Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars

The fill up time is SUPER misleading. You get 5 minutes refills only if you're the first one at a full storage tank pump. After that, you either get to wait for the station tank to repressurise (which can be sped up with compressors) or you're going to have slower fill up time. It's so bad actually that some small stations can have the first costumer fill up in 5 minutes and the second one right after that needing 10 times more to do the same. Imagine a fast charging plug that charges the first costumer at 180 kW average and then the second one only gets 20 kW cause the plug needs to cool off: nobody will use it.

Right now there are so few FCEV that almost nobody experience that. But if there are no fast charging stalls available, you can slow charge anyway. If there is no hydrogen, you're stranded. And with V2V standard coming these months, being stranded on the road would become even less possible, while you can't do that with H2.


FCEV could be viable for long hauling like semis and tourist buses, IF you use only green H2 AND batteries don't get significantly better then they're now. And even then, it could be just viable but not economically reasonable. But for the private? Cars, small trucks and vans, city buses, bikes? Yeah, let's not fool ourself: the war between FC and B has unravelled seriously in the past 15 years and FC lost pretty clearly, no matter how hard someone can try to convince you otherwise. FCEV are good products, don't get me wrong... but as of now, BEV are vastly superior and the trend is pretty clear: investments in FCEV for cars is stagnant at best and is rising fast for heavy vehicles.