Canada

Freaking Hydrogen cars. Dead end tech with a fuel that's extremely difficult to keep in place. For whatever reason the big asian car manufacturers like Honda and Toyota seem to refuse to admit will never take off, after more than 2 decades trying.

I'm fascinated by their insistence on a technology that is clearly doomed. The embodiment of the sunk cost fallacy. They insist on trying to continue to make Hydrogen a thing, with no plan for infrastructure which is even more complicated than DC fast chargers, while not even attempting to expand EV offerings that people want in the meantime.

Hydrogen isn’t going to happen. So stop holding your breath.

Beyond all of the other problems with hydrogen (production, transportation, storage, dispensing, etc.) the economic truth is that hydrogen vehicles are, at best, 60% efficient. And hydrogen production either relies on fossil fuel production (for “grey” hydrogen), or electrolysis (“green” hydrogen). Electrolysis itself is only about 66% efficient.

This efficiency matters in this comparison because when you put 100 units of energy to get 66 units of energy out, and then put that into a vehicle that can only transform that into around 40 units of motive power, you will always do better putting that energy into an EV which is 95% efficient (you put in 100 units of energy and get 95 units out). In terms of cars, you can charge more than twice as many cars with this input energy as you’d be able to with hydrogen. There is no world where that makes any sort of economic sense for anyone.

With hydrogen vehicles, you get a vehicle that needs a lot more energy to go less distance. It’s the worst of all worlds. And that’s just discussing the efficiency values — and not all the losses that occur during all the transfer stages. Hydrogen needs to be kept cryogenically cold (which also requires more energy to maintain) — in effect, there is no possible work in which hydrogen replaces a modern EV.