The dirty little secret about clean cars is that a decade after Tesla Inc. left hydrogen technology in the dust by putting its first all-electric sedan on the road, automobile executives still think cars that emit only water are the way of the future.
“We’ll keep the fuel-cell technology in development so that we have this technology option should there be a shift in the market,” said Ola Kaellenius, head of development at Daimler AG, which is about to market its GLC F-Cell sport utility vehicle that can drive 500 kilometers on a single tank.
A KPMG survey last year found most senior automotive executives believe battery-powered cars will ultimately fail, with hydrogen offering the true breakthrough for electric mobility. That’s what Japan is banking on—Toyota Motor Corp. is making a big bet it will triumph over batteries.
Of the almost 1,000 officials polled by the Dutch advisory, some 78 percent said hydrogen cars will prevail because their tanks can be filled in minutes, making recharging times of 25-45 minutes for battery options “seem unreasonable.”
Elon Musk famously dismissed fuel cells as “mind-bogglingly stupid”
You wouldn’t guess it by looking on the roads or in auto showrooms today. Just compare BMW’s one fuel-cell car to its plans for 10 battery-powered models by 2022 and you can get a sense of how far behind hydrogen has fallen.
When zero-emission transport first captured the public imagination in the 1990s, hydrogen was just as promising as batteries, not least because fuel cells can run for a lot longer. Unlike liquid gasoline or diesel, a tank of pressurized hydrogen creates electricity by chemically fusing with oxygen in the air.
“It almost feels like a Betamax versus VHS moment,” said Justin Benson, KPMG’s U.K. head of automotive, referring to the war between rival videotape formats in the late 1970s that VHS, considered technologically inferior, eventually won. “It’s not beyond the wits of man to move to hydrogen relatively quickly, if organizations wanted to do it.”
There are pockets of investment. Japan wants fuel-cell cars and buses made by its automakers to transport athletes during the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and California has spent $100 million building fueling stations. But China, the biggest car market, is going full tilt in the switch to battery-powered cars to combat air pollution.
2016, Munich became the first city to offer a car-sharing service—called BeeZero—comprising only fuel-cell-powered hatchbacks. Each of the 50 H2-powered Hyundai ix35s available to rent can run 600 kilometers on one tank, compared with 200 kilometers for BMW AG’s battery-powered i3. But BeeZero has struggled against BMW AG-owned DriveNow, a 700-large fleet of battery- and fuel-powered rental cars. Linde said it would close it on June 30 because it’s not “economically viable.”
Cost is part of the problem. Huge investments in lithium-ion battery technology are quickly pushing prices down of this segment of electric vehicles. A BMW i3 retails for 37,550 euros ($46,200), compared with at least 65,450 euros ($80,600) for the Hyundai ix35.
Add to that the limited availability of fuel-cell filling stations and how tricky it is to extract hydrogen from other elements it binds to, and plug-in electric cars feels more immediately feasible. There are four hydrogen stations in and around Munich, and a total of 30 in Germany, compared with hundreds of public charging stations for batteries.
