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Originally Posted by Spuds
If the average person drives 30 miles a day, then a 312 mile range Mirai would have to spend 5 minutes fueling once every 10 days.
Less if you consider that it has a small battery pack that could also be charged directly.
You know, that's exactly what I want to be doing with my spare time. Finding a charging station to add a few miles to my range.  . Also, hydrogen fill time isn't a huge concern, but I'm sure if there were any incentive someone could invent a faster pump.
Supercharging stations are plentiful because Musk threw other people's money at it for the last decade. Tesla is a furnace into which people feed dollar bills. If Hydrogen had that kind of enthusiasm we would probably all be driving hydrogen cars by now.
But is a hydrogen fueling station more expensive than 18+ supercharger stations (assuming the same number of plugs as pumps)? To match the capacity of fueling stations you do have, many of which are in places you don't go to spend an hour waiting to move on, you need more than 180,000 charging stations if they all had the same amount of superchargers as pumps at the gas stations. You would need over a million level 2(?) charging stations. Now, do you really need the capacity you actually have, no, but if you really want to compare capacity against fueling stations as a metric, those are the numbers you are looking at.
Cost of a supercharger station from wikipedia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Supercharger
Cost of a 4-pump hydrogen station from dadhawk's article:
My phone is dying, hopefully I got to everything. Please wait while I find a charger...  |
Finding an electric charging station shouldn't be a problem. The charging station is your garage
I plug my car in to trickle charge my Braille battery. Same effort. I plug in my phone. I plug in my laptop. If the parking structure at my work had chargers then my car could be charging 23.5 hours most work days because my commute is 3.5-5 miles one way to work. If the average person drives 30 miles a day and takes two hours to do that because of bad traffic then there is the potential to charge for 22 hours. That is more than enough to serve the 30 miles a day at 120v and then some. Obviously if someone has access to a gen 3 wall charger at their house or destination then they could add potentially a maximum of 44 miles per hour of charging, which is a full charge from a full depleted battery in a typical night. This is the advantage with EVs; there are plugs everywhere and fast chargers are just an option and a means of traveling far, but not necessary for the majority of people on a daily basis.
Even if someone wanted to use a Supercharger, unless they were on a long road trip, the Supercharger would only be needed to make up the difference. For instance, if someone wanted to fully charge the car then cool, but if they just wanted to add more miles than a night of charging because they were doing a longer drive the next day into the city or to visit a friend in the next town then 5 minutes on a V3 Supercharger could add 75 miles. Add that to a slower home charger, and the example above would have added over a hundred or more miles in the worst case scenario with five minutes of effort.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesl...harger-tested/
Because of the above, you can't try to make an apples to apples comparison between hydrogen refueling and EV refueling. The behavior and means of charging is completely different. The fact is that if all cars where hydrogen then we would need 10,266 fuel stations converted to hydrogen or new stations built, and we are far away from that. Are they retrofitting any old stations to save cost? That could be an option, but often times it is cheaper to build new then renovate a structure because of building codes. For EVs, most people only occasionally need a supercharger. The problem is surge usage during holidays and other times.
Your cost analysis is off too. The price of the EV stations is largely the cost of the land and other logistics. They can be built relatively cheaply if there is careful planning. Read the link for a full cost breakdown of what the EVs cost to build and maintain. I think if you research what a hydrogen fuel station costs to maintain and build then you will see there is a big difference. Level 2 charging stations are super cheap. They can put them up for super cheap. Building a parking structure? Plan ahead and add refueling stations at each port. This is already happening. It dramatically brings down the cost of these installs.
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There is also a wide variation in cost for installing DCFC. In the EV Project, the cost to install over 100 dual port DCFC units ranged from $8,500 to $50,820 with an average installation cost of $23,662. The lower installation costs ($8,500-$20,000) were generally for sites that were able to use existing electrical service. Figure 9 shows the distribution of EV Project DCFC installation costs, by cost tier. The WCEH had an average installation cost of $40,000 for the DCFC. The higher DCFC installation costs for the WCEH compared to the EV Project is partially due to many WCEH installations taking place in rural locations that required electrical service upgrades. The WCEH project had rigorous design and construction standards that required a deep concrete foundation. The EV Project focused on taking advantage of existing electrical service infrastructure to drive down costs.
The Orlando Utilities Commission (OUC) installed five DCFC units in Orlando with installation costs ranging from $4,000-$9,000 each (OUC 2014). They were able to minimize costs through careful selection of site locations such that minimal trenching or boring was needed to connect the DCFC to the electrical service. OUC also conducted a competitive bidding process that included training electricians on how to install EVSE.
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https://afdc.energy.gov/files/u/publ...eport_2015.pdf
Besides the problem of finding a hydrogen fuel station near or needing to drive far to get to a fueling station (44 miles for the closest fueling station to me), the other issue is finding fuel at this time. They can build a lot of fuel stations, but they also need to work on making more hydrogen. Being low on fuel is a big problem right now, and they don't even have many hydrogen cars on the road. Check out the stations, and you will see for yourself.