[spuggy]

I see the big problem with hybrids or electric cars being the huge carbon footprint to make them (those expensive and diffcult-to-obtain rare earth materials get shipped all over the world for processing before being built into a car), the expense and complexity of the power train, and the battery life issue. Oh, and the recharge time and range is a PITA for pure electric as well.

In comparison, the hydrogen fuel cell seems to work really well. Same fuelling model we're all familiar with from gasoline cars, same re-fuel time and acceptable/comparable range/performance, just a different pump. And the fact that the exhaust is water. And hydrogen is pretty easy to come by, seeing as how 2/3rds of the planet is covered with water.

Jay Leno likes it as well, probably because he lives close enough to the only hydrogen refuelling pump that it is useful, lol.

I guess all those car companies must have some reason they're all so avidly pursuing the other options, but I have no clue what those are. I expect it's profit. Or jumping on the "green" thing. (Like the greentards that advocate wind farms. Where the wind farms take 20 years to offset the carbon footprint of building them, but the expected service life of the turbine is 10 years. But it's green. Won't anyone think of the children?)

Heck, I read in Reader's Digest (so it must be true) that Bill Lear (inventor of the Lear jet and the 8-track cartridge) developed a steam car in the 70's that worked just fine, but "they" said people would never accept a 2 minute wait to build up steam from cold. I owned a Citroen in the 90's that pumped hydraulic fluid into the suspension from a cam-driven pump to raise the car to normal ride height and if you drove away before it was finished, you'd trash the cam/pump (I forget) and have to remove the motor to replace, and/or just bottom the car out all over the place. That took 90 seconds to get it's act together - there were all kinds of reasons to hate that car, but waiting 90 seconds before you could drive away wasn't in the top 20 or 30...