Linkstew

Jim Motavalli's New York Times review of the Honda FCX was quite an encouraging read:

Given my experience with fuel-cell prototypes that were noisy, balky and incapable of going very far between refuelings, the FCX was something of a surprise. Featuring the latest generation of Honda's own fuel cells (hundreds of them are arrayed in two multiple sets, called stacks) and a body and electric motor derived from the company's unsuccessful EV Plus battery vehicle, the FCX felt like a real car, not a high-strung test mule.

The FCX carried a federal combined city-highway economy rating of 57 miles per kilogram, but since the car holds less than four kilos of hydrogen - a very light gas - long cruises are a challenge. [...]

The pricing of hydrogen remains fluid. The Department of Energy has estimated that the cost of a kilogram of hydrogen (with roughly the energy content of a gallon of gasoline) could fall to $3 by 2008, but that assumes certain economies of scale that have not yet been established.

In particular, I'm interested in what's involved in preparing hydrogen for usage in a fuel cell. That process needs to be clean and efficient, too.

While searching for this review on news.google.com so I could read the NYT article without logging in, I came across Mike Millikin's discussion of the same NYT article:

A successful plug-in hybrid strategy will have some major PR work to do to counter the apparently automatic (and from what I can tell, unwarranted) bias against a plug-in architecture.

I don't think a bias against plugging in is unwarranted. I suspect people's objections are based on the lack a plug-in terminal infrasctructure . Anything they can't take away from home very long probably isn't going to be received well, and in my case, I wouldn't even be able to use it at home in the first place: I only have street parking for my car; Where would I ever be able to plug it in?

More importantly, as long as there's resistance to plug-ins, there will probably never be enough demand for the infrastructure to overcome the logistical issues with making it available.

See also: laptops.