Tesla Trumps Toyota: Why Hydrogen Cars Can’t Compete With Pure Electric Cars

[caraher]

2. As are many of the vehicles on that list

Particularly the fuel-cell vehicles.

The main point is that for the near future, any kind of large-scale hydrogen vehicle deployment would rely on fossil fuels, with a net climate impact worse than that of vehicles already in widespread use such as the Prius. You don't need a Spark to do better than a fuel-cell Tucson, unless you're one of a very small number of people leasing under the pilot program who can draw all their fuel from a solar hydrogen electrolysis station. And even then, in the ideal zero-emission scenario, you could have squeezed more driving out of that solar array using it to charge battery storage EVs, than employing it to make and compress hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles. That's because you threw away most of that energy splitting water and heating running your fuel cell; it's an intrinsically inefficient intermediate step that's far more lossy than charging a battery.