Are we Being Driven Down the Wrong Green Lane?

It's rarely a controversial view to suggest any government may have got something wrong, but you’re in danger of being branded as some sort of planet-killing heretic if you say anything against the relentless push towards electric cars. I'm not going to say for a minute that we should stick with petrol and diesel and ignore electrification, but I am going to question whether pure electric vehicles are the wrong green lane for the government and the motor industry to drive us down.

What's wrong with electric vehicles?
Electric cars are great, they really are, but they're not without their downsides. The vehicles themselves are excellent and they're only going to get better and better, and electric car technology can be as efficient, powerful, capable or as fast as you want it to be. The problems occur with the supporting cast of charging infrastructure and electricity generation. I won’t bore you with all the details here, but anyone who knows anything about electric cars will probably understand the issues.

What I will say is that the time it takes to charge an EV, the availability and accessibility of charging points, and the ability for the UK to generate the electricity needed to power millions of electric vehicles are massive problems.

What's the alternative?
For me, for what it's worth, the alternative is clear and obvious and the technology already exists hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Hydrogen fuel cell technology has all the advantages of electric car technology, but it overcomes some of the very significant problems I just listed about electric cars.

For a start, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, so it's not exactly scarce or expensive. Hydrogen fuel cell cars are still powered by electric motors, but they don’t have to spend hours hooked up to a charging point and we don’t need to build four new Hinkley Point nuclear power stations to produce the electricity for them. The hydrogen goes through a chemical process in the vehicle's fuel cell to produce the electricity needed to power the motors, and the hydrogen is held in a fuel tank in liquid form so you fill up with the fuel at a fuel station from a pump in much the same way you do with petrol or diesel.

The only emissions from the exhaust are water vapour, and the way fuel cells work means they actually purify the air around them rather than polluting it.

What's the problem with hydrogen fuel cell cars then?
Just like with electric cars, converting us all to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles isn't without its challenges. At the moment at least, harvesting hydrogen, converting it to a liquid, transporting it, storing it and making it widely available are all challenges to be overcome. However, we don’t need as many hydrogen fuel stations or as many refuelling points for fuel cell vehicles as we need charging points for electric cars. We already have enough petrol stations, so it's just a matter of them adding hydrogen pumps on their forecourts.

The biggest problem facing fuel cell technology is the cost of producing fuel cell vehicles and the amount it will cost consumers to buy them. At the moment there are only two hydrogen fuel cell cars commercially available in the UK, which are the Toyota Mirai and the Hyundai Nexo. The Mirai currently costs from £65,219 and the Nexo costs from £69,495, which is a lot.

We can make the same argument here though as advocates of electric cars make when it comes to the high prices. If demand increases and production ramps up the economy of scale will kick in and prices will come down. Unfortunately, we're yet to see any evidence of that with electric cars, so don’t hold your breath for affordable hydrogen-powered cars anytime soon.

Are we getting it wrong then?
If I thought for a moment that there would soon be (working) EV charging points everywhere and recharging wasn't going to be an issue, then electric cars would make a decent amount of sense. I don’t think that for a moment though, and that's before we even address the even more difficult question of generating the required electricity in the first place.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are like little power stations in their own right, and if we can get over the tricky issue of the cost they would surely be a much better option for emission-free motoring than electric cars? The Hyundai Nexo has a range on a full tank of 666.3km (411 miles), and it only takes a couple of minutes to fill the tank from empty. Just saying.
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