Even though alternative fuel vehicles make up only a small percentage (and by small, I mean less than five percent) of the market, nearly every automaker is looking toward some type of EV vehicle for the driving of the future. The challenge with an electric vehicle is creating a model that has the range of a gasoline vehicle with the refueling time that we experience right now. So far, every automaker has been woefully lost in trying to make this happen. You can only force electricity into a battery pack so fast, and some of the charge is lost as heat and during the transfer, making it difficult to charge quickly.
There is an alternative to this alternative fuel that offers us more of what makes sense for the future. What would you say if I told you that you could have a vehicle that fills up just as fast as your gasoline-powered model while giving you the range you need from a full tank? If I added to this question that fact that this vehicle would only expel water vapor as the emissions from the exhaust pipe, would this be a vehicle that would capture your interest?

Enter the Hyundai Nexo

The type of fuel that will allow you to fill your vehicle in as little time as with gasoline and receive a similar range is hydrogen. Hydrogen gas is one of the most abundant gases we have in the atmosphere and it’s extremely easy to use as a fuel in a vehicle. The new Hyundai Nexo made its way to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to give us a look at what this vehicle could be and how it would be the one used in the future for driving, but there’s a problem.

While the Nexo isn’t the first hydrogen fuel cell model from Hyundai, it’s the first one that’s been built from the ground up as a fuel cell vehicle that you can experience on the roads that you travel. The Nexo can be refueled in as little as five minutes and it offers you a range of up to 370 miles on a full tank of fuel. All of this sounds great and allows you to think the Nexo could be the right choice compared to an EV model because this vehicle only expels water vapor and is used similarly to the vehicles we already drive.

While everything sounds great for the hydrogen-fueled Hyundai Nexo, the fact is the only areas in the US where we see hydrogen refueling stations is in the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. This means there would be an extremely limited place to sell this SUV when it arrives on the market for us to enjoy. It seems that we need to expand the infrastructure for this type of vehicle and it needs to become a more widespread fueling system used in the automotive industry. Will hydrogen become used as widely in the future as gasoline is now? Only if the infrastructure for hydrogen vehicles increases dramatically.

Looking for something different? Opt for the efficient and compact Hyundai Kona.