It also seems to me like running pressure vessels around at 70 mph is not going to be a very good idea. There's a variety of possible ways it may not be a good idea; for instance, you can build pressure vessels than can generally stand up to an impact even at that speed, but they will be quite heavy which causes efficiency problems no matter what other advantages may exist, and will be difficult to hit all our other collision safety metrics with. Keep it light enough to avoid that and now they burst on collision. Plus, you know, people drive cars for a long time and don't maintain them, and again, while you can generally engineer them not to explode any amount of sudden steam escape can become a problem in a lot of circumstances... even radiators, much much smaller by volume, have historically become dangerous at failure points due to the heat and pressure involved. I don't think there's a "sweet spot" for any of these concerns, only points in the middle where you end up with all the problems at once.
In reality we as a species are actually pretty good at handling risk. Look at gasoline cars those infernal firebombs on wheels ended up being ubiquitous.
Yeah, we are pretty good at handling risks... as evidenced by our decision to not put steam engines in all our cars.
Engineering solutions have to exist; we can not just will them into being. See also "why our electric cars have not improved in battery density by a factor of magnitude in the past 10 years".
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It also seems to me like running pressure vessels around at 70 mph is not going to be a very good idea. There's a variety of possible ways it may not be a good idea; for instance, you can build pressure vessels than can generally stand up to an impact even at that speed, but they will be quite heavy which causes efficiency problems no matter what other advantages may exist, and will be difficult to hit all our other collision safety metrics with. Keep it light enough to avoid that and now they burst on collision. Plus, you know, people drive cars for a long time and don't maintain them, and again, while you can generally engineer them not to explode any amount of sudden steam escape can become a problem in a lot of circumstances... even radiators, much much smaller by volume, have historically become dangerous at failure points due to the heat and pressure involved. I don't think there's a "sweet spot" for any of these concerns, only points in the middle where you end up with all the problems at once.
As opposed to running a class D metal fire in training at 70mph.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electric+car+fi...
In reality we as a species are actually pretty good at handling risk. Look at gasoline cars those infernal firebombs on wheels ended up being ubiquitous.
Yeah, we are pretty good at handling risks... as evidenced by our decision to not put steam engines in all our cars.
Engineering solutions have to exist; we can not just will them into being. See also "why our electric cars have not improved in battery density by a factor of magnitude in the past 10 years".
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles store highly explosive H2 in tanks at up to 700 bar / 10,000 psi. That’s at least 20X more pressure than any steam engine!