The future of personal transport is not certain. By restrictive legislation, or lack of convenience or cost, we may all be forced to reconsider our own personal transport methods in the future. There is no guarantee we will have personal cars to ourselves.
Depending on the local arrangements, vehicles may possibly run on batteries, Hydrogen or even the continuing use of petrol, diesel and LPG or natural gas, and of course the mix of fuels and limitations may well vary from country to country.
Here in the UK the government has decided to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel engined cars in the not too distant future, and the industries response both here and in most of Europe is to move to Battery Electric Vehicles. The effect today in the UK is that of the majority of new car sales are BEV, with a very small minority opting for Hydrogen either through a fuel cell or as a direct into a revised ICE engine.
There principal reason why BEV has forged so far ahead is because the infrastructure to run BEV's is comparatively easy and certainly cheaper to provide than Hydrogen for vehicles. This does not mean hydrogen is dead in the water, but it does reflect on another present day aspect of the production, storage and transportation of H2 proving to be vastly more difficult and disproportionately expensive, and that has resulted in a dearth of hydrogen filling stations. That has to be viewed against to plethora of ways you can recharge a BEV - and even that is continuing to improve.
I have seen ( but I can't recall exactly where) a scientific energy comparison between using HEV and BEV. If a BEV was fed 100kWh of energy you would get about 80kWh at the car wheels thus 80% But if that same 100kWh was used to produce H2, and then used in an HEV you would only get about 50% at the wheels. And that ignores the energy used to transport, store and deliver it to a car.
So without even turning a wheel, H2 is costing quite a lot more. In The UK, EU, USA and other places BEV's have taken a storming lead, which will continue to suppress other alternative fuel systems.
Until we have a method of collecting or extracting H2 that is at least three to four times more cost effective than the best present day method, H2 will not be a completely viable alternative to BEV's - and don't forget that there is a massive world wide impetus to continue to improve batteries, which will drive down their price, and improve their effectiveness , which is continually raising the bar for H2 to reach.
As I said at the top of this comment, H2 isn't going to die, but it may only find favour in certain more specific use cases, possibly fleet operators who could justify the installation costs of the H2 infrastructure.
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