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‘Elon Musk turned up,’ said Goldstone, who nevertheless describes himself as ‘a huge fan’ of the electric car magnate and professional controversialist’s products. Musk has called fuel cells ‘fool cells,’ claiming cars making their own electricity with chemical processes are less efficient. Fans counter that batteries are heavy, and there are environmental penalties associated with mining the metals that go into them, the energy used in their production and re-cycling their toxic innards.
Then there’s the issue of where the electricity and hydrogen are made. There are C02-free methods but, proving that there’s no such thing as a free ride, coal and gas power stations are sometimes used to generate electricity (meaning plenty of Chinese electric cars are effectively running on anthracite), and hydrogen can be a by-product of refining fossil fuels. In these circumstances, both shift rather than get rid of the pollution. So-called green hydrogen is the more eco friendly alternative where solar and wind power are exclusively used to electrolyse water and create hydrogen.
Still, before Musk made battery electric cars fashionable, many vehicle makers thought that hydrogen was the way to go. Some people still do. Jo Bamford, heir to the JCB digger maker, is one.
‘If I could give you a car that cost the same as the one you’re driving today and could be filled up in the same way, wouldn’t you buy it?’ he said.
He thinks China will monopolise electric battery production, claiming its factories can do this more cheaply than British ones could, and that it controls massive stocks of elements like lithium and cobalt that go into them.
‘Batteries are here to stay, but hydrogen is going to make up 20 per cent of the world’s energy mix. We’ve missed the boat on battery production. Let’s not miss the boat on hydrogen,’ he said.
Bamford is boss of Wrightbus, best known as maker of London’s humpbacked ‘Borismaster’ buses. His company is starting to build hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles. He also chairs Ryze Hydrogen, which makes and distributes the stuff. He’s hardly unbiased, but is genuinely evangelistic about the technology, although conceding that making fuel cell cars truly affordable and convenient would mean a massive change in industrial strategy.
‘I wouldn’t start with cars,’ he said, claiming that trucks and buses, which cover longer distances, and lose money when not working, would benefit from the greater range, squirt-and-go re-fulling and not having to lug batteries around. If he’s right, in a decade we could see HGVs and buses dribbling warm water into the gutter instead of chuffing out CO2 and particulates.
If there was a network of lorry hydrogen fuelling points, the potential to expand these for cars is obvious.
Tesla-owning motoring pundit Quentin Willson is not a fan of hydrogen in cars however. ‘It’s nuts,’ he said. ‘Take 100 watts of electricity produced by a wind turbine. It has to be turned in to hydrogen, compressed, chilled and moved by tanker before it can power the car. In the end, you only get about 30 per cent of that 100 watts. Electric cars are around 85 per cent efficient.’
Robert Steinberger-Wickens is the University of Birmingham’s professor in fuel cells and hydrogen research. He suggests some electric car efficiency claims are over egged (‘between 60 and 90 per cent’). For sub 150-mile journeys he thinks battery electrics have the edge efficiency-wise over fuel cell cars. But in a hydrogen car you can at least drive from London to Manchester without stopping ‘for hours to charge.’
The professor sees a grim future of electric car batteries going ‘phut’ thanks to repeated fast charges (‘it’s simple physics’), forests of charging posts and an electricity grid wilting as it served legions of cars plugged into them.
He also suggests that commercial charging points are vastly more expensive per re-charge than their domestic equivalents, and here at least might share some common ground with Quentin Willson, who has started a lobby group called FairCharge, which is calling for charging point pricing transparency. The consensus ends there however.
‘It’s an urban myth that car and phone batteries are the same,’ said Willson. ‘You can find Teslas that have done 300-400,000 miles, and if you look on our roads, people are fitting these cars into their lives without problems.’ He claims that advances in battery technology mean that they will rely less on mined precious metals, talks about lithium extracted from clay, Tesla’s cobalt-free battery, silicone anodes (whatever they are) and a fast-growing battery re-cycling industry. He thinks predictions that the National Grid will be sucked dry by electric cars are bunk.
‘This is epoch making. We just don’t have to burn things anymore,’ said Willson who, like Jo Bamford, is unafraid of bold claims.
Professor Steinberger-Wickens, who is exasperated by what he sees as ‘a total lack of strategy on energy,’ thinks car makers themselves should stump up the cost of a hydrogen car filling station network, and wonders why none of them has built a plug-in model, that combined battery and fuel cell technologies.
Quentin Willson would doubtless rubbish these aspirations. Last year just over 190,000 battery cars were sold in Britain, so does this mean he’s won the argument?
It would seem so, but business owner Jonny Goldstone is not so sure. ‘There isn’t a “best solution” that will trump everything else. Electric cars have made huge strides and there will be a lot more development, but I can see them and fuel cell cars running alongside each other. It’s still too early to put all our eggs in one basket.’
Because you read about cars
Also by Martin Gurdon
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