A crititcal view: Hydrogen’s Real Job in Transport Isn’t the Family Car
A KTU physicist’s data-driven critique argues hydrogen passenger cars can’t match battery EVs on cost, efficiency or cold-weather range. We take the argument seriously — and show why it points hydrogen toward the places it actually wins: heavy transport, ports and industry.
NEWS
HydrogenLatvia
8/5/20264 min read
Every so often an article lands that’s worth reading precisely because it argues against you. A physicist at Kaunas University of Technology, Dr. Benas Gabrielis Urbonavičius, has published a careful, numbers-first assessment of hydrogen passenger cars in Lithuania. His verdict is blunt: on efficiency, running cost and winter range, the hydrogen family car struggles to keep pace with a battery EV. We’d rather sit with that argument than wave it away — because alternative views expand the horizon, and they help everyone see the wider picture of where hydrogen truly earns its place.
A reality check worth taking seriously
The piece was prompted by real news. Lithuania’s first hydrogen filling station opened in Klaipėda at the start of June, part of the port’s alternative-fuels project and a step toward EU Regulation 2023/1804 on alternative fuels infrastructure. What followed in the public space, the author writes, was a string of claims about hydrogen cars that didn’t match the measured reality. So he set out the data — much of it from KTU’s own laboratory, the only one of its kind in Lithuania, where students work hands-on with real Hyundai and Toyota fuel-cell systems.
Where the numbers turn against the passenger car
The case is detailed, and it’s fair to let it speak. According to the study, covering the same distance in a hydrogen car takes two to three times more green electricity than in a battery EV — the energy cost of electrolysis, cooling, compression to 700 bar and reconversion in the fuel cell all stack up. And the picture gets harder in the cold.
Below −10 °C, real consumption can climb 60–100%, pushing running costs toward €29 per 100 km, and the system effectively refuses to start near −20 °C.
Type IV 700-bar tanks carry a fixed 15-year life (20 for the Hyundai Nexo) and can’t be re-certified, so the tank’s expiry can mean the car’s.
A replacement fuel cell runs roughly €50,000 on a Nexo — close to writing the vehicle off.
In March 2025, contaminated hydrogen in Poznań damaged 23 of 25 fuel-cell buses — a reminder of how exacting the ≥99.97% purity requirement really is.
Over their first three years, the article notes, these cars lose 70–80% of their value, and running 100 km costs around three times what it does in a battery EV. None of this is hostile to hydrogen. It’s a clear-eyed read on one specific use — the passenger car.
A few fair counterweights, as food for thought
It’s only right to hold up the other side of the ledger too — not to score points, just as considerations worth keeping in view. A handful of them soften the picture.
Much of the critique measures today’s cars. Toyota’s third-generation fuel-cell system, due in Europe from 2026, targets roughly double the durability, about 20% more range and lower cost — so the tank-and-fuel-cell economics look more like a moving target than a fixed ceiling.
The efficiency gap is real, yet hydrogen can lean on energy batteries struggle to absorb — curtailed or stranded renewables — while sidestepping the lithium and cobalt supply chains and the grid strain that come with mass fast-charging.
For fleets that run hard, fast refuelling is more than convenience. In one California truck pilot, it enabled two or more trips a day, where depot charging simply couldn’t keep up.
And winter cuts both ways: battery EVs lose range in the cold too, and in high-utilisation commercial duty cycles fuel-cell range can hold up comparatively well.
None of this overturns the author’s core point about the family car. But it’s a reminder that the technology is still moving, and that the verdict depends heavily on the job you’re asking it to do.
The Klaipėda station tells a bigger story
Here’s where we’d extend the author’s own point. The Klaipėda project isn’t really about family cars at all. Alongside the filling station sits an experimental port service vessel powered by hydrogen fuel cells — and that’s the tell. Ships, heavy freight and port equipment are exactly the places where batteries run into weight and range limits, and where hydrogen’s energy density starts to pay off. The station is infrastructure for a heavy-duty future, not a bet on the private driveway.
Building for demand, not for the mandate
The author draws a sharp historical parallel: hydrogen passenger cars increasingly resemble the story of compressed natural gas — heavily promoted, then quietly overtaken by better options. It’s a warning the Baltic hydrogen ecosystem should take on board. Under EU rules, Lithuania will host five public hydrogen stations by 2031, and much of that build-out is driven by obligation rather than by demand.
The smarter path is to aim hydrogen where demand is genuine and batteries fall short — long-haul freight corridors, port operations, industrial heat and shipping. That’s the logic behind regional efforts like the emerging Nordic-Baltic hydrogen corridor and Baltic heavy-transport pilots. Put the molecules where they win, and the economics stop fighting you.
The wider picture
A good critique doesn’t shrink the case for hydrogen — it sharpens it. The KTU analysis is a useful corrective to the idea that hydrogen must go everywhere, and it frees the conversation to focus on where the fuel is genuinely competitive. For everyone building the Latvian and Baltic hydrogen economy, that isn’t a setback. It’s a better map.
Source: Vandeniliniai automobiliai: tarp lūkesčių ir realybės