The hydrogen storage solution remains inadequate and does not seem to be improving at the same rate. There's also the "unclean hydrogen" problem: at the moment, if you go out and buy it, there's a very good chance it will have been made from natural gas with the CO2 dumped into the atmosphere. At that point you might as well use existing LNG/CNG cars.
Long answer: on the one side, the price for combustion engined cars is going to raise, emission limits are harder to hit. Electric cars are going to get cheaper on several levels. First, batteries are getting cheaper all the time. Then, the production of electric cars is in the process of ramping up, with volume comes cost savings. Even just optimizing how batteries are being built has lots of cost saving potential. Then, the Corsa is an interesting example. It is a platform both for electric and combustion engined cars. That is not as efficient as a pure electric platform, so more cost savings here.
Finally, most car manufacturers are in the process of transitioning to electric, which costs a whole lot of money. They are trying to get these costs back by pricing them into the price of the electric cars. This is going to go down over time too.
Not to mention the EV version will give you a much better driving experience and not be unhealthy to people, specially in cities.
We are just at the start of the S curve adoption, and most cars sold are not sold for £17k but rather £30-40k. For that cost EV are already better.
Here's a interesting Tesla specific take: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/insurance/tesla-insurance
Personally I prefer predictable slightly high costs vs random potential for exorbitantly high costs.
For all comparisons you should probably price in an estimate for the first three years of running costs, too.
Meanwhile, hydrogen cars are much more expensive than battery electric cars, there are only a few models available at all and there are few filling stations - they are really expensive to build. On top of that, distribution of the hydrogen is much more complex than using the power grid for electricity. And you can charge an electric car at basically any outlet, if need requires.
But the largest problem is, that for renewable hydrogen, we need about 3x as much as electricity than using a battery electric vehicle. Not counting anything else, this is 3x the cost.
Having owned a few BMW's I do not doubt that assertion at all.
Hydrogen has a storage problem. As in the stuff is wickedly hard to keep from 'evaporating'. Electric has a charge time/range problem. I can fill an ICE car in 10 mins and drive 400 miles. The same thing with electric takes an hour. For 'day to day' use electric is like almost there (up front cost being one of the bigger issues). For long range drivers, not yet.
See chart at the bottom of the link.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/30/battery-developments-in-the-...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/chart-beh...
It looks like cost parity with ICEs will happen around 2023.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a34992832/battery-price-dr...
Hydrogen is likely to be better for some applications though, like long-haul jets.
Also, there's no lack of materials for battery (NB: Tesla only uses LFP cells in China now, and achieve similar specs as their NMC chemistry used in the US).[2]
There's no shortage of materials in sight and it's far cheaper than hydrogen. Hydrogen has very few use cases were it's more efficient than batteries (industry, agriculture and aviation, mostly)[3].
[0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production)
[1](https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2019/08/hydroge...)
[2](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesla-china-idUSKBN26L26S)
[3](https://twitter.com/MLiebreich/status/1397267000196534283)
Hydrogen fuel cells are a fine technology, but it has no momentum. It has a chance to win long-distance trucking, but I doubt it will be the future of personal transportation.
Yeah I'm betting on anything bigger than van will become hydrogen, anything that needs long distance or perhaps remote environments will be hydrogen based. Smaller city based vehicles likely to be battery based
There are very, very few cases where BEV will not work. BEV is also much, much, cheaper to operate, so even if its not optimal BEV will still be used over FCV.
In those few remote location that you mention (likely a lot less then 1% of the market), gasoline will simply be used. The investment in hydrogen for such a minimal case makes no sense.
That's why they have have forced air vents to remove all the car exhausts and gass sensors
[Edit] Correcting myself, looks like Komatsu/Proterra are working on a bigger EV excavator. [1] I hope this becomes affordable because the noise reduction of electric would surely make my neighbors happy and I would love to not breath diesel exhaust.
[1] - https://www.proterra.com/press-release/komatsu-electric-cons...
We'll probably upgrade the charger to higher speed (Ionity already support 250+Kw) but what's the point?
As for the weight, do you know a Model 3 weight roughly as much as the BMW Series 3 (closest competitor)? https://carbuzz.com/compare/bmw-3-series-vs-tesla-model-3#ca...
It's cheaper, too: https://insideevs.com/features/517960/tesla-model3-bmw-3seri...
It might seem that way but they are.
If you have to drive to a dedicated spot to do all your charging, all the time, >30 min for charging is /long/. Filling up a car is what, 5 min? And it lasts longer. Don't see this scaling, and people will not like it.
How much power can you realistically get to an European inner-city parking garage without major infrastructure changes? Comparing the timeline for all-electric to the timeline of major construction projects in Germany, I'm not optimistic....
I think we need a "fluid"-refillable e-car. Hydrogen is an option, or maybe build a battery with a replaceable fluid as the energy store. But we might be in a trap: Right now, battery cars are clearly better -- better availability, range, price, choice. And now, charging is not a big problem in most areas, with dedicated spots for charging, it is sometimes easier to park than a gas car! But at some point, these spots will be saturated, and I don't see the capacity ramp up fast up with demand. (Same for green energy production, at least in Germany, without nuclear as an option). Part of that is "not in my neighborhood" initiatives against ugly charging ports running along every street, against construction for more cables, transformer stations etc.
So we could end up with many battery cars and a charging infrastructure which doesn't scale fast enough, and no hydrogen cars, where we could retool the gas infrastructure for filling up and scale quickly.
Hydrogen has the advantage that it is rather cheap and efficient to transport it over large distances. You could do hydrogen production in Africa, for example, and ship it to Europe. Even less danger than oil-tankers. A ship accident is either a big fire, or nothing. No large oil spill. Production could be local to power/far away from people, so social acceptance is better. In-car storage and safe filling up seems to be the problem.
Do you really believe it's easier/cheaper to retool the gas infrastructure for hydrogen than adding more chargers? All house have electric plugs (enough to charge overnight) and parking lots and most sidewalks too (cf https://thedriven.io/2020/03/24/siemens-converts-all-lamp-po...). Most EV don't need to be charged more than once a week, too.
Edit: Where I lived in Germany, most parking lamps are at the house-side of the sidewalk. Can't run charging cables across the sidewalk everywhere. Trip hazard.
Most people in cities don't use their cars much either. Tesla is already building super chargers in cities. If you only drive in cities and you really only park at spot where there is no charging, and you can't charge at work. You can just go charging at a super charger once a week or so.
To suggest hydrogen is a better option because of this very limited single concern, public parking in cities, is crazy in my opinion. Also the city could let a company do it as long as they get part of the money, and in fact this is already what many companies are doing.
And yes, the infrastructure roll out will be extensive and take time, but it can happen slowly over time as electric car adoption expands.
I see a future where autonomous EVs will drive themselves to charging stations, often in the middle of the night. Tesla will get there first.