"Fuel cell vehicles can have up to 400 miles driving range, can be refueled in as little as three minutes, and the propulsion technology can be used on small, medium, and large vehicles, the partners noted."

That's nice. But if we get affordable 200 mile EVs that can recharge in less than 20 minutes the cost of fuel for FCEVs will make them non-starters.

I'm betting on 200 mile range for well under $30k in less than seven years.

>>>>"The company [Toyota] has committed to introducing a hydrogen fuel cell sedan in the US by 2015."

So, FCV's will be around by 2015, which is 2 years away!

H2 refill station is very quick and simple to set up. I've calculated before that only about 500 stations will be needed for the entire continental USA to have a station within 7-10 mile driving distance in urban aeras and a station within 30 miles on cross-country highways, at the cost of half a billion dollars or much less. Yearly sales of petroleum is several hundred billions dollars, so the cost of H2 filling stations will be a very small percentage of over fuel expenditure yearly, yet the stations will last over many decades.

FCV's have advantages over BEV's including the durability of the fuel tank and FC stacks, without the heat-related and calendar life degradation of batteries. In hot areas like Arizona or New Mexico, the Leaf's batteries have deteriorated much faster than expected. Batteries do not like hot climates. Nor cold climates good for batteries, plus FCV can take advantage of the waste heat.

Fast charging stations will be expensive to build, yet not very profitable because people will recharge mostly at home and only rarely use the station, thus hard to recoup the investment cost due to low volume of use. I predict that few companies would venture to build fast charging stations in sufficient location. Plus, fast charging is hard on batteries and make 'em wear out faster than slow charge.

H2 stations will receive continous business because it is costly to setup for H2 fillup at home, and will payoff within one year of service. The rest of the time will be pure profits.

Fuel for EV's will be less than H2, however, the batteries will cost a lot more than H2 tank per unit of kWh energy over the life time of the storage device. Calculate the electricity cost AND the depreciation cost of the battery and you will find that H2 may be cheaper per unit of kWh to the wheel.

Roger,
You're comparing battery tech in a a Leaf from 2010 with Fuel Cell tech from 2015-2020. You're also ignoring that Tesla is building hundreds of fast charging stations by themselves. I just did a search and there are 16 level 2 stations within a 10 mile radius of my house in the North Atlanta suburbs.
I drive from Atlanta to Knoxville because my daughter is going to UT and there are 2 DC fast chargers in Chattanooga right now. All of this exists today, in 2010 and is growing rapidly.
I think FCV's will find their niche in home applications but I don't see them competing with EV's for the Light Duty vehicles. EV's already have Possibly for long haul trucking, but even there, they would have to show a TCO compared to NG trucking.
I'm not hating on FCVs...I just don't see a realistic path forward in LDV's.

@DaveD,
Tesla's charging stations are subsidized by buyers of Tesla, who are paying a premium of the luxurious and excellent brand. Fast charging stations is not a viable self-supporting business model, because the moment the customer is charged with appropriate fee to recoup the cost of the station, people will start charging at home and bypass the charging stations.

DaveD:
The main problem with a really big roll out of BEV vehicles is that most folk other than early adopters may not be willing to accept the range limitations of them.

Now batteries may fall in price so fast and increase in capacity so much that they won't have to, but I don't know if they will or not.

I don't really think that anyone else does either, as getting to the point where they are truly comparable to ICE would need around twice the Tesla's battery capacity, whilst at the same time costs drop so much that that is available at an 'everyman' price.

Now maybe folk will accept significant compromises on this ICE-comparable performance, but we don't know that either.

PHEVs are a safer bet, but we also know that we can do ICE-comparable performance, and even the costs of fuel cells to reach that at around ICE prices need far less in the way of breakthroughs to get there than batteries.

Personally I would prefer an electric highway for on the move charging than either, but fuel cells are a fairly safe bet to provide ICE comparable performance at good cost.

What I do think is daft are notions that fuel cells are so hopeless that they should be abandoned, or that it is money wasted and infrastructure costs for them are impossibly huge.

That is simply symptomatic of a complete inability to add up.

So let a hundred flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend, I say.

Plenty of time to chop the heads off of some of the worst performing ones later! ;-)

DaveM,

I am seeing that the "range limitations" are less and less of a concern as people get used to EVs. We've got a Ford Focus EV and four Leafs at our office now and once people got used to the idea of them, we have lots of people considering them. Even some of the muscle-heads that drive Mustangs today. From watching them talk and interact as they get rides in the cars, I'm seeing that about 100 to 150 mile range will be the tipping point for many of them, so I think your estimate of "twice Tesla's battery capacity" is way off base.

They LOVE the idea that they can just plug in at home and not deal with gas stations anymore. They view it more like plugging in your cell phone when you get home.

Granted, this is a limited sample because most of our employees make good money and live in the suburbs where they have their own homes to plug in. But that's still a sizable population here in the US to give EV's a BIG head start between now and 2015-2020.

Anyway, how you doing and how's the weather in the UK? I'm heading over there next week. Atlanta is doing it's best imitation of a tropical rain forest so the rain can't be any worse. LOL

@DaveD:
My comment on twice Tesla's battery was not what I thought people would find acceptable, but simply that that would be the size needed to give truly comparable performance and range to ICE.

I simply don't know what the majority of people will find acceptable, as that anyway depends partly on what the alternatives are.

If the choice is that or very expensive petrol, then maybe, although there is currently a lot of subsidies, which incidentally I agree with, in the costs of buying and running a battery car.
For instance here in Europe if they caught on they would in one way or another have to pay the ~60% of the pump price of fuel which is tax.

If the choice was a battery car with some range limitations, or a fuel cell car without, then again it is unclear what the choice would be.

I am in fact happy with either.

We are due some sunshine by the end of the week, so you may be lucky!

Watch out for the heat though, as you are unaccustomed to the scorching 23C that temperatures are expected to reach by Saturday!

Is this business or pleasure, and will this be the first visit?

Commercialization success:
follow Tesla's lead - high-end barely affordable vehicles that will appeal to the naturally-moneyed early-adopters, the ones we all fantasize about but openly hate - because as prices go down we will buy them at a higher price comparable to a gas vehicle than if they started cheap - its the not-Walmart effect (or Tesla effect);
continue to follow Tesla's lead by putting free or near-free fill-up stations at strategic locations throughout north america (perhaps coordinate with Tesla) (subsidized by car purchase);
continue and beat Tesla by offering 7-year+ full maintenance lease programs;
go beyond Tesla by making home installation fuel-up systems optional at car purchase, including contractor-install cost-reductions in implementing it in tandem with your existing solar, gas, grid, or alternative home energy system.
That's it - that's how fuel cell cars will be 5% by 2025 and 25% by 2035.

Hey Dave,

LOL I'd LOVE to have 23C temps for a high!!! :-) I'm over there for business because our headquarters is in Sutton but I'll take a day or two to run around. I've been there many times (nearly 2 million miles in international travel), but I still love London.

I really am a fuel cell fan, and even own part of a startup that is trying to use them in stationary spplications. But I just can't get my head around them in light duty vehicle applications. I could be wrong...we'll see. Hey, most of us have been on here and ABG for at least 5-10 years...I'm sure most of us will be on here in 2018 saying "I told you so" or denying what we said back in 2013 LOL

It is good to see that most here believe we should keep all options open for future transportation. The one thing both the Tesla Model S and the Chevy Volt demonstrated was that we could have BEV or EREV automobiles that were just as good as any ICE powered automobile.
We could see breakthroughs in battery tech soon, possibly using metal-air, however, even these super batteries must have very low costs (<$100/KWH) and address the long recharge times, particularly for BEV which realistically should have batteries that are larger than 100 KWH to give a 400 mile+ range.
After following fuel cell tech for years, it has a definite place in distributed electric power generation, using either SOFC or PEM, particularly if cogeneration of heat or hot water is included. Transportation use may still be questionable even if the cost of the fuel cell is dramatically reduced. The balance of plant costs for fuel cells (fuel storage, etc) are still great. However, for buses and large trucks (Class 7 or 8, e.g. Vision Motors), possibly even SUV, fuel cells may be a good fit. In addition, the number of H2 stations required would not be as great. Did you know that today only California and South Carolina (for BMW) have H2 stations - check out the DOE alternative fuel maps they are quite interesting.

30,000 miles a year?  100 miles per day, 300 days a year?

That is 4.5 times the median daily commute, and I'd wager that it's at least 2 standard deviations above the mean.  Maybe 3.  In other words, those drivers are a niche rather than the mainstream and the bulk of the populace will be served quite well with vehicles designed to ignore the needs of the 30k mi/yr set.