Hydrogen vs Electric Cars: The Shocking Truth
this idea of being given this message. We’ve all got to switch. We haven’t. We can’t. We shan. There’s no need to. Engineering will come up with other solutions. They’re already there. Did you hear that? Other solutions to battery electric vehicles are already there. Where? Hydrogen cars. Surely a man of Hammond’s stature isn’t going to go there, is he? Look, I’ve driven an EV for 6 years alongside the other 1.7 million battery electric vehicle drivers in the UK. Not plugins, pure battery electric vehicles. I’m giving you fair warning. What you are about to hear is the most infuriatingly dumb, factually incorrect nonsense that you will hear all day. Unless, of course, you still listen to the BBC. Over to Times Radio for this one. For the first time, it’s now cheaper to run an electric car than a petrol one, thanks to a price war between charging networks. Hang on, I can’t let that go. For the first time, it’s become cheaper to run an EV than a petrol one. Any EV drivers out there want to share their savings over the past 10 years, for example? Who came up with that? BEV owned by Octopus Energy has slashed its rates to 39 p per kilowatt hour, undercutting rivals like Ionity and Tesla. Competition is revving up ahead of the 2030 electric switch. Richard Hammond knows a thing or two about cars and he joins us now. Good morning. Morning. Do you think this is going to be enough to make people finally switch to electric vehicles for good? I love this idea of switch as though everybody could or would. It’s not that binary a polarizing issue which is the way it’s constantly sold to us. It’s not and it can be actually. Um let’s just I mean to get one thing straight that the transport infrastructure has to decarbonize. Totally see that. Nobody’s denying it. The internal combustion engine never damaged anything. It was the fuel um and digging up oil and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. Yep. We’re going to have to find ways of stopping it. Not just in the world of transport by the way, but also fast fashion, chemicals used in everything else we do, our homes, etc., etc., etc. Cars are just one part of that. Electric cars, battery electric cars are one of the solutions potentially to that, one of them, and very, very effective in some applications. I drove the new Renault 5 recently and loved it. I thought it was a superb little car. And it also captured that emotive element of a car, the connective bit, the bit where we grow to love a machine simply because it enables us to live our lives by taking us where we need to go, whether it’s to school, the shops, work, to meet friends, whatever. It did all of that, but it wouldn’t fit into everybody’s life. I actually looked at it and compared it to looking at a child’s bicycle in the shop window and thinking, “Oh, I wish I was eight and that was waiting under the Christmas tree for me. My life would be complete if it fitted my life. Can I just mention other sized EVs are available, but obviously a child’s bicycle wouldn’t work for me in my life now. I’m 55. Um, and an electric car wouldn’t work in my particular life, but in other applications it would. I guess what I’m saying is we keep getting these polarizing ideas and theories that right, we’ve all got to switch to battery. Can I just put it quite straight? We can’t and shant. Batterypowered vehicles, electric vehicles were tried at the same time at the dawn of the car. And in some applications now, technology has advanced to the point where they can function perfectly for us. But for other people, they won’t work. Lead acid batteries in early 1900s electric cars had very low energy density at a cell level. About 30 W hours per kilogram versus today’s 250 W hours per kilogram. In modern lithium-ion batteries, a 100 years ago, they were heavy, slow to recharge, and had limited range of up to 100 miles. Battery energy density in modern EVs already deliver 400 plus mile range cars like the Tesla Model 3 Longrange, for example, making them more than adequate for almost everyone’s daily driving needs. To say that they won’t ever be suitable for everyone is nonsense. Do we really have a battery energy density problem or a presenter density problem? Look, nobody is forcing anybody, but economics matter. For most people who do have a driveway can benefit from a cheap overnight electricity tariff that costs a tenth of the cost of petrol, who drive an average of 30 m a day. Are you saying most people can’t buy a secondhand electric car and benefit from saving thousands of pounds a year as me and many others do? It should be a no-brainer for those who can switch. Unless you have a fetish for burning money, that is. I genuinely don’t understand why that message isn’t being shared more. Most people will save a ton of money running an EV. They’ll stop emitting exhaust pollution in our streets. And as every EV owner I meet tells me, they’d never go back to internal combustion engine car after finally getting around to just test driving an electric one. It’s just better technology. I’m not quite sure how Richard Hammond here couldn’t make one of today’s what 500 mile plus range electric cars work for him. Best guess is in the comments. For almost 8 years, Octopus Energy have had their dedicated overnight electric vehicle tariff costing peanuts to charge and run any electric car. Switch to Octopus Energy using my referral link in the description below and we’ll split £100. They really are an amazing company to deal with. You get straight through to a human if you need one and you might bag yourself one of these. Take a look after the video. Cheers. And also critically, engineering is still refining it and working on it. Battery energy density is the big problem. It’s a it’s a it’s a different process to a fuel that’s consumed. It it needs solid matter to work. Batteries are and always shall be heavy. But there’s more advances announced today, I think, in solid state battery technology by Toyota. And at the same time, Mazda are working on an incredibly efficient combustion engine, a rotary engine to work in a hy hybrid configuration. Toyota Mazda. No, no, I think I think we hear you. But I think the point is more for the people who who do really want to do this cuz your point is that obviously I mean we always talk about this. We talk about this a lot and our listeners love talking about electric cars. For the people it works for, they are absolutely into them. They love them. They’re never going to switch back. For the people who want to drive up the motorway for 6 hours on a weekend, go and see family, it doesn’t work at the moment. It doesn’t work for lots of different reasons. Yes. Okay. If I wasn’t driving a Tesla, didn’t have access to the supercharger network, I’d be less happy about relying on rapid public chargers, but they are much better and more reliable than they’ve ever been. They are literally everywhere nowadays, most certainly at practically all motorway services, for example, on this 6-hour hypothetical journey. But most folks just travel 30 miles a day in the UK. And new EVs come with an average of 300 miles. EVs have moved on from where Hammond seems to think they are. I mean, I’ve just driven to Switzerland and back with absolute ease in the shortest range Tesla Model Y. 10 grand could buy a used Tesla Model 3. And if you currently spend more than three grand a year on fuel and maintenance, but you can switch to one of these and charge from home, it will pay for itself in savings from petrol and maintenance in just 3 years. and you can travel around Europe with ease. I know I seem a little strident about this, but I just want to share the good news that millions of people could save thousands of pounds a year by switching to an EV, a used one, a second family car, whatever. I’m just sick of people being thoroughly misinformed and even warning me not to go through flipping puddles or park in a multi-story in case the vehicle weight makes it collapse. Interviews like this one do nothing but help keep people poorer, misinformed, and suck in on the teeth of the fossil fuel industry. Madness. One of the things that people are a bit worried about though is changes to the tax system because for a long time electric vehicles have sort of been allowed to operate in a way that helps people, incentivizes people to go towards them. Would it be the wrong moment in your view for the chancellor to hike taxes on electric vehicles? I think it would be the wrong moment to use taxes as a means of steering everybody towards a means of moving around to live their lives that isn’t practical and applicable for everyone and probably never shall be. Never shall be. This is such short-sightedness. Battery tech has been improving all the time. Battery costs are declining as economies of scale continue with batteries being the most expensive element of an EV. and without all the unnecessary components of an ICE car. The engine for one, the exhaust system, the fuel tank, multi-geear transmission, the clutch, starter motor, alternator, oil systems, engine coolant systems, fuel pump and injectors, spark plugs, on and on it goes. All deleted components in an EV. What does that mean? You can drive costs way down to build electric cars. This cannot be done with engines. They have reached their peak cost savings. Again, I I just want to come back to this idea of being given this message. We’ve all got to switch. We haven’t. We can’t. We shan. There’s no need to. We haven’t. We can’t. We shan. We haven’t got to switch. Okay, then. Internal combustion engines forever and rely on an everlasting amount of coal to burn. We can’t switch. Well, the infrastructure is growing considerably, and most people can charge their car overnight on their driveway, just like plugging in your phone at night with the added benefit of never visiting a petrol station again. And lastly, we shall not switch to EVs. So says Richard Hammond. Until, of course, as he sees it, the day comes when Toyota comes up with a final solution for us. Or Mazda wows us with a more efficient engine. Oh, you think I’m joking? Stick around. Engineering will come up with other solutions. They’re already there. Hydrogen combustion, hydrogen fuel cells, those are suitable for different applications and will work in different they already do. synthetic fuel as if we were to if we use renewable energy to bank hydrogen as opposed to putting it in a giant battery when it’s not being used, we turn it into hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells, renewable energy to bank hydrogen. Oh, let’s make it with all the spare renewable energy we have, shall we? I know a third of the UK’s electricity comes from renewables like wind power, but it’s not like we are drowning in solar and wind just yet, is it? We don’t have that spare renewable energy to start making hydrogen. The UK has already tried and failed spectacularly with hydrogen cars and filling stations. The government’s 2021 hydrogen strategy pulled 375 million pounds of our taxpayer money into production by 2025, but it was eventually realized it was a dead end. In short, it tried, it bombed, and EVs won. Please, somebody tell Hammond. Would you like a massively explosive hydrogen tank sat in your driveway? What about getting involved in a crash? Do you know what a hydrogen explosion looks like? But if those things aren’t enough to put you off, hydrogen cars are a thermodynamic disaster. Producing the fuel wastes up to 70% of the input energy through inefficient electronicis or gas reforming. Then the fuel cell squanders another 40 to 50% converting it to motion. Meaning you need 3 to four times more electricity per mile than an electric car which can deliver up to 90% batteryto-wheel efficiency. Why is it that traditional auto companies would want to replace expensive to fill internal combustion engine cars with expensive to fill hydrogen cars? I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Can you? Mazda, the Mazda car that they’re looking at, it’s only a concept car at this stage, will use fuel, which could be synthetically made. It’s hydrogen and carbon or hydrocarbon without digging any oil up. We can capture carbon to do that. It will capture its own CO2 emissions at the tailpipe, put them into a canister. It can then be reused and combined with renewably generated hydrogen as a means of banking renewable energy to create a hydrocarbon. It’s a perfect circle. Nobody’s any more up. A perfect circle. It’s official. Hammond’s brain has plopped out. Studies have already confirmed what common sense has made clear for years. Hydrogen fuel cells cannot catch up to battery electric vehicles, which to you seems like the simpler process here. Here’s what a perfect circle of sustainability could look like with battery powered vehicles. This diagram shows EV battery material circularity, a sustainable loop that reduces waste and mining. Why it’s good is that it reuses the materials instead of throwing them away. It cuts new mining, powers clean energy with recycled batteries, and saves resources. The same materials can be used again and again. The result of this is a cleaner planet, fewer mines, and longerlasting materials. Up to 99% of battery materials can be recycled in modern facilities with estimated reduced mining needs by 50 to 90% by 2040. Or internal combustion engines offer zero material recovery, forcing endless coal mining and burning to refine and deliver fuel that’s gone forever after one use. which in your opinion seems to be the most efficient model we should be aiming at. We just are not getting that messaging as consumers and you said before the little break before I came on, Richard Ham has come to join us. Um, is it time to swap? He thinks you should to switch rather. He thinks you should. Ah, no. I my advice to all of us would be to be good um and and and conscientious consumers cuz that’s our job. Our car is one of the biggest contributors potentially to the whole of the climate problem that we as individuals will make and we need to think responsibly about it. But to think responsibly about it, we need to be informed. We need to understand these things and we don’t. Do you mean buying cars that can run on sunshine or cost £3 to fill up to travel 300 miles? It’s crazy, isn’t it? 10, 20 years ago, I was doing car reviews and all I had to talk about was, “Oh, they’ve put electric windows in the back as well as the front.” Um that was it. Nothing changed. The internal combustion engine powered car didn’t change for about 100 years really. It was just refined. Now the whole of the automotive space and the buying decisions we as consumers make within it is immensely broad and wider and deeper. But we aren’t informed as those consumers. The most important thing we can do rather than blindly say somehow find £50,000 to buy an electric car that doesn’t quite fit my life. Let’s act as consumers thoughtfully and conscientiously because business and commerce will follow. It will follow what we need and want. Engineering behind them will make sure what we need and want doesn’t destroy the planet we want to live our lives on. In the past 100 years, tell me which auto company has truly broken the mold and given consumers a genuine different choice. A better performing, cheaper to run, safer, high-tech, overtheair updating robot on wheels. There’s only one company that have delivered real change to the consumer over the past hundred years of automotive history and kick the rest of the industry up the backside into at least having a go at making the obvious next propulsion system for cars. It’s not often that, as Hammond puts it, business and commerce will build what we want. But yes, Tesla has. But we didn’t know what we wanted until it came, did we? I don’t mean to be rude to Richard Hammond here. He’s entertained me and generations of car enthusiasts since I was a kid. But good grief, his views are shockingly dumb in this interview, pinning people’s hopes on Toyota and Mazda of all companies for new vaporware prototypes and imaginary tech. Both of these companies make quite frankly pathetic electric vehicles based on their statistics. And on top of that, Hammond still believes hydrogen cars could be the answer. These views are seriously outdated, factually incorrect, and seem to have come from an era circa 2010 at best. Sorry, Hammond. You seriously need an overtheair update. But that’s just what I think. Let me know in the comments what you think. I’m Will. This is the Tesla Jigsaw. Thank you patreons. Thanks for watching.
Richard Hammond shares his thoughts about Hydrogen being the future of transport and questions EVs—let’s look at the facts. With 1.7M BEVs on UK roads and the government’s £375M hydrogen rethink, discover why electric is the practical choice for most. Share your EV experience below!
#Tesla #ElectricCars #EVFacts #RichardHammond #HydrogenMyth #TopGear #EVsWin #CleanEnergy #CarFuture #SustainableDriving #modely #model3 #teslanews #electricvehicles #elonmusk
Link to Times Radio full video: https://youtu.be/a0jIzroBjtk?si=dL9pjd_f2fKL8-w6
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