Agreed on both statements. I just wanted to throw it out there, but even I see that probably every car maker wants to use its own size, shape and voltage. And being stuck with somebody's bad battery pack would suck... so yeah could be done but very unlikely.
And for instance using fossile fuels to make hydrogen would be stupid (at least on a large scale), it would be much better to use regenerative power sources for that. But the question remains, why has it gone so quiet around hydrogen fuel cells? It seems that only Honda is interested in them and only on a very small scale. Everybody else is going either hybrid or battery-powered, but both are only short-term solutions to a bigger problem...
Part of it is that most of the other fuel cell efforts by other makers were concentrating on fuels other than straight up hydrogen initially. As I recall, (and this time I'm not picking on the Euros, just using the first example that comes to mind) most of the German makers' early fuel cell efforts centered around things like methanol, which turned out not to work. Even the Daimler NECAR 4, which used hydrogen directly in its fuel cell was intended to have its production version
run on methanol. BMW had decided that H2 was the future, but instead of a fuel cell they had decided to run it as a fuel for their internal combustion engines; see the
Hydrogen 7. They had apparently neglected fuel cells almost entirely, as did most other makers.
As such, they were quite a bit behind Honda and the Clarity. They're catching up - IIRC, there's a Merc B-class H2 version that's available for lease in Europe as of last year. Hyundai also had to catch up, to name another maker; their
H2 fuel cell version of the ix/Tuscon SUV is undergoing public testing this year, will go into limited production for MY2012 and full production by 2015. Other makers are coming; Toyota's anticipating their production-ready car will be out by 2015, Ford's given their
once moribund fuel cell program
a reprieve and are talking about 2018-2020 for an H2 fuel cell car. It's amazing what happens when someone else proves the tech can work and shows up with a production car.
Mostly it seems that the makers themselves are starting to roll the H2 fuel cell cars out, but with little fanfare, perhaps due to various media biases. After all, H2 still gets somewhat of a bad rap, even here on these forums where people should know better, due to the Hindenberg incident. It wasn't the H2 causing it to burn so fast in that case, it was the fact that the idiots that built it thought that the shiny was more important than non-flammable and they basically painted the thing in
thermite. Ooops. Sadly the media is always happy to remind us of the "hydrogen-filled Hindenberg" so rolling fuel cell cars is perhaps best done quietly.
One final note - as the Hydrogen 7 proves, if you switch to hydrogen, you don't have to scrap the existing internal combustion fleet as much of it can potentially be converted. Whole lot of waste disposal issues avoided in that case.