuel, not the energy. Hydrocarbon fuel is pretty much always poisonous, even unburned, but some batteries are not poisonous, and some sources of electric energy to store in batteries are not poisonous either.
And even the extreme bad case for electric, electricity generated from poisonous coal stored in poisonous batteries can be less bad than shipping around poisonous petrol and burning it into poisonous emissions in individual vehicles. Because in way of principle it is easier to centralize and minimize the poison emitted by the coal generator and the recycling of poisonous batteries…

[We already made and developed benzine and diesel powered fuel cells, it was perfected and then dropped around 2015, they were NOT cheap, but they did work and they were reliable,]

Ah yes, but the big deal there is that they rely on the same hydrocarbon fuels as ICEs, and if one thinks that the demise of ICEs will be because their fuel becomes too expensive, having the same fuel for cells is a problem 🙂 Also, the hydrocarbons are still poisonous even if they are not burned.

But who knows, maybe gas or ethanol fueled cells could be a thing. Some promising design seem to be coming up.

Did not intend to say that, rather that ICEs are usually powered by fossil hydrocarbon fuels that are poisonous (also all those petrol station grounds now fatally contaminated), but fuel cells are powered by a fuel that is not poisonous *directly* (not a carcinogen).
Plus, and quite independently, that thermal energy from air-fuel explosions with alternating-cycle engines poses quite a few engineering problems (even if they have been solved…) that electric energy don’t have, as to turning that into motion.

More explicitly: fuel -> energy -> motion and then:

Battery electric: fuel or whatever -> electric energy -> battery -> electric energy -> motion.
Cell electric: fuel or whatever -> hydrogen -> electric energy -> motion.
ICE: hydrocarbon fuel -> thermal energy -> motion.

Hydrogen poses some technical supply problems, as I said and you have expanded on it, including containment like you say, even in liquid form, so current research is targeted at storing it in some kind of compound form from which it is is easily liberated. And including the cost of making it, even using fossil fuels, but that can happen far more cleanly in factories than in individual cars, and it can happen with off-peak energy too, and with solar or hydroelectric energy (especially off peak).

For now fuel cells are not competitive with good batteries, but they seem to me to be a much better long term bet than the laptop-style li-ion batteries that Tesla uses, and probably Toyota think the same.

As you say the really big problem with electric is indeed “fuel”, that is storage of energy, but turning electric energy into motion is cheap and easy; viceversa for hydrocarbon fuels and ICEs the energy storage problem is almost trivial, but turning thermal energy into motion is a lot more work.

For now hydrocarbon fueled ICEs have overall the advantage over both battery and hydrogen engines, but that’s because despite all the other disadvantages the hydrocarbon fuels are so cheap. When that cost advantage shrinks, thermal energy engines will be replaced by electric ones, and I think ideally it should be hydrogen-fuel ones rather than battery-chemistry-fuel ones, and certainly not li-ion laptop battery powered ones.

At least I think we agree on the latter: that the current Teslas are a dead end.