Tesla’s Co-Founder, Mark Tarpenning, has recently sparked a debate among the players in the automotive field in stating that hydrogen fuelled celled cars are simply not suitable for being used as a primary source of fuel as its efficiency is one of the worst out there. Before going down the ‘energy saving’ path, Tesla put much time and research into discovering what the most efficient system out there would be based on. As well as hydrogen fuel celled systems, they looked into various other fuel cells including biofuels and ethanol but still came to the conclusion that battery electric cars were no doubt the way to go in providing the most energy efficient system.
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While hydrogen fuel celled cars sound ideal, offering zero emissions and just pure water coming out from the exhaust, the real problem lies in producing the liquid hydrogen ready for mass use. The gas may well be situated all around us, but is compounded in other components and to be used it must first be separated, and this is not such a simple task. The most common used method of doing this is by first using electrolysis to separate the hydrogen from the rest of the compound (which uses electric energy consumption). It then needs to be compressed into a liquid (this also uses energy consumption) and then it needs to be transported to the pumps for people to use (consuming more energy).
So, even though the result of hydrogen fuel celled cars are great, the getting there may not be quite so easy on the environment. If more time and research is put into reducing the cost of mass-producing the hydrogen, then maybe Tesla will come on board, but until then, I think it will be battery electric all the way for them.