I hope so, but I bet there are number of problems we are not hearing about. For instance, how is energy generated to produce hydrogen? Coal fired plants? Natural gas? If natural gas, would we be better off economically and environmentally using natural gas cars? What about the materials in the fuel cell? Are they more hazardous than present cars? I am sure we will find a better answer to the internal combustion engine, but when it is PBS pushing the idea I become skeptical.

OK, putting aside the fact that the Hindenburg was full of Hydrogen...lets look at a few comments in the article:
"So, in 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed a new law that provides $20 million a year to build at least 100 hydrogen refueling stations in California by 2024. " - That's roughly two million dollars of tax money per filling station...are these going to be private filling stations or ones that California owns? If they are private, what makes this any better than the gov't giving subsidies to oil companies that the Libs are always complaining about? Huh Libs?
"Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan relied on private investors to help build up to 100 hydrogen stations by 2010. But the plan failed." - So the free market would not support it? So we once again try to force the market to accept it using taxpayer funds...got it...

Californians deserve everything they have voted for over the years...just sayin'.

That SF "blanket of brown disfiguring smog" is not from the cars but rather from the residents' political leanings :-)

Wow...costs less than gasoline, no emmissions....it mus be a plot of those evil Koch brothers and the Bushies that is why we don't have this already...!!!

Once again we are asked to totally suspend belief and common sense to believe another pie in the sky story. The only thing positive about this technology is that we could create hydrogen generation plants at these ridiculous windmill and solar farms and use up the surplus energy which is produced due to the lack of control as to when the power is produced. Also these wind farms tend to be in the middle of frigging nowhere so you have at least a 10% transmission loss in getting the power to somewhere it is actually needed. Hydrogen thus produced could be thus be trucked where it is needed.

more GOVERNMENT involvement in what should be private investments. as we know GOVERNMENT involvement means WASTING taxpayer dollars. IF there is ever going to be a market for these types of vehicles the car buyers will see the benefits and want them which in turn will cause some investor to see the potential and build fueling stations. the future is GASOLINE powered cars.

From 2011 press release:

"Researchers led by MIT professor Daniel Nocera have produced something they’re calling an “artificial leaf”: Like living leaves, the device can turn the energy of sunlight directly into a chemical fuel that can be stored and used later as an energy source.

The artificial leaf — a silicon solar cell with different catalytic materials bonded onto its two sides — needs no external wires or control circuits to operate. Simply placed in a container of water and exposed to sunlight, it quickly begins to generate streams of bubbles: oxygen bubbles from one side and hydrogen bubbles from the other. If placed in a container that has a barrier to separate the two sides, the two streams of bubbles can be collected and stored, and used later to deliver power: for example, by feeding them into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current.

The creation of the device is described in a paper published Sept. 30 in the journal Science. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and professor of chemistry at MIT, is the senior author; the paper was co-authored by his former student Steven Reece PhD ’07 (who now works at Sun Catalytix, a company started by Nocera to commercialize his solar-energy inventions), along with five other researchers from Sun Catalytix and MIT.

The device, Nocera explains, is made entirely of earth-abundant, inexpensive materials — mostly silicon, cobalt and nickel — and works in ordinary water. Other attempts to produce devices that could use sunlight to split water have relied on corrosive solutions or on relatively rare and expensive materials such as platinum.

The artificial leaf is a thin sheet of semiconducting silicon — the material most solar cells are made of — which turns the energy of sunlight into a flow of wireless electricity within the sheet. Bound onto the silicon is a layer of a cobalt-based catalyst, which releases oxygen, a material whose potential for generating fuel from sunlight was discovered by Nocera and his co-authors in 2008. The other side of the silicon sheet is coated with a layer of a nickel-molybdenum-zinc alloy, which releases hydrogen from the water molecules."

I have mused that the key to low cost reactions (chemical/physical) may lie in the production of a three dimensionally precise catalyst. This is how biology works, and it would seem that you could lower the reaction threshold that way.

Jan, wants H-car

The problem with (liquid) hydrogen is not engineering, it's straight physics. Liquid hydrogen has about three times less energy per gallon than gasoline. So if you get 30 miles/gallon in a gasoline car, you'll get only 10 miles/gallon of liquid hydrogen (or 2.5 to 5 miles per gallon of compressed hydrogen). Who wants to be driving a hydrogen tank with wheels. The hydrogen tank also has to be heavier, because hydrogen has to be kept under pressure. That puts also a limitation, because you can make a car lighter to get more miles per gallon, buy necessarily cars have to be heavier than if they had just a regular gas tank.

Another issue is that hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is only a means of transporting energy. It has to be made using electricity or another source. If made from methane, the process creates CO, which is burned to CO2. The processes that generate hydrogen are not carbon neutral. You might as well get more energy and less pollution (if you think of CO2 as that) by burning the fuel directly.

Hydrogen fueled fleets of large vehicles (buses, trucks) have been as economical as running off of diesel since 1998. I worked in the hydrogen industry from 1997-1998 and did hydrogen research and development projects from 1997 to 2006. The economics of automobiles have always been limited by the weight and cost of both the fuel cell (twice as efficient as the internal combustion engine) and the hydrogen storage system. If you are willing to pay about 30% more for both the vehicle and the fuel, hydrogen fueled vehicles are a reasonable option. I can make hydrogen from just about any sort of hydrocarbon fuel or from electricity. You do not need to worry about energy supply for the Gulch, when it gets to that point. A competitor will probably come up with a cheaper option, but this will be part of my Gulch solution when the time comes.

Cool. Do you know if they have a scalable, carbon-neutral way to generate the hydrogen in the first place? Even if they don't, I'm happy even to see one piece of the puzzle.

This chicken vs the egg argument is so much scrambled eggs. The roads and refuel stations for the original cars were, I'm sure, few and far between.in outlying areas.
We have this new fantastic info resource, the internet. There's a website for the natgas refuel stations across the country. Hours, pricing. etc Users can even give a quality rating for specific stations.
New tech is never to be bad-mouthed. Even though this or that one falls by the wayside.
Place your bets, oops investments, now

Harry M

It still requires a power plant to produce electricity to power the hydrogen mfg plant to create hydrogen from water to power cars. Where is the benefit? Why don't you just power cars directly with gasoline or diesel fuel?

I wouldn't take what California doing for something real it's a semi-fascist state with so many regulations I don't know how they could put in such an infrastructure. The Auto Co.'s could look on You Tube and find many ideas for economical engines that could burn gasoline at more completely. There is a limit to what can be done with the current design of the internal combustion engine. Retooling for some of the US companies could be very costly. You would need deep pocket entrepreneurs to produce a competitive alternate engine vehicle.

When some very big and rich corporation, or billionaire is willing to set up hydrogen fueling stations all across the country and further, is willing to lose money on them for the next 10 years or so, I will then believe wholeheartedly in the viability of hydrogen cars. Who knows? In the words of the incomparable Judy Tenuta, "It could happen."

If the government would not have taken over GM we would have had them two years ago and have them in full production this fall from General Motor. however Government Motors thought it would be more effective to can the Hydrogen Fuel Cell program GM had pilots running in two areas on (ya way back when they took it over) and put all the R&D into the electric car.

Once again this shows just how stupid our federal government is when it comes to running or investing in a business.

More than likely when I replace my car next (at least 5 years out from that) I will be picking up a Hydrogen Fuel Cell car, which means a Hyundai or Honda. I had a Toyota once and that will never happen again.

I suppose if you have your own charging station and never exceeded the range of the vehicle....fine. Failing that there are going to have to be a lot of new filling stations before one can use a hydrogen-fueled car for long trips. One possible exception: have an on-board electrolysis/charging unit that plugs in. Though I don't know how much hydrogen anything small enough to be carried on board would generate.