comment: >
  
  Yes, but you have to fill that fuel cell with hydrogen. In order to do that, you have to build out all of the electrical infrastructure you would need for electrical cars, then add electrolysis machines at the end of it to separate and compress the hydrogen. This uses more electricity than it would to charge a battery electric vehicle. You fill your fuel cell, and the fuel cell then needs to generate electricity from the hydrogen, and most of your energy is lost in conversion. All in all, it's extra infrastructure and a whole lot more electricity needed to move the vehicle the same distance.
context: There are a few major drawbacks to using a hydrogen ICE. Namely fuel stability and power output. Maybe one day in the future it will become a viable option, but at the moment the technology couldn't keep up with commercial demands. >
  
  When comparing the two you always have to compare the relative ease of building out charging infrastructure vs. the enormous expense of building hydrogen infrastructure. Right now we don't produce much hydrogen, have limited ability to transport it, and almost no facilities to pump it into vehicles. Also, the cars themselves are not even being produced in quantity. 
  None of these problems exist for battery electric cars. All the electricity production and distribution networks have already been built (though some expansion will be required). Charging endpoints are the major infrastructure need at this time, and those are relatively cheap to install...like a couple orders of magnitude cheaper than hydrogen.
  Finally, battery tech is rapidly evolving. One of the key areas of study is battery chemistries that use less rare/expensive materials. It's likely that we have not yet seen the type of battery that will fully revolutionize our economy. Mining technology may also provide new sources of lithium if it's still required in large quantities.
  The last thing we can do is simply reduce our reliance on cars. Especially in cities, there are much better ways to create urban environments than building them around car use.
  edit: I forgot to mention that hydrogen may be the right solution for applications where a vehicle is far from civilization and has a lot of capacity to store fuel, such as a cargo ship. But even there battery tech may improve enough where it works for that application as well. Easier to recharge w/ solar panels than create hydrogen. >
  
  Good luck getting over the “million little Hidenbergs” on the road perception. >
  
  Those people clearly don’t know about lithium fires.  It’s true, hydrogen fires/explosions are no joke, however current Tesla batteries have 5 kilograms of lithium.  Lithium fires are fucking terrifying.
  Burns at 2,000°c, you can’t put it out with water as that can lead ironically to hydrogen explosions, are self oxidizing so can reignite if you smother them and spew extremely toxic smoke.
  I’d kinda prefer driving my own Hindenberg over dying in a lithium fire. >
  
  Hydrogen has really crappy low energy density, so you need to squeeze a lot of it into a high-pressure tank, which is not a fun thing to take out with you on the road.
  The other problem is that hydrogen atoms are tiny so they tend to work themselves into metal and make it more brittle.
  So now you have a brittle high-pressure tank bouncing around on the road with you (and possibly getting smacked in a collision).
  Solvable maybe with advanced composite materials but that might be really expensive. >
  
  Complete non-engineer here, so take my opinion for what it's worth.  That said, I think you (like many others) are missing the mark because you're focusing on only one part of the problem (lithium) and missing the greater up-stream problems.  In this case, the real problem with hydrogen powered cars is in the hydrogen generation and compression.
  In brief, while free-floating hydrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, it is much more efficient to use electrolysis to produce.  This is a very very power-intensive process, most of which comes from fossil fuels.  The hydrogen must then be compressed, another power-intensive process.  Through these processes alone, one think tank (Cato) calculates that hydrogen my be more carbon intensive than gasoline cars. (Of course, this could be remedied with nuclear or wind/solar power, but "green" hydrogen costs almost triple the price of hydrogen produced by conventional means).
  On top of this, because of the nature of the hydrogen cell process hydrogen engines are only 37% efficient, best case.  Purely electric cars are 90% efficient.
  In short, given current technology, hydrogen powered cars are never going to overtake electric cars.  There are still some fundamental physics problems that keep it out of reach.  This may change in the future, but for the moment it would seem that the only real competitor to gas is electric. >
  
  Isn't the current idea for making hydrogen Cars to use a hydrogen fuel cell to get electrical output to power an electrical car