And not only that, even if a Chinese driver can wrangle a dedicated parking spot for his car, there is a ridiculous amount of red tape (and bribery) involved in getting the local electric utility to approve the installation of an EV charger for the parking space.
You've come to the wrong conclusion. At a cost of $1 million per dozen fuel cell cars served per day just to build H2 fueling stations, it would be less expensive to install a L2 charger at every single place that people park cars, in China as well as well as any other industrialized country in the world. If we assume one fill up per week, that means one H2 station would service only 84 FCEV cars per week, at a cost per car
just for installing the H2 station of $12,195. The maintenance fee for H2 stations is also ridiculously high, as several entrepreneurs in California have found to their sorrow.
Of course that estimated $12,195 cost per FCEV is so high partly due to the infrequency of installation, and if there was a national effort to roll that out, the price would come down due to the economy of scale. But the same is true of installing EV charge points; the price of installing those will come down as the number of installations increases exponentially over the next decade or two... in China as well as in every other industrialized nation.
Even if we ignore the possibility of using PEVs (Plug-in EVs) to replace gasmobiles, H2 still makes no sense. Pick any practical fuel, such as methane or alcohol or synthetic diesel, and the well-to-wheel cost to make and distribute a fully synthetic fuel would be far, far lower than trying to use H2, which really is very nearly the worst possible choice for a fuel in widespread use. I mean, what could possibly be worse? Maybe uric acid or cow pies? It's really hard to think of anything that could be worse that anyone has seriously proposed to replace gasoline and diesel.
* * * * *
As is often the case, Elon Musk says it best:
I don’t want to turn this into a debate on hydrogen fuel cells, because I just think that they’re extremely silly. There’s multiple rebuttals of it online. It’s just very difficult to make hydrogen and store it and use it in a car. Hydrogen is an energy storage mechanism, it’s not a source of energy. So you have to get that hydrogen from somewhere.
If you get that hydrogen from water, you’re splitting H2O. Electrolysis is extremely inefficient as an energy process. If you took a solar panel and used the energy from that solar panel to just charge a battery pack directly—compared to try to split water, take the hydrogen, dump the oxygen, compress the hydrogen to an extremely high pressure—or liquefy it—and then put it in a car and run a fuel cell... it is about half the efficiency. It’s terrible.
Why would you do that? It makes no sense. Hydrogen has very low density. It’s a pernicious molecule that likes to get all over the place. If you get hydrogen leaks from invisible gas, you can’t even tell that it’s leaking. But then it’s extremely flammable, when it does, and has an invisible flame.
If you’re going to pick an energy storage mechanism, hydrogen is an incredibly dumb one to pick. You should just pick methane. That’s much, much easier. Or propane.
The best case hydrogen fuel cell doesn’t run against the current case batteries. So, then, obviously, it doesn’t make sense. That will become apparent in the next few years. There’s no reason for us to have this debate. I’ve said my piece on this. It will be super-obvious as time goes by.
--Elon Musk, January 13, 2015