What factors led to shift away from pursuing hydrogen-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles?
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Hydrogen is small, so it can slip out of most materials so you need extra thickness on tanks and hoses which means more weight and less efficiency. Hydrogen is not very dense, so you have to compress it (it is really expensive to liquify, so gas it is). Hydrogen is also extremely flammable. Hydrogen is hard to move around or store because of these factors, we can’t use existing pipes or tanks or tanker truckers. We have plenty of water, which is a good source of hydrogen, but getting the hydrogen usually means cracking water through electricity, so while water is plentiful it actually takes nontrivial amounts of work to get the hydrogen.
There’s a lot of promising research that’s being done right now regarding using hydrogen as a fuel in the engine and ammonia as the transportation medium. Ammonia is cheap and easy to make and could be made at scale easily around the world. Ammonia can be stored in the same tanks as gasoline, and use the same piping as gasoline without too much work. The engine would crack the ammonia using a catalyst and then use the hydrogen directly.
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