That's just a minor problem, not a fatal flaw. Obviously you can fix that with a small heater for negligible energy cost.

And much cheaper to fill as well.

On a pretty efficienct ICE that I had I was averaging about 20p per mile driven. On my EV I'm averaging 2.5p per mile driven.

Add to that the problem of “boil off” / “pressure venting”. There are some cars that empty their hydrogen tanks on their own in about 2 weeks. Just because of this issue.

There are new ways to store hydrogen, but these also need external (=from a separate battery) electricity to release it again and the process is slow and doesn’t provide enough amperage, so it can only be used to slowly charge another big battery that is required for these cars to be able to drive.

Toyota have been researching hydrogen cars since the early 90's.

Unless you can find a way to double their efficiency, and also get hydrogen down to close to 1:1 energy input to output it's just not an efficienct use of electricity.

Sure but you should be comparing the goal end state, a world in which out energy consumption and generation is green, that's the whole point of our move to bev's and hydrogen. So you should be comparing energy generation by green means to power a BEV or using green energy to produce hydrogen to power a hydrogen car. In that world the whole energy production and consumption chain is about 3x as efficient for BEV, which in my mind means there is no way hydrogen is going to be competitive and we shouldn't waste valuable resources on persuing it.

Hydrogen that doesn't come from the natural gas industry requires that very same electricity to be extracted from water - so they're operating from the same baseline in my efficiency calculations.

Except it's efficiency for the same class of vehicles we're talking about, so a bike is an apples to oranges comparison.

Proton Exchange Membrane is 40-45% efficient. Generating hydrogen from electricity is 70% efficient - meaning for a kWh of input electricity you get 3x the motive power from a BEV.

Then rolling out a refuelling network, with the high pressure tanks and expensive delivery mechanism, will cost far more than installing EV chargers - and that's before we even get onto the CURRENT penetration of EV chargers vs Hydrogen filling stations today (16 in the UK, 54 in the ENTIRE US, and not growing).

Hydrogen might be the solution to emissions from haulage, but BEV's are more than good enough compared to the ICE cars they're replacing for 99.9% of motorists needs. Yes, I'm ignoring the "I need to drive 1000 miles without stopping for fuel, rest, using the bathroom, come back when an EV can do THAT" people.

And on burning EV's, they catch fire at rates 20x lower than ICE cars, and LFP chemistry is far more resistant to thermal runaway.

Now lets talk cost - over the life of the car the BEV will be cheaper to run. Filling a Mirai in the UK will cost you around £90 for 400 miles of range. Charging my EV6 from 0 to 100 will cost me £5.50 for 300 miles of range. We're talking near orders of magnitude difference in cost per mile here - it's almost an unfair advantage that you can charge an EV at home off peak for next to nothing.

Range is almost entirely irrelevant.

The average commute distance is 16 miles, and commutes over 50 miles are quite rare. This means a car with a range of 100 miles would cover the vast majority of use cases. Add some buffer for emergencies and cold weather, and even the 150-mile-range Nissan Leaf is more than enough.

You could also look at once-a-year road trips, of course: a range of 250 to 300 miles is becoming quite common for mid-level SUVs. With current technologies that means a charging session of 30 minutes or so every 3.5 to 4 hours - and it's only getting better. For context, the EU-based commercial truckers have a 45-minute break every 4.5 hours, because non-stop driving for even longer than that poses a safety risk.

BEVs aren't stuck in the 1990s anymore. Their range has significantly improved over the 60-mile range of the GM EV1. If 2025 BEV range is an issue for you, you are the outlier.

Efficiency doesn't matter when you're literally pumping energetic liquid from the ground. It does matter when you need to build 150% more solar panels to produce the energy to create your energetic liquid/gas.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/fuel-cell-e...

I believe all Hydrogen vehicles are using proton exchange membranes still, which have roughly 40-50% efficiency.

And that's before you take into account that even the most cutting edge hydrogen refining processes are around 70% efficient.

So 1kWh of energy input (electricity) will net you 3X the motive power when used directly in a BEV than first being coverted to hydrogen, and then converted back into electricity.[1]

[1] 0.5*0.7 = 0.35.