Re: It will retail for just $35,000
Is no one looking at hydrogen anymore?
Yes, Toyota and Hyundai have been pushing this, and both have cars on the road. Hyundai claim they'll sell you one for £53k on the road, with 350 miles range. Unfortunately the physical attributes of hydrogen create a range of practical challenges that are expensive to overcome, plus the high energy-cost of producing hydrogen mean that it isn't looking like a prime time candidate anytime in the next decade. In theory you could convert every petrol station to a hydrogen station and change the entire car fleet to H2, but there's no practical source for that volume of H2, and the costs of changeover would be several billion quid.
What are people living in flats and/or have no dedicated parking space supposed to do? Is every street with flats / shared housing going to be supplied with either fixed charging poles or inductive charging?
Probably not, but a mix of options could be created. In particular, if the cars will support 120 kW fast chargers, then the weekly aggregate charging time for an average private car is about the same as the typical dwell time on a weekly supermarket trip (circa 45 minutes charging, c8,000 miles per annum). Put in some buffering battery storage in shipping containers at the supermarket, cable up a third of the spaces for charging, and in concept it'd be no less practical than the way that many people currently fill up with fuel when they do a grocery run.
Where the electricity is going to come from is a much more pressing problem, followed by how to distribute it - the charging aspects are fairly easy by comparison.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
