One Korean automaker has big dreams for the future of fuel cell technology. Carrying the flag is the new 2026 Hyundai Nexo, which promises big range and big capability beyond the finicky hydrogen-powered vehicles that have come before.
Hydrogen is a funny thing, and not just because it makes your voice higher. It’s the gas that was supposed to save transportation from the evils of gasoline and the perceived feebleness of the electric vehicle. Despite decades of development and huge investment, however, that’s yet to come to pass. Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota have tried their darndest, but have only sold a few thousand fuel cell vehicles each. Meanwhile, the fuel has gotten so expensive of late that it’s spawned its own black market.
Can better cars make hydrogen a practical and popular transport fuel? Probably not!
Hydrogen Power
The 2026 Hyundai Nexo made its debut at the Seoul Mobility Show on Wednesday, with the Korean automaker eager to highlight the capability of its new-generation fuel cell drivetrain. The new model targets 700 km (434 miles) of range from a “five-minute charge,” as Hyundai worded it—which makes for easy comparison with the charging times of EVs. Of course, the Nexo isn’t filled with electricity, but with hydrogen—with fast refueling being the major attraction of the technology.
434 miles is a solid amount of range, up from 380 miles in the outgoing Nexo. This is partially achieved through efficiency improvements, but also through a larger fuel tank. The new model carries up to 6.69 kg of hydrogen, up from 6.33 kg previously.
Great focus has been placed on the rest of the fuel cell drivetrain to improve performance relative to previous generations. The new Nexo’s electric motor can deliver 150 kW (201 horsepower), up from 120 kW (161 hp) in the previous model. Supporting this is an upgraded hydrogen fuel cell stack that can deliver up to 110 kW, while the onboard battery can deliver a further 80 kW. The latter ensures there’s always enough electrical power on tap to meet the driver’s demands. At best, the new model will slam out the zero to 60 mph sprint in just 7.8 seconds, a nice improvement over the old Nexo’s 9.2-second time.
Hyundai has also focused on usability features, too, with the new-generation fuel cells more capable of operating effectively at lower temperatures. The Nexo is also touted as the first fuel cell EV to offer towing capability (not counting the heavy trucking market, we presume). It’s only for select trims and markets, but we’re told certain models for Europe will be able to haul up to 1000 kg (~2200 pounds). If you’ve got a small boat and you absolutely must have a hydrogen-powered vehicle, the Nexo is likely your best bet.
Most of all, though, Hyundai is eager to talk about design. The Nexo wears the ‘Art of Steel’ design language of the Korean automaker. Thus, the Nexo rocks a lightly futuristic vibe, with sharp LED lighting elements and lots of straight lines. There’s also the distinctive “4 Dot” lamps, also known as “HTWO” lamps for Hyundai’s overarching HTWO hydrogen branding. They’re visible front and rear, and intended as a unique design element that denotes the Nexo as one of Hyundai’s fuel cell vehicles.
Inside, Hyundai has made sure to give the mid-sized SUV pleasant appointments. There’s lots soft padding, including on the dash, and Hyundai has expanded passenger and luggage space for additional comfort. Doors open wider, and there’s more legroom and headroom, with Hyundai wanting to ensure the Nexo was “an ideal choice for families.” Ones that live near hydrogen filling stations, anyway. Layout-wise, Hyundai went with a large single curved display for both the instrument cluster and infotainment use. Overall, the interior it continues the low-key sci-fi theme seen outside, but in a more plush and welcoming fashion.
One design feature Hyundai found worth noting is the “column-type shift lever.” Don’t get excited, though—it’s not the big mechanical arm-type shifter that most automakers abandoned by the early 1990s. Instead, it’s just a column-mounted electronic control that you use to tell the vehicle to switch between Drive, Reverse, and Park modes like on other Hyundais. Since the drivetrain is all electronic, there’s no real transmission to shift anyway. Regardless, Hyundai put the shifter there since it frees up space in the cabin—as does the island-type center console.
Tech-wise, the Nexo gets a voice recognition system complete with generative AI capability, and the usual complement of Android Auto and Apple CarPlay Functionality. There’s also a Vehicle-to-Load function that can be used to power various appliances either inside or outside the vehicle.
Digital side and center mirrors also offer improved visibility of the environment around the vehicle. As an interesting touch, Hyundai has also equipped the vehicle with a fingerprint authentication system as part of the infotainment system—touting its use for keyless start, among other applications.
Where From Here?
On paper, the Nexo has decent specifications, and it looks great in photographs to boot. In all likelihood, Hyundai has built a capable and comfortable mid-size SUV with acceptable performance and good range on a full tank of hydrogen. All of these things are readily achievable. The challenge Hyundai faces is not to build a good hydrogen car. The challenge is to build a world that’s ready to accept one.
The simple fact is that most of the world doesn’t have hydrogen filling stations. No amount of engineering finesse in the Hyundai Nexo will solve that. The places that do have filling stations tend to suffer from mechanical problems and extraordinarily high prices. At current rates in California of $36/kg, a modern hydrogen vehicle costs about as much to run as a Dodge Viper, efficiency be damned.
Hydrogen cars were desirable for approximating “zero emissions” without the recharging headaches of electric vehicles. However, past decades have seen EVs grow far more capable in range and charging speed, while chargers have proliferated across industrialized nations. In the same period, hydrogen fuel cell technology has inched along at a snail’s pace, while the number of hydrogen stations has barely grown. In some cases, they’ve even gone backwards. In the US, for example, you’d struggle to drive your hydrogen-powered car more than 50 miles outside California. The question is simple—what good is a hydrogen powered car if you can’t fill it up with the universe’s lightest gas?
It’s not quite clear whether Hyundai, or any other automaker, has a solution to this problem. It’s probably got a great SUV on its hands, with the 2026 Hyundai Nexo due to land later this year in global markets. It’s just not quite clear who is going to buy them right now. Even if Hyundai doubled its sales in the United States from 2024, that would only be a total of 102 cars.
Image credits: Hyundai, Google Maps
Top graphic images: Hyundai, depositphotos.com
Its rear reminds me to Pontiac Aztek
I feel like the author and most of the commenters are missing the point here. This Korean manufacturer debuted the vehicle at a Seoul event. This is a Korean car, for Korea. The RoK has plentiful hydrogen infrastructure. Show me a map of Hydrogen range around Daegu, and its a different picture completely.
Apart from the butt looking a little Ssangyongesque, it’s pretty attractive!
So this has fuel cell and battery in a hybrid system, somewhat like an ICE/battery system.
It’s a ••••yundai ••••ydrogen ••••ybrid. ••••uh••••.
Also, reading across the front DRL-grille panel-DRL sweep I can’t not see – – •••• – -. So what is that for, Meccano Hyundai Monster? My Hydrogen Masterpiece?
They give away so much hydrogen with cars like this that if there were enough stations to get up and down the West Coast and as far east as Vegas, I would go for it. They’re already placed conveniently enough for my every day life, but I go on enough road trips to want a car that dos more than getting to and from work.
Plus those resale values are tragic. New ones are only on lease, though, right?
For my money, I’d avoid them as hydrogen users in Cali often complain that stations are out of order and it becomes really hard to fill up. It just seems like so much extra hassle compared to an EV for very little additional benefit. You can refill it fast on a roadtrip, except there’s nowhere to refill it beyond CA…
So now “great looking:” means looks like it was made of LEGO? I guess it’s better than the “hack and slash plus fake vents everywhere” look.
Hydrogen is effectively just an even worse battery.
I’ve seen Nexos around here (SoCal) on the streets and (more often) still in dealer lots for years now… since they first came out I guess. They’re interesting, but always struck me as a bit generic (in design) and I clearly recall there being a silvery dash/center console thing that looked annoying as F. I’ve never test driven one IIRC. This new one looks much nicer: like a butched out Ionic 5.
The hydrogen tanks in the fuel cell powered Toyota Mirai are apparently only supposed to be used for ten years due to them containing the pressure of the compressed gas inside. After that I’m not clear on what’s supposed to happen: do you scrap the car, or are you supposed to get new tanks fitted and if so, at what cost? Of course welders and scuba divers also deal with tanks of gas under pressure, and I presume/assume/log flume that they might exceed manufacturer’s recommendations about the projected lifespan of their tanks, so maybe a 20 or 30-year old Mirai is still probably safe to drive?
With that said, I don’t see too many first-gen Mirais on the road, even here in LA.
Also, were you making a joke Lewin, or does hydrogen actually make your voice higher if you inhale some? Of course helium does that (it does something to the vocal chords I think) but I didn’t know about hydrogen.
I assume there is a way to test and recertify the Mirai tanks just the way welding/scuba tanks are required by law to get recertified every 5-10 years (depending on tank material).
Probably have to pull the tank to get it tested, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t be able to be recertified.
It can cause asphyxiation.
Hydrogen does make your voice higher, yes – I checked! ;D
Not recommended to try yourself, there’s an asphyxiation risk
Looks great, the Aztek really was ahead of its time. I like that automakers are still experimenting. Hydrogen probably doesn’t have much of a future in passenger vehicles, but it’s not like they’re ignoring ICE and EV in all flavors so there’s no harm really.
EV’s have hydrogen whipped for personal transportation. It’s far more convenient to plug in anywhere there’s electricity. The power and range of EV’s are already leaving this thing in the past. 0-60 in under 8 seconds? My EV can do that towing a camper. 200ish miles of range towing? Again, my EV already does that. Round trip efficiency is terrible for hydrogen. Almost as bad as gasoline. It can be done to not emit CO2, which is the draw.
Maybe hydrogen for trucks or ships. EV’s make better passenger cars.
I like the front half. The rear half looks like someone was trying to reinvent a Pontiac Aztec.
That’s a whole buttload of components and complexity for the kind of power an N/A 4 banger can crank out without sweating. Is Big Hydrogen funding the development of these things, or are automakers really like “We should spend several million dollars developing a car that we will sell 5,000 of at a massive loss”?
> not just because it makes your voice higher
That’s helium, not hydrogen.
Hydrogen does the same thing as it’s lighter than the normal mix of Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Argon of the general atmosphere.
Any gas (that won’t kill you) that has a lighter molecular weight than Atmo will raise the pitch of your voice. Similarly, any gas that’s heavier will deepen your voice, such as Sulfur Hexafluoride.
There’s no need for the parenthetical qualifier. The lethal ones will do this as well, at least at first.
Who specified the wrong gas? Oh well, what could go wrong? Oh the humanity…
American high school periodic table:
-pledge of ignorance
-football
-recess
-bible
-lunch
-football
-recess
-football
-tutoring for all of the above
Actually it’s both!
EVs have won out largely because they are easy and can be implemented incrementally, not because they are a better engineering solution. From day one, everyone could charge an EV at home. The retail chargers added confidence and additional capabilities but weren’t strictly necessary.
Hydrogen would have needed massive investment in infrastructure to get going, and since this country has zero desire to maintain the infrastructure it already has and has a large percentage of its population that thinks science is from the devil, there wasn’t much chance of that.
The benefits of hydrogen are also primarily in areas consumers don’t see and, therefore, don’t think to exist. Hydrogen is everywhere and doesn’t require massive mines that destroy regional environments to produce.
If you could wave a magic wand and replace ICE cars with a new system of your choice, hydrogen would be a better system than BEVs. But that wand doesn’t exist.
Depending on the use case, EVs are a better engineering solution too. For the personal vehicle, it just makes sense to produce electricity, transport the electricity, “store” it in a battery, and then directly convert it into mechanical motion. The whole thing from electric generation to propulsion typically settles out to 50~90% efficiency.
Compare that to hydrogen, where you have to make the electricity, then use it to get hydrogen, then compress the hydrogen, transport the hydrogen, use the hydrogen to run the fuel cell, and then you propel the vehicle. This comes out to a 20-40% efficiency.
Now there’s times where that second scenario is preferable, but that’s largely hauling heavy things, long-ish distances. But that first scenario is the very definition of a “better engineered solution” when it comes to personal vehicles. Especially when you throw in existing infrastructure considerations.
I’m not sure if your efficiency numbers are correct for BEVs. Transmission losses are between 8-15%, and home charger efficiency typically tops out at around 90%. So, it seems like 80% would be a reasonable upper limit. But that is a minor niggle.
But the primary thing you aren’t accounting for is the material that goes into the vehicle. Hydrogen is everywhere, while the elements to make batteries are not. Those rarer elements require mines that create huge environmental disasters on local and regional levels. It is an issue separate from carbon but still very real.
As somebody whose favorite getaway (Boundry Waters) is under threat by mining companies who want some of that sweet, sweet battery metal, I have significant reservations about a BEV-only solution. Generally, I think PHEVs are a better deal because they massively reduce the amount of metal needed while still being able to run the vast majority of miles on EV power. The same solution could be done by replacing the ICE motor with a fuel cell. A 50-60 mile battery range and then hydrogen power.
Either BEVs or hydrogen requires the electricity at the source to be made sustainably of course.
What exactly do you think fuel cell electrodes are made out of?
That all comes down to how much mass is needed. Batteries are quite a bit more.
Your implication that the entire weight of these things (battery or fuel cell) is entirely the rare-hard-to-get metals is false though. So yes, a fuel cell has less mass than a comparable battery, it’s not exactly as straight forward when it comes to the amounts of exact materials.
Plus, how exactly do you compare a LFP battery to a PEM based electrolyzer stack?
What do you mean “how do you compare?” I am aware these things aren’t straight forward, that was part of my original point.
Just remember, hydrogen fuel cells often have many elements/materials that similarly require mining and what not. I.e. anodes, cathodes, electrolyte, catalysts, membranes, etc. Hydrogen can also be kinda nasty depending on how it’s sourced. Is it from natural gas? From ammonia? From electrolysis?
You mean you can’t just go out with a net and catch the hydrogen from the air?
The mass of the fuel cell is less and, therefore, requires less material. Again, I said if you could wave a magic wand and have the system in place. There are low-impact ways of producing hydrogen, but it requires more green electricity than BEVs.
Most hydrogen today is extracted from natural gas. Getting usable hydrogen from things like water is so inefficient that basically no one does it. And there’s nowhere near enough renewable energy production to cover it, so even if we committed to that you’d be burning coal to extract hydrogen.
The only way truly green hydrogen ever becomes viable at scale is nuclear energy, and given the current political climate around that it’s pretty much DOA.
I don’t disagree, but again, that was the magic wand part of my OP.
Fair enough. That’s a big magic wand. 🙂
At some future time, 2040 or 50, some grad student will write a PhD thesis about the prescience of the Pontiac Aztek, whose styling was so far ahead of its time, and which predicted vehicle styling trends for decades that followed, from Bentleys to Hyundais.
I may be alone here, but I really don’t think the Aztek is bad looking when compared with a lot of the stuff coming out today.
I’d vastly prefer to look at an Aztek than something like a modern BMW, for example.
I really do think it was ahead of its time!
If you look outside of the United States, there’s a lot of hydrogen infrastructure being built. In Asia, there are about 700 hydrogen filling stations in place already.
Companies are not making bets on hydrogen fuel cells because they’re idiots. They’re making long-term bets, because over the coming years The materials needed for battery electric vehicles are a finite resource, while hydrogen is functionally infinite it’s already becoming a winning solution for heavy industry, so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to see it continuing on two passenger vehicles.
Japan, Korea, and China are making significant public investments in hydrogen infrastructure.
It’s a niche technology in US passenger vehicles today, but it’s not a folly.
Wow, 700 filling stations in Asia, that’s like one for every 7 million people
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. You’d think it would be child’s play to bag it up for sale outside some sketchy bodega. Unfortunately, we have to deal with the realities of compressing and storing it, in addition to the fact that most major petroleum retailers haven’t committed to investments in the space to begin building a network of stations in the states.
Sure it’s wildly abundant, but it also pretty much doesn’t exist on earth without being in compound with something else. And separating it requires energy, which is kind of counter to the mission.
Unless…
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/france-worlds-largest-hydrogen-deposit
Find someone who loves you as much as automakers love this dead-end technology.
Yeah it baffles my mind that some automakers insist on keeping the false promise of the hydrogen vehicle alive.
For cost and infrastructure reasons alone, hydrogen has no future on any large scale.
They are just glorified PR exercises.