For all the love battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids get these days, you’d think hydrogen is dead. It isn’t.

Oh sure, the Obama administration, smitten by cars with cords, wants to cut funding for hydrogen by 40 percent. California’s hydrogen highway has gone nowhere. We have no fueling infrastructure to speak of. And critics argue it could take decades for hydrogen to have an appreciable impact on gasoline consumption or CO2 emissions. But some big automakers remain convinced hydrogen is the technology best suited to moving us beyond petroleum, and they plan to start selling fuel cell vehicles in 2015.

“Hydrogen is the fuel of the future — and always will be,” goes the joke. But Mercedes-Benz, along with Honda and others, says the future is now. Three Mercedes-Benz F-Cell hatchbacks are rolling through the West Coast this week during an around-the-world road trip meant to prove the technology is ready for prime time.

“We are convinced of the great potential of fuel cell vehicles,” Christian Mohrdieck, the company’s director of fuel cell and battery development, said during a recent stop in San Francisco. “We want to convince the last few skeptics.”

Three neon-yellow F-Cell hatchbacks left Stuttgart, Germany, on Jan. 29, 125 years to the day after Karl Benz invented the automobile. They’ll roll through 14 countries in four months and rack up 20,000 miles apiece.

Automakers push hydrogen because it offers the benefits of battery electric vehicles — namely zero tailpipe emissions — without the drawbacks of short range and long recharge times. You can fill a car with hydrogen in minutes, it’ll go about 250 miles or so and the technology is easily adapted to everything from forklifts to automobiles to buses.

Mercedes plans to sell the F-Cell in 2015, though it is leasing them in limited numbers now. Toyota’s shooting for the same time frame for its first fuel cell vehicle, and Honda will be there with them with the FCX Clarity it currently leases to two dozen people in Southern California. General Motors still has the hydrogen Chevrolet Equinox, and Hyundai recently rolled into Washington, D.C., with the third-gen Tucson ix fuel cell vehicle.

These are real cars, not crazy concepts. The F-Cell is based on the B-Class sold in Europe. It has a 100 kilowatt (136 horsepower) motor that performs like a 2.0-liter gasoline engine. The car carries almost 12 kilos of hydrogen, stored at 10,000 psi in three carbon-fiber-reinforced tanks, and has a range of 250 miles. It gets the equivalent of 71 mpg. The hardware is packaged under the hood or under the floor, leaving plenty of room inside for five people and 15 cubic feet of cargo.

We took an F-Cell for a spin and found it … utterly ordinary. It drives, performs and handles like any nicely appointed small car. There’s nothing weird about it. To call the F-Cell unremarkable “is the highest compliment,” Mohrdieck says.

But the cars have never been the problem. Oh sure, they are wildly expensive. Earlier models would have cost $1 million or more had anyone actually sold them. That’s why automakers have leased the handful of fuel cell vehicles they’ve sent into the world. Even that’s expensive. The Clarity is $600 a month for 36 months; the F-Cell is $849 a month for 24. Both automakers include maintenance, insurance and unlimited hydrogen.

Toyota has said it has cut the cost of fuel cell vehicles more than 90 percent by using less platinum and other expensive materials. It plans to sell its first hydrogen vehicle for around $50,000. The F-Cell will play in the same ballpark.

“I can fully agree with Toyota’s projections on cost,” Mohrdieck says. “Fuel cell technology can be on the same level as diesel hybrids. That is my goal. That is Daimler’s goal.”

The biggest problem with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles has always been storing and distributing hydrogen on a large scale. Hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, is widely used in the aerospace, refining and food industries. We produce a lot of it, but it isn’t widely available.

Mercedes says there are just 200 hydrogen fueling stations worldwide, so Linde, the company providing the hydrogen for the F-Cells, built a mobile fueling rig for the trip. California, which has seen its much-touted love affair with hydrogen wax and wane, has four public stations. Nineteen more are planned by the end of 2012.

Clearly there is a long way to go, and even the most rudimentary infrastructure will cost billions. Advocates say we are — slowly — making progress.

Honda's solar hydrogen station prototype, installed at its R&D center in Los Angeles, uses solar-powered electrolysis to produce about 0.5 kilograms of hydrogen in eight hours. Photo: Honda

The Hawaii Hydrogen Initiative plans to have 20 to 25 stations throughout Oahu by 2016. The Gas Company, the state’s major natural gas provider, produces hydrogen and synthetic natural gas and delivers it via pipeline. The idea is to divert the hydrogen to fueling stations using pressure swing adsorption. Advocates of the venture, backed by GM and others, call it a cost-effective way of producing and distributing hydrogen — one that could be duplicated elsewhere.

Hydrogen startup SunHydro wants to build a “hydrogen highway” from Maine to Miami using solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen at privately funded stations. It opened its first station, in Wallington, Connecticut, last fall.

Honda, meanwhile, is exploring home fueling. The Solar Hydrogen Station uses a 6-kilowatt solar array to power an electrolyzer. It produces 0.5 kilograms of hydrogen in eight hours, enough to go 30 miles. Spokeswoman Jessica Fini says that’s enough for many people’s daily commuting needs, and Honda is refining the tech for home deployment.

Looking overseas, Norway has opened four hydrogen stations since 2006 and plans three more this year. Japan has a dozen stations and hopes to have 100 by 2015. Spain, Germany and Denmark have similar projects underway.

Proponents tout hydrogen as being truly renewable, and some of the stations slated for California will use solar electrolysis and other “green” methods of producing hydrogen. But most of our hydrogen is created by steam-reforming natural gas — and will be for the foreseeable future, says Spencer Quong of Quong & Associates, an advanced-automotive-engineering consultancy. Although energy-intensive, it is more efficient than refining gasoline, he says.

Hydrogen is most frequently distributed by truck, consuming still more fossil fuels. But a well-to-wheels analysis by the California Energy Commission found hydrogen still offers a net reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions compared to gasoline. The benefits are even greater when you’re using solar-powered electrolysis to produce hydrogen.

But at what cost? Proponents concede the technology, and the infrastructure that would support it, will require huge government investment. But the federal government is backing off. President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget reduces funding for the Department of Energy hydrogen technology program by 40 percent, or almost $70 million. DOE says the cuts are being made “in order to focus on technologies deployable at large scale in the near-term.”

Spongebob alongside one of three F-Cell hydrogen fuel cell vehicles during a stop in Los Angeles. (Photo: Mercedes-Benz)