Shooting a gas tank is a bit irrelevant, unless you live in Beirut! But puncturing one (which is relatively easy) spills the petrol which is a fire waiting to start! True not all cars burn at the slightest tap (barring of course the legendarily flammable Ford Pinto) but enough do to be a BIG concern to firefighters who automatically attend most crash scenes. A handful of my close friends including the best man at my wedding are firefighters, this comes from the horses mouth!
The other point I want to make here is that production Hydrogen cars are not a fantasy or a prototyping experiment. In California, you can go into the Honda dealers (probably others by now) and buy an unremarkable looking, mid size, 4 door sedan, powered by a Hydrogen motor. James May tested one for Top Gear (that's how long ago it was) and found it good, performance more than adequate, range on a full tank in excess of 400 miles, fill time under 5 minutes, emissions, water vapour only, so effectively Zero! Even then, enough filling stations in California were selling Hydrogen to make ownership practical, the price of the cars was not as exorbitant as battery models and of course, you don't have to buy 10s of thousands of dollars worth of new batteries every 5 years or so! What's not to like?
My philosophy is, and has always been "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" and like you, I like petrol. But we are not going to be ALLOWED to continue burning hydrocarbons much longer, it just ain't going to happen. We must find another way, Hydrogen engines seems to me to be the answer, with maybe electric city cars as a sort of (possibly autonomous) self drive taxi in places where car ownership is not practical, like New York, Tokyo etc. Though notoriously militant NYC taxi drivers might have something to say about the "autonomous" bit!
One of my favourite Sci-Fi authors, the late Robert Heinlein, had this to say about human technological development.
It comes in 3 stages, the first is simple and not very efficient, the second is more efficient but complicated and the 3rd stage is refined and elegant, but by that time, it's generally obsolete! The case in point he mentioned was carrier aircraft landing, but it applies to most things if you think about it, my case in point would be steam locomotives!
Steve
_________________ '73 2 door Toledo with Vauxhall Carlton 2.0 8v engine (The Carledo)
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