Decades Of Promises: 'Dude, Where's My Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Car?'

Designing, engineering, testing, producing, and selling cars run by anything other than gasoline engines is hard, expensive, and challenging.

Carmakers routinely lose money on the first generation of new technologies--Toyota, for example, with its first-generation Prius hybrid.

But while hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery-electric cars have had a long and torturous path to market, there's one technology that's taken even longer.

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Or as Bruce Lin puts it in his Catalytic Energy blog: "Dude, where's my fuel cell car?"

In one single, sobering graphic, he looks at 20 years of promises made by automakers to launch hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles.

In a series of quotes that pop up from the graphic embedded in his post, Lin highlights various predictions made by scientists, engineers, analysts, and executives for when fuel-cell cars would start to reach volume production and appear on the world's roads.

The first estimate, made in 1980, suggests that the year would be 1990.