The future of classic cars?

[andymc]

It's only in the past 10-12 years that serious R&D has gone into producing mainstream electric cars using Li-Ion tech. Milk floats of days gone by ran on lead acid batteries, which were nowhere near as energy dense. Li-Ion may well be superseded relatively soon, but EVs will be here for decades to come.

How will a mass shift to hydrogen take place when the cost of electricity to run an EV is already significantly lower than the cost of conventional fossil fuels, even at the priciest rapid charge outlets, while hydrogen, by contrast, is substantially more expensive than petrol or diesel. If you already bristle at paying £70 or more to fill one of our 75s, imagine how unhappy you'd be at the prospect of paying over £200 to cover similar distances on hydrogen. Of course, that assumes you can find an outlet at which to purchase some, as there are only a handful of these across the UK - four, last time I looked. By comparison, there are currently over 26000 public connectors for EVs in the UK alone. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are also more expensive and complex than today's EVs, being essentially a hydrogen-powered generator plus battery on wheels.

The cost and technical challenges of safely storing hydrogen in small vehicles is another significant barrier to its adoption in personal transport. Where I think it has a greater chance of making inroads is in mass/large scale transportation - trains, buses, bulk road transport (i.e. HGVs) and shipping.

I don't think EVs are a short-term phenomenon. As mentioned elsewhere, Daimler have announced that they will no longer be developing internal combustion engines - they see their future as electric. Volvo had previously announced similar, that by around 2024/2025 their entire fleet will be either hybrid or electric. Moreover, the investment in infrastructure that has already taken place in terms of the charging network - which is still only a fraction of what is needed - is significant, on a scale which means it won't simply be binned 20 years from now. Even the Beeching cuts to the railways didn't actually discard the entire network!