We could take the gasoline, burn it to generate electricity and use that to charge electric vehicles. If you consider the massive efficiency advantage, we'd probably still come ahead over using internal combustion engines.

This is in other words a complete non-issue. But I'd love to hear plans on safeguarding inevitable hydrogen leaks in residential areas. Should we tell people to get rid of their garages?

I think you are confused. Gasoline drive is perhaps 30% efficient. Electric drive is perhaps 80%. Charging batteries I don't remember, but let's call it 80%.

So what you've proposed is:

    Burn gasoline (30%) * Charge batteries (80%) * Drive e-car (80%) = 19% efficient

It works better if you have a very high efficiency gasoline-powered generator (a 60% efficient generator gets you 38% efficient) but that can't really be done at the homeowner scale.

I guess you are underestimating just how terrible internal combustion engines are and overestimating charging + driving losses.

Consider that hybrids or HEVs can improve substantially on the efficiency of just a pure ICE. I guess the problem with using an ICE for driving directly is that you are often forced to run it at RPMs and states where it is nowhere near that hypothetical 30% efficiency, simply to get the acceleration the user demands.

The difference there lies in that the electrical infrastructure can be overhauled gradually, as electric car adoption increases. We already have something that is useful to the current EV owners, and it can be made better. I'm also not convinced that the utilities are correct, current peak use is probably a lot higher than what a fleet of slow-charging vehicles would consume at night.

In the case of hydrogen infrastructure, we have nothing. If you're the first guy to buy a hydrogen car, you can't fill it up anywhere, there's an enormous amount of investment and work needed to get to that first hydrogen gas station, and I don't see that happening. Who would put up the money to make that bet?

> In the case of hydrogen infrastructure, we have nothing.

Well, more than nothing, but not a lot just now. Though more is in development.

> If you're the first guy to buy a hydrogen car, you can't fill it up anywhere

I'm going to guess that the first several tens of thousands of people to buy consumer electric vehicles in the US will be clustered around the places where the existing infrastructure is [1], so that this won't be even approximately true (there'll be an interesting trade off until infrastructure builds out in that FCVs will have a longer single charge/tank range than EVs, but a much more limited area of operations since there'll be limited refueling locations especially outside of the "home" areas.)

[1] e.g., in California, http://www.cafcp.org/stationmap

Oh wow, I did not know this existed! That's great, nothing's better than healthy competition!