Not surprisingly, the strategy has its critics, particularly from competing Tesla. Elon Musk, the billionaire chief executive of Tesla, mocks fuel cells as “fool cells” that will lose in the marketplace to battery electric cars like his. Battery electrics are more efficient than fuel cells and are cheaper to operate. And there are currently many more places to plug in than places to top off a tank of hydrogen.
But battery electric cars have major technological shortcomings, too. They take time to recharge, they do not go as far as hydrogen cars between refueling, and the batteries required for larger vehicles make building them impractical, because the current lithium-ion batteries simply cannot hold enough energy to take larger vehicles over longer distances....
....The questions surrounding hydrogen fuel cells have always been “How expensive?” and “Where does the hydrogen come from?”...
...Dr. Chu, now a professor at Stanford University, is still among the skeptics — he, like Mr. Musk, sees electric batteries as the more promising path. But he said advances in solar and wind technologies made producing hydrogen by splitting water more economical. “I began to see more possibilities of clean hydrogen production,” he said in an interview last month.
...Other technologies could emerge, too. A hydrogen station in Fountain Valley, about 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, is in front of a wastewater treatment plant, because the hydrogen comes from human waste. After bacteria digest what has been flushed down toilets to produce a mix of carbon dioxide and methane, the gases are cleaned up and fed to a different type of fuel cell that produces electricity, heat and hydrogen, and the hydrogen is piped to the pump....
But being uneducated me, I would suggest stick to electric. Electrochemical storage proved to be the most efficient (on cycle level) and better cells are coming in daily. Hydrogen seems to be just another investment distraction that slows down electric storage development.
