But how? Right now level 3 supercharging can return 80% of a lithium battery's capacity in 30 minutes or less safely and consistently. Hydrogen requires intense, 10,000PSI containers to store with fixed lifespans- compared to something like a vandium flow battery, which stores energy in metal mixed in water that is now hitting the market.
30 minutes sounds like a long time to some people. The range is getting better, for sure. I think about it this way battery EV vs fuel cell EV is a bit like gasoline vs diesel these days. You have both to satisfy some different needs.
I would say that flow batteries are in the shorter term, almost now. It bridges the gap between li-ion and whatever can get to 12+hr storage economically. They should make economic sense at 4+hr duration, but there will be a point where you are buying enough electrolyte that it doesn't. Hydrogen is good when you meet the grid needs, have charged all your storage, and still have some left over. This will be increasingly common as the renewable fleet capacity increases and it's overbuilt to deal with the intermittency.
In the time it has taken to go from no hydrogen infrastructure to still no hydrogen infrastructure, battery technology for EVs has gone from crappy to completely viable. In the time it takes to go from still no hydrogen infrastructure to still basically none but maybe a little bit, batteries will go from viable to the absolute default.
In fact, at some point batteries will have to be designed for planned obsolescence because they're already getting to the point that the cars are so reliable and suffering so little degradation that they'll undercut future sales if the new model isn't vastly superior. I also expect you'll see battery ranges stop growing and actually shrink at some point in the next 10-15 years because when you plan your trip in your ride-hailing app, the megacorp deploying your robo taxi will probably send one with less than 100 miles total range that just drives itself to a charge point and gets back whatever 2-digit range number it lost by charging for 10 minutes with no human there to complain about how slow it is. In the event you plan a trip of several hundred miles they'll send you some robo-taxi with a big battery which they only have a handful of because it will still be the case that those are like 2% of all trips. And they'll charge you more.
And all of that will happen before the idea of widespread hydrogen cars ever gets its feet under it.
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