Even with zero storage costs, hydrogen cars can't compete with batteries, since it's electricity -> battery -> electric motor vs electricity -> hydrogen -> battery -> electric motor and that extra step takes energy.
It's only on longer distances that it begins to make sense as a tradeoff but even there it's not clear there's much room for it in the market.
Surely with hydrogen it's a fuel cell (and relatively v. small battery for regenerative braking and such), not a battery like a BEV? And as the hydrogen, using a tech like MOF, would be cheaper to store, and easier to store longer term ... the extra energy expense seems a priori to remove a lot of e- waste and reliance on mining in developing nations.
I'm not sure how the life-cycle overall energy usage compares, would be interested in reading a study of someone wants to link one.
I'm hoping that hydrogen storage will become easy enough that we'll use that for large scale excesses like those from nation-size grids during excess production. So we can do seasonal shifting at scale.
Hydrogen Fuel Cell is about 4x less efficient than BEV because you lose about half the initial energy making the hydrogen and half of that going back to electricity again. It's just very hard to come back from that if you have an alternative that uses the electricity directly.
They're still better than conventional ICE (as long as the hydrogen is made from renewable energy) but just on energy alone BEVs are about 88% efficient, FCEVs 22% and ICE 18% efficient.
It's only on longer distances that it begins to make sense as a tradeoff but even there it's not clear there's much room for it in the market.