Compared to traditional ICE that burns petroleum products, electric/EV is by far the better technology for an advanced society. It wins hands down. If the Oil companies had not suppressed and held the development back for as long as they had, probably almost everything would have been electric by now.
Now that it finally being allowed, there is this great push to develop and improve it, as this was not done in previous years. It is akin to having been kept on steam locomotives while better technology was available, because the steam barons did not want to lose their monopoly on selling steam. Now don't get me wrong, steam power was truly great. But better technology does exist. Electric trains are far better.
In Tokyo, they have an electric train that does not even have a conductor. You can go and sit at the front of the train, where they have put large windows so you can see the city go by, because there is no conductor there.
Hydrogen as a fuel source has been studied and looked at a lot for many years. There have been ICE BMW's and public busses that have been tested running on hydrogen in countries like Germany and elsewhere. The problem with Hydrogen is storage. As it is such a small molecule, it is difficult to contain the gas. It will permeate the walls of a steel tank in which it is stored and could degrade the material over time.
Another technology is the use of fuel cells, that can be used turn liquid methane or other fuels into electricity, that then drives a motor, but it also has it's own set of issues.
As far as generating hydrogen "on the go", until this is proven to be feasible by someone not only showing it, but then also making it public, without asking for money, in other words giving it away so that anyone can learn the secret, it remains no more than a claim and a theory.
So far, no one has done that. Stanley Meyer may have built his car, and it may have worked, but he wanted to keep the "how-to" a secret. And so whatever he did do, died with him. The first thing people tend to want to do is get themselves a patent, so they can "own" their discovery and then hope to get wealthy from it. That is the mistake in my view. If you discover something that can benefit everyone, then it should be given away so everyone can benefit. Otherwise, the result is that no one benefits from it in the end.
So what Musk did, was to make the current EV technology that they developed open source and free, to anyone. Tesla did have patents, but then in 2014 did this:
All Our Patent Are Belong To You
Elon Musk, CEO, June 12, 2014
Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.
https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you
We can see the result of this now 10 years later. Now it's everywhere. There have been battery fires etc., yes, this is true. But it is because the battery technology had not yet been fully developed to be safe, with lithium ion batteries which carry a risk. The technology was held back by and in the West, for the sake of continuing oil profits for the people who owned it.
Now it is being developed by the East - mostly China. The new batteries they are making now are Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries, to replace lithium ion. These new batteries carry more energy, charge faster, last longer and they do not catch fire.
New technology always goes through a stage of trial and error. There used to be a risk of Diesel engines suffering from runaway. In fact, it still happens today. Diesel engines can run away, when they start burning the oil that is in the engine sump, and that can be quite scary for people when it happens because it's not easy to stop. It can even burst into flames if it's a big enough engine, although that does not happen normally.
Why I believe EV is better is mainly because it cuts out a big chunk of waste process (extracting, transporting, refining, transporting again, then burning it to produce propulsion). With Electric, you don't need that. Also, I've always loved electricity and have played around with it since childhood. I wanted to build an electric car, like the toy one I had. I just think it's cool