For comparison, it has cost Tesla ~$600 million to build out its global supercharger network.
You can look at hydrogen almost as a propane replacement as well.
Nuclear to hydrogen is workable and the way I'm imagining it going. There's also options to create hydrocarbons from air using the heat of a reactor.
And claiming that hydrogen doesnt need much development is an insane claim given the money put in and the total lack of success.
Not everything is a consumer car and truck. Being a battery maximalist prolongs the time everything else runs on dead dinosaurs.
Emergency vehicles of most types don't need that however. And in many of the cases you mention swappable battery packs are an option as well.
But we have to realize that compared to all consumer and fleet cars, 99% of all trucking is the vast majority of fuel use in transportation.
Extreme long range trucking is the exception.
In most cases you would make the hydrogen into methanol and you can keep mostly the same engines.
It makes indeed more sense to just use renewable gasoline, e.g. using the Fischer-Tropsch process like VW's eFuel.
Yep, BEV are great for commuting, but very difficult to use if you need to travel long distances in remote areas or tow a caravan or trailer.
Long distances are no problem unless you you are traversing unpopulated area free of infrastructure, and that is likely 0.000001% of all driving.
That's exactly it, but maybe not in the way you meant.
Industries want to push hydrogen because the most economical way to produce it is by using fossil fuels. So they can pretend they are 'green' while keeping business as usual.
This is not the case, at least over here in Australia. Whenever hydrogen is mentioned as a fuel, it is implicitly Green Hydrogen. It only became necessary to explicitly start saying Green Hydrogen after the fossil fuel spokespeople were using existing production to belittle green initiatives and pilots.
The actual reason hydrogen is being pushed here is because of what happens when you shut down large, centralized coal power plants and shut down coal mining capacity. You end up with rural towns with no jobs, or in the eyes of a politician an electoral district who isn't going to vote for them. Hydrogen means big solar and wind farms connected to hydrogen plants and jobs and votes linked to those jobs, and you can guess where they are going to be built. The elephant in the room is who is going to buy all this hydrogen when in most cases it seems batteries are the better choice for consumers.
Not much development except for developing generation capacity that doesn't exist (and electrolysis is wildly inefficient, by the way), a distribution chain that doesn't exist, familiarizing everyone from consumers to service staff with a fuel system unlike anything they've used before (CNG only ever took off in mass transit, and only to a limited degree), and oh by the way, it's centered around a gas that is so prone to leaking it leaks through metals and embrittles them in the process.
I can plug in an EV into the wall in my garage and charge it every night without a single change to my house. An L2 charger installation is an hour or two's work for an electrician.
https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/FR-1996-06-26/96-16205
Right now the lack of standardization of high pressure, high flow rate pumps for large trucks is a problem that Nikola is working very hard to solve. The pumps that are standardized and in use right now are a major bottleneck.
https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/nrel-research-fuelin...
Of course, this is a future thing, not a now thing.
Visual a bus that picks you up at its regular stops, but when it enters the highway of uses a long stretch of overhead wire to use nil battery.
You get the benefits of scale and flexibility of a bus, but at a reduced cost than train infrastructure while still moving many, many more people than a car.
What gives you this impression? What happens to the tens of millions of people who live in suburbia? What happens for those who enjoy living in suburbia?
If EVs really take off and we start to see gas stations shutting down, it would be nice to have the infrastructure already in place to keep fire trucks and ambulances rolling.
If you need a backup plan, then a regular gas station and perhaps hybrid emergency fire trucks seems to make more sense. Since all the infrastructure is available for that right now.
Liquid fuel (hydrogen, gasoline, etc) is essential. So as EVs take over and gas stations shut down, we either need to provide government subsidies to keep some gas stations operational, or invest in a clean alternative.
In short we're approaching things from the wrong end IMO, burning more fossil fuels for energy generation and moving things that need power density and quick refueling to slow, heavy batteries.
Truckers have legally mandated breaks that largely mitigates charging time.
Charging infrastructure is cheaper than hydrogen infrastructure.
The amount of land saved from this alone would be huge. Trains are also just way more energy efficient