Not long ago, Changan Automobile announced more information about the Changan C385 to the outside world, in addition to the conventional pure electric version and extended range version, this time will also launch a hydrogen version. The Changan C385 is expected to be officially launched in the second quarter of this year and will be delivered in August at the latest, so this will become the first mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in China.
The C385 hydrogen version has a range of more than 700 km, a hydrogen consumption of 0.65 kg/100 km, and can be replenished in 3 minutes. The hydrogen energy equipment it is equipped with is the first mass-produced independent car hydrogen fuel cell system in China jointly built by Changan New Energy China team and the British team, which can achieve ultra-high power generation efficiency and ultra-long stack life. A lot of people are interested in this car, so let's talk about this car.
1. Don't hydrogen fuel cell vehicles still have batteries?
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles can achieve real zero emissions, its emissions are only water, many people say, hydrogen fuel vehicles do not also have batteries? This is similar to hybrid cars, the battery is only used as a medium for energy transfer, the battery capacity will not be too large, hydrogen mainly relies on the fuel cell stack, the reaction of hydrogen and oxygen is combined to generate current, and then input into the battery, and then drive the vehicle.
Compared with pure electric models, hydrogen fuel vehicles have fast charging speed, are less affected by temperature and speed, and there will be no obvious battery attenuation phenomenon when driving 500,000 kilometers, so there is no need to worry about replacing batteries.
2. Is the cost of hydrogen fuel vehicles high?
According to the disclosed information, the C385 hydrogen electric version of hydrogen consumption is 0.65 kg / 100 km, and the current hydrogenation price in Beijing is about 30 yuan per kg, calculated down, the driving cost per kilometer is less than 0.2 yuan, this driving cost is currently lower than the fuel vehicle, to the intermediate car 8 liters per 100 km of fuel consumption, about 1/3 of the gasoline car.
If you can install household charging piles, then the cost of electric vehicles is certainly lower than that of hydrogen fuel vehicles, but the question is, how many people have purchased private parking spaces? Not to mention that hydrogenation only takes 3 minutes, and household slow charging piles take more than 8 hours. If you use commercial piles, the cost of driving is the same as for hydrogen-fueled cars, but the recharge time is longer.
3. Where to go for hydrogenation?
At present, China has built a total of 264 hydrogen refueling stations, except for Tibet, Qinghai and Gansu. Guangdong Province ranks first in the country with 50 seats, Shandong ranks second in the country in the number of 28 seats, Jiangsu and Zhejiang both have 21 seats, ranking third in the country, Shanghai and Hubei are 15, Beijing has 14, Hebei has 13 and Liaoning has 10.
Of course, this number is still not worth mentioning compared with gas stations, so it is not convenient for the hydrogen refueling party, mainly depending on your region, if you are in Guangdong Beijing, Shanghai and other areas, the distribution of hydrogen refueling stations is still enough to meet the current hydrogenation needs, but it is possible that you have to drive a few more kilometers.
4. Where does hydrogen come from? Isn't hydrogen manufacturing also polluting?
Many people for the production of hydrogen, still stay at the level of electrolyzed water, but if you really want to meet the use of large-scale hydrogen fuel vehicles, no company will be stupid enough to use electrolyzed water to produce hydrogen, because it is not cost-effective at all.
On the one hand, the mainland is currently the world's largest hydrogen producer, with a hydrogen production of about 33 million tons in 2021, ranking first in the world. This is because in industrial production will produce a large amount of hydrogen, even if you do not develop hydrogen fuel vehicles, this part of the hydrogen will also be produced, that is, industrial by-products, but these hydrogens are gray hydrogen, purity can not meet the use of hydrogen fuel vehicles, in this regard, Sinopec has broken through the hydrogen purification technology, purity of 99.999%, can purify these gray hydrogen into green hydrogen for hydrogen fuel vehicles.
On the other hand, many enterprises are making solar energy hydrogen production, Sinopec invested 3 billion yuan, in Xinjiang to start construction of the use of photovoltaic power generation direct hydrogen production projects, the world's largest photovoltaic green hydrogen production project under construction, after the commissioning of the annual output of green hydrogen up to 20,000 tons. Sinopec plans to build 1,000 hydrogen refueling stations during the 14th Five-Year Plan period.
Therefore, the source of hydrogen, Sinopec and other enterprises have long been in front of you, and began to act.
5. Are hydrogen fuel vehicles safe? Will it explode?
Many people's cognition of hydrogen fuel vehicles is still stuck in the level of hydrogen instability in junior high school physics books, if hydrogen fuel vehicles are so unsafe. Why did the Beijing Winter Olympics use a lot of hydrogen fuel vehicles, and are you not afraid of leaving a name in the history of this Winter Olympics? Why should the five ministries and commissions of the state jointly approve the three most densely populated cities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou as the first batch of demonstration city clusters for hydrogen energy development? Is it possible that with the problems that you can think of at the level of junior high school physics, the national level will not think of?
Hydrogen molecules are small and easy to leak, but also have hydrogen embrittlement characteristics, but engineers have conducted special research on the characteristics of hydrogen, using a large number of anti-hydrogen embrittlement materials, in addition, hydrogen diffusion speed is fast, low density, easy to detect the characteristics, so that hydrogen will not be deposited, but quickly escape into the atmosphere, hydrogen sensors can find hydrogen leakage for the first time and start the safety valve.
Yi Baolian, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that so far there are more than 30,000 fuel cell vehicles in operation around the world, and not a single vehicle has had combustion and explosion accidents.
6. Isn't hydrogen fuel vehicle technology in the hands of Japanese car companies?
Many people say that your current development of hydrogen fuel is to make a wedding dress for Japanese car companies, patents are in their hands, in fact, because no one plays hydrogen with Toyota, in 2015, Toyota announced that about 5680 hydrogen fuel cell patent technology will be free to use by peers, hoping to drive the development of hydrogen fuel technology, because Toyota knows that it is impossible to promote the hydrogen fuel industry on its own.
Although the current pure electric model is the focus of each car company, in the commercial vehicle, each has not given up the research on hydrogen fuel cell technology. Compared with the heavy and huge lithium battery pack, hydrogen fuel cells are more conducive to vehicle lightweighting. It is unrealistic to let trucks carry heavy batteries for long distances, and the upper limit of hydrogen energy development is higher, and once it is broken, it will completely get rid of dependence on oil resources.
7. What are the problems in the development of hydrogen fuel vehicles?
Of course, if hydrogen fuel vehicles are all advantages and no disadvantages, they have long been popularized, and the key problem is that hydrogen fuel vehicles have several key problems that have not been broken.
Fuel cell vehicles mainly have three high problems: First, the price of fuel cell systems is high, and heavy metal platinum is used. The price is 1.5-2 times that of a lithium-ion battery car. The current price of hydrogen in Beijing is 30 yuan per kilogram, which is the price after subsidies, but it is still not dominant compared to pure electric models. Third, the construction cost of hydrogen refueling stations is high, reaching 10-15 million per station.
In addition, hydrogen needs low temperature pressurization to liquefy, so large-scale storage and transportation is also a problem, which is a problem that needs to be faced in the future development of hydrogen fuel vehicles.
However, in any case, we cannot directly abandon research because the development of hydrogen fuel vehicles is currently facing such and such problems, because the breakthrough of hydrogen energy technology will bring about changes that will be revolutionary and will directly reshape the domestic energy structure.
In the past two years, the development policy on hydrogen energy is frequently introduced, and people who understand it can probably see the eyebrows, that is, in the short term, we can develop pure electric and plug-in models, but the research of hydrogen energy technology cannot be relaxed at all, and 2022 has become a veritable "first year" of China's hydrogen fuel cell vehicle industry, an era that belongs to hydrogen energy, which is slowly coming to us.