I think the reason they haven't taken off yet is the range. As soon I can get a decently priced one that has a 300 mile range I'll be purchasing - although I don't need it often I will need one enough for it to put me off at present.
Define decently priced? Is £30k new decently priced?
I disagree. I have no idea of the energy efficiency of hydrogen but being powered by such means the average motorist will be able to keep using cars in a flexible and range-anxiety free way, just as they do with petrol cars now.
No need to wait an hour to charge up as that takes five minutes with hydrogen, as it does with petrol.
Ok, having decent hydrogen infrastructure will take time (how many electric charging points were there 10 years ago?) but, unless you currently have your own petrol station in you front garden, it will be hugely more useable than electric.
You can already use an EV in a range-anxiety free way, just maybe not the cheaper ones right now. Like I said, if you're driving 300+ miles you should be stopping for breaks anyway - so why not stop and charge up in that time too? While the Leaf can only push 100 miles to a charge, the top end EVs can see up to 380 miles to a charge and get to about 300 miles in half an hour of charging.
Hydrogen is horribly inefficient, the only reason it's getting any traction at all (and by any, I mean 1 station is 1 state in the US IIRC) is that it's being pushed by certain companies who stand to lose a lot if you can fuel your car up at your house without needing them at all, they thrive off the fuel station model and want to keep it around in some form or another.
You have to transport liquid hydrogen in the same way you have to transport fuel, then you pump it into your car, then your car converts it into energy. Except, it was energy to begin with before being shipped so you're wasting huge amounts of it to turn the hydrogen into a liquid, then transporting it, then turning it into a liquid again. See the silliness here? You're not gonna save any environment tanking around huge containers of liquid hydrogen. Storing said hydrogen is also incredibly expensive - the molecules are so small that you need a completely perfect metal alloy container to store them, which is very expensive to produce. Otherwise it'll just leak out everywhere.
It's entirely possible we can make huge leaps in battery tech and get charge times down dramatically. So why a hydrogen powered car have any use if we can fuel up a 75kWh battery in 5 minutes and then get 280 miles out of it? Or a 100 kWh in say, 10 minutes (battery charging isn't linear) and get almost 400 miles out of it?
If you haven't guessed, I'm a huge proponent for electric cars. My next is a Model S.
