For the cost equation, car manufacturers need to get about half of the job done by improving the technology. The other half deals with volume. The 30 cars Ford has on the road were all hand-built and custom-made, so there are no economies of scale. Increasing production volume will bring down the cost further.

On paper, fuel cells look great, said Nick Lenssen, an analyst at IDC's Energy Insights.

"We just haven't been able to make them work on an economic level yet. Even with some of the low temperature fuel cells there is complexity in converting the fuel into hydrogen onsite unless we eventually have some sort of hydrogen distribution system, which is decades away," he told TechNewsWorld.