If Tesla made a working hydrogen powered car design, that mechanically more or less works the same as a gasoline one: why haven’t we fully embraced this technology?

Question

I was told by a friend that Tesla made a working hydrogen powered car design and then sold it to shell why isn’t there more on this?

In: Technology

Answer 1

The concept of hydrogen cars is often misunderstood

When people talk about hydrogen cars it is almost exclusively in terms of hydrogen fuel cells – i.e. the car is electric and the hydrogen (and air) is producing the electricity to power the car

Hydrogen combustion is volatile, hard to control, and there is not much point to it as you require a lot of energy to produce the hydrogen. Simply exploding it is not an efficient use of the energy you have spent producing it – however would be a decent alternative if we had an easy source of hydrogen and a way to control it as well as we can control fossil fuels (ignition timing, pressure etc)