Contrast that with hydrogen, which is only barely out of prototype stage with extremely limited availability. The Toyota Mirai is the most successful with around 21k units sold total since 2014 - 3 full orders of magnitude lower than Toyota’s annual sales count, or the total BEV sales.
Now, it’s possible that things will pick up if there are some big improvements in cost and availability but that’s a huge if since it requires major advances in multiple areas just to become competitive with BEVs: it’s not just price but especially fueling - batteries are slower to charge but electricity is available almost everywhere so your plan B is a lot better than needing a tow if anything goes wrong with the one station you were planning to refuel at in the few regions which have any stations at all. Again, that’s not intractable but it’s a much harder chicken-and-egg problem, especially as long as it relies on customers choosing to lock in higher costs and significant restrictions. Environmentalists care about the result, not the technology, so they’re just going to buy an BEV if they aren’t riding an e-bike.
In reality, the moment hydrogen becomes comparably as cheap and available as gasoline or diesel, it is likely the end of the BEV. It is the availability of fuel that is the fundamental problem right now.
The EU has mandated that every "major highway" must have a H2 depot every 2-300km, can't remember exactly.
But still you need to get it made somewhere, preferably not from natural gas, because that's just stupid. It needs to be transported to a station, by truck, on a regular schedule or it'll stop working.
Compared to EV chargers which are, in essence, glorified power outlets.
The problem with "power outlets" is that they're heavily dependent on fossil fuel power plants. Since it is an unpredictable variable load, even more so than you think. Which is why it is really a transitional solution. From the beginning, it was about replacing distributed emissions with centralized ones, usually far away from cities. At some point, it became this green fantasy that could seriously replace fossil fuels. It is highly unlikely to do so in reality. Even BEVs will need hydrogen power plants to solve variable grid load problems. Eventually, you'll realize that hydrogen is a mandatory part of the problem, and the battery becomes redundant if not a negative.
Toyota wants hydrogen vehicles to happen, so they've sat around hoping someone else solves the refueling network problem for them.
So far this strategy hasn't worked out. Are there any signs of that changing?
https://www.hydrogeninsight.com/transport/two-of-londons-thr...
Hydrogen in the US feels destined for trucking and heavy industry if it sees success anywhere, but hydrogen filling stations at truck stops aren't going to sell a lot of Mirais.
People really need to stop thinking about current market position and start thinking about the conclusion of each technology. Just like how diesel ultimately led to another fossil fuel burning ICE car, BEVs only lead to heavy and expensive vehicles that are highly dependent on exotic metals. What is the solution to that last problem? It has to be a vehicle that is both zero emissions and doesn’t have weight and resource dependency problems. If you think in that way, you pretty much always end up with a hydrogen powered car of some sort.
