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It seems to us that engineers must have skipped a step on this one. Back to the Future Part II had the hoverboard, but it's not like we saw them emerge on the streets of suburbia in the early nineties. Meanwhile, Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves star in a conspiracy movie about the cover up of the hydrogen fuel cell, and what do you know? A decade later, here they are, popping it out like it was no big thing.
Underlying what appears to be a big deal are, as you might expect, some complications. The roll out features five (yes, 5) total vehicles in Southern California, including one for actor Jamie Lee Curtis, though Honda plans to have 200 by 2011. But more importantly, researchers admit that the production of hydrogen requires as much (or more) carbon dioxide. Of course, the primary benefit of hydrogen is that, once it is in the car, the only by-product from powering the electric motor is water vapor.
Other competitors include recent start-ups like Tesla Motors and several from the big guys. ZENN Motor Company, a Canadian operation, features Austin/Cedar Park's own secretive company, EEEstor, and claims to have a "super-capacitor" in the works that they say has a range of 400+ miles per 4 hour charge.
Flux capacitors aside, there is endless speculation about which new technology will emerge to best power our cars in the future. The Clarity has been well-received, and appears to be another suitable challenger—one that has leapt near the top of the pile.
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EROEI is still the big question - you did a good job of not falling into the trap of treating hydrogen like an energy source (it's the carrier, just like batteries). Even when cracking the hydrogen from natural gas, it appears to me to be an expensive and losing proposition compared to an efficient gasoline car.
The lesson to learn from all of this, though, is that we will not be able to drive by ourselves like we do today in anything like today's vehicles. There is no solution out there which will economically propel an SUV from suburban home to suburban job for one passenger, in other words. No matter what ends up winning, it's going to look a lot more like a Prius on expensive fuel than the Suburban at $1/gallon. Better get yourself a home near transit while you still can - Laura Morrison is going to make damn sure no more housing units are built in the city.