Hydrogen has massive losses when piped and causes embrittlement. Electricity is much easier to transport.
What am i missing here ?
The drive train is electric, they're just running a diesel generator to power them.
And it totally ignores the massive issues with hydrogen charging. Charger frozen to the car, constantly broken, incredibly difficult, huge issues handling high volume, require a lot of power and so on.
> Batteries cant hold enough power per pound/size
A comparable Tesla is lighter then a Mirai. Batteries still have massive amounts of improvements to make. Structural batteries is gone make it even lighter and battery density is improving every single year.
FCV on the other hand have far less ways to be lighter then they currently are.
EV will beat FCV on weight and efficiency by far and the lead is increasing.
> like driving across the country
That already works great with EV.
> or powering trains
Why not just use methanol? Almost the same as current tech for diesel trains and you can make it in almost the same way as hydrogen if you really want to make it carbon neutral.
> Furthermore, electricity cant be piped through our existing gas infrastructure.
Electric infrastructure that can do that already exists. Also, doing that is actually very, very costly and not worth doing. This infrastructure then ends up suffering from hydrogen embitterment and has massive leakage and is really expensive to maintain.
> Hydrogen complements solar and batteries but I think solar and battery will get into consumer hands first. Consumers don't require the high density energy storage that hydrogen/oil allows.
There are already many companies who are trying to make batteries that are more efficient and cheaper at storing energy then creating hydrogen. Using hydrogen as a battery is inefficient and expensive.
Grid batteries don't need to be energy dense. The only thing that matters is cost.