I believe your view that "fuel cell cars are doomed except as a PR stunt" is very wrong and shortsighted. Here is an article from Foreign Affairs and the CFR. If you know anything about them they are the de facto ruling establishment of the United States and the world. What you read here usually becomes established public policy.
LOVINS: Yeah, views on hydrogen. We bring it in at the end of this book. If you want to know more about my views on it, just go to RMI.org and download "Twenty hydrogen myths," which is under the "Library" section under, I believe, "Energy." Broadly, there are ways to get from here to a hydrogen economy that are profitable at each step, starting now, and can be surprisingly quick. It's still a decades-long process, but as [President of Arete Corporation] Bob Shaw, one of the leading investors in this area, says, those who think the hydrogen economy is impossible should stop interrupting those who are doing it.
Everything is coming along nicely. And the key to it turns out to be in two areas. One is to integrate the deployment of fuel cells in buildings and industry and in mobile--that is, vehicular--uses so that each stream of applications makes the other happen faster. They're not unrelated, and there are some neat ways to relate them that we published five years ago that make everything fit together.
Secondly, the very efficient vehicles that are ready for the hydrogen speed up this process enormously. For example, in the SUV I described, the virtual design--that was originally designed as a 114-mile-a-gallon fuel cell version. The fuel cell gets three times smaller, so you can afford it many years earlier. The tanks get three times smaller, so they package--that is, they fit--with lots of room left for people and cargo. And you don't need a breakthrough in storage, you don't need very high-pressure tanks, and it all works fine with off-the-shelf technology. So it seems to me a lot of the things pushed recently by the Academy, by, I'm ashamed to say, the American Physical Society, of which I'm a member, simply got it wrong by not looking at a recent developments in material science and vehicle technology.
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