Motor Mouth: In the hydrogen-EV debate, does efficiency matter?

[Caribbeans]

Motor Mouth: In the hydrogen-EV debate, does efficiency matter?

The battery-versus-fuel-cell war is not as simple as we've been lead to believe—and it's still not clear who the winner will be

Driving.ca | David Booth | Mar 19, 2025

We have become a people of rhetorical questions. Whether it be regarding geopolitics, Trump’s tariffs, or even, as is unfortunately true in these trying days, cars, too many of us only ask questions to which we already know the answer. One needn’t look further than Quora.com, the social-media question-and-answer giant whose sole purpose seems to be to gamify inquisitiveness, to see that most of our queries are but impetus to force the desired response. Confirmation, not curiosity, is the quest, the query merely the play on words necessary to get the respondent to mouth the answer the inquisitor desires.

All this to say that when I received a question from a viewer of our latest Driving into the Future panel — Hydrogen: The Missing Piece — that asked “Does efficiency matter?” I initially dismissed it as yet another artifice put forward by electric-vehicle advocates to reinforce why batteries are better than fuel cells. Fuel-cell-powered vehicles, by traditional counting, are not nearly as efficient a use of energy as battery-powered EVs, which, as you might have guessed, remains the primary argument when someone wants to dismiss “fool’s cells.”

But is that the whole answer? Is that the doom of hydrogen writ in but three words? Is there more to be discussed? For instance, to whom does this efficiency matter? If you’re not recognizing that last, that was a leading question, the (hopefully) slightly more subtle sister to the rhetorical, designed to elicit uncertainty to the latter’s desired response...

...In fact, trucks and SUVs (of all kinds) now account for about four in five passenger car sales here in the Great White Frozen North, and, save Mitsubishi, absolutely no manufacturers sell subcompact sedans, the segment all but extinct in North America. If the wallet truly be the ultimate in voting ballot, Canada’s auto market would seem to be saying pretty clearly that we don’t care all that much about efficiency...more
https://driving.ca/column/motor-mouth/hydrogen-fuel-cell-ev-electric-vehicle-efficiency-technology

[NNadir]

1. It certainly doesn't matter to the fossil fuel industry or the people trying to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen."

Of course such people couldn't give a rat's ass about environmental issues.