But hydrogen fuel cells are also expensive to maintain and have been a huge maintenance burden, as they're quick to fail with contamination (and lots of other factors), leading to hydrogen trains being replaced by diesel trains.
Hydrogen can be clean, but it isn't and won't be for the forseeable future for the simple fact that it would be way to expensive. Almost all hydrogen today is made from natural gas and much less efficient than powering an electric car from a gas plant. But even if hydrogen was produced with electricity, due to the low efficiency it would be much dirtier than an electric car (And we're entirely discounting hydrogen leakage, which is much more potent at heating up the planet than CO2).
Hydrogen can also be fast to refuel, but it takes much longer than gas and often requires a long "time-out" after the last refueling. Hydrogen fuel stations are also very unreliable. With current EVs, 20%-80% charging in 20 minutes is state of the art, which should make charging times mostly a non-issue when this is also available in most "cheap" EVs.
We have CH4 cars today, and an infrastructure in place. It should be expanded and tbh it's a great fuel. The leakages are a problem but I think much of them can be fixed.
I had a Honda Civic Gx, (natural gas) and it was comfortable and very convenient while in Los Angeles. Road trips and camping sometimes sucked so we just rented for those. But there are already "natural gas" highways because so many trucks use it.
Sadly I think it's era is over, oh well.
https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...
https://wrolpi.org/
And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.
They had a GIS team working on mapping updates to fire lines, cut lines, dozer paths, crew assignments, etc. And as required they'd upload everything to the pirate box and the commanders / captains could download the maps to their tablets.
Amazing stuff all without internet.