After years of hearing people talk about hydrogen powered cars I almost want to believe they are ruse to get people distracted from working solutions. IE, hydrogen power cars sound like a good idea, the exhaust is just water! And for entities deeply invested in the current infrastructure the idea is great because it'll never happen.
I once had a silly argument with a hydrogen fanatic (who insisted he built a working hydrogen fuel cell in his garage in the 70s, but we'll get to that) which was back and forth like this:
Hydrogen Fan: But the exhaust is only water!
Me: All electric cars have no exhaust!
Hydrogen Fan: Well they do at the coal plants!
Me: So we are going to count electric production? What about Hydrogen production? Today it uses fossil fuels and outputs carbon and methane worse than coal plants.
Hydrogen Fan: But the real exhaust is only water! And you could eventually get the hydrogen back out of the water!
Me: That's not how Chemistry works. Where does the energy come from to split the water molecules?
That's about when I gave up on the conversation as it derailed into the aforementioned beliefs that the guy built a Hydrogen Fuel cell that somehow fueled on water, spit out water as exhaust, and was capable of driving a car in the 70s but then his garage experiments were stopped by a government conspiracy. (I presumed drugs were heavily involved in the actual reality of this story, this was a middle aged guy working in a hardware store.) This entire conversation felt like par for the course when dealing with people that think hydrogen powered cars are anything but a ruse. You even hear variations on it from the Big 3 car companies. ("Well we almost had hydrogen working in the 70s but the government stopped us." Yup, it was clearly the government and not, say, the basic laws of chemistry and physics.)
