Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it’ll just burn up because it won’t all be released at once. And I’ve never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.
EV battery packs are also designed to mitigate thermal runaway events, even down to Tesla packs making every cell connection a fuse on case of issues. That doesn’t stop them from catching fire anyway after some accidents.
Since hydrogen is so light though, it escapes into the atmosphere before collecting enough to explode in a car. BMW claimed this way back in the 90s when it was experimenting with the gas.
There’s probably more of a danger of the tank and in hydrogen cars bursting, since the hydrogen is stored at relatively high pressures. But the gas could easily escape without igniting.
Obviously anything is possible when you are storing energy as densely as possible. And one of the highest density energies we store is still hydrocarbons.
Are they routinely tested in high impact crashes too? Slamming into a phone pole might be more energy than a rifle round.
It’s also a pressure vessel. Rupturing that might be scarier than just fire.