tonybelding

Maybe it has. I'm told some large parts of the book came out of articles from The Economist, so they may be several years old. So. . . They may actually date from the era when everyone considered electric cars a dead issue, and all the big car companies were banking on hydrogen.

And let's be honest, many of them still are. GM still sees a big role for hydrogen in China, and China could play a huge role in the future of the automobile industry -- something the book explains in depth. In fact, all of chapter seven is devoted to the rise of China and India.

From the book: "Some compare Asia's rise to the recovery of Europe and Japan from World War II. But that was puny compared with what is happening in China and India."

"Some economists and environmentalists think the emergence of China and India, in the way that is having an impact across the whole world, is more akin to the rise of the Roman Empire or the discovery of the New World than to the economic boom seen in postwar Japan and Europe."

Every major car company has hydrogen cars. They are research vehicles, they are concept cars. GM has them. Honda has them. Ford has them. BMW has them. Companies that have nothing in BEVs or PHEVs have hydrogen research programs. You can argue whether they are sincere, whether the fuel cell cars are just political or PR stunts, but I think the book reflects a corporate reality of the car makers.

The book also claims that Stan Ovshinsky is a big fan of hydrogen -- something I previously had not been aware of.

At no point in the book do they ever make any kind of technical argument for or against hydrogen or any other particular fuel. Most of the time the hydrogen bias creeps in as a sort of underlying assumption, but it doesn't have any impact on the points they are trying to make. I see it as a minor annoyance, not really a problem for the book.