Hydrogen vs. Battery Electric Cars

I think Fuel Cell + Li-Ion hybrid vehicles would be a great addition to the market. We already have PHEV, which pair Li-Ion with gas. FCEV by themselves still seem to be expensive, so bringing together the technologies of FCEV and BEV to make this new hybrid might be extremely expensive. 

But the hybrid mentality is exactly why I still want to purchase a Chevy Volt (PHEV) as my next car. The resilience that you get, like whether the grid fails due to more frequent extreme weather events/a shift in climate (see ERCOT in Texas this past spring) or whether the Canadian tar sands dry up/Saudi Arabia stops selling oil to the US for political reasons/we outlaw shale and deepsea extraction, means less emergencies. Life can still go on. Think of the redundancies engineers employ in cybersecurity, or in fire protection of buildings, or in Uninterruptible Power Supplies used for big data centers at Microsoft or FoxCon. Less failures lessen the loads for all parties involved in acting to get the system back to normal.

I think the short refuel time with FCEVs makes so much sense. With BEVs, yes the grid would be overloaded if we put all vehicles on it immediately, but with electricity you can control the rate of charge. If you plug your car in overnight, electricity can flow both directions at different rates and at different times of the night depending on larger, collective grid statuses (see Vehicle 2 Grid concepts). BEVs can still act as distributed renewable energy storage devices, those of which many people argue are necessary if we want to see renewable generators like Wind and Solar take off and become successful (80-90% grid mixes compared to the 10% today). 

I can totally see a future where if you have the time and are not driving your vehicle for hours and hours, say if you're working at home, then through electricity you can employ your car as a distributive energy store for renewables. If you don't have time, then the quick, 5 minute fuel time means the rest of the activities for the day aren't delayed or blocked. 

Aside from the safety rules involved, I can totally see hydrogen becoming a 1-to-1 replacement for natural gas. It itself is a gas anyways, and may be able to utilize the same infrastructure. Think I've heard that corrosion is still a problem though. Obviously the cooling is too, but researchers around the globe are working with different messengers/carriers of hydrogen, like ammonia or methanol.