2025 Honda CR-V e:FCEV First Drive: Road to the Future or Dead End?

Is the new fuel-cell-powered variant of Honda’s ubiquitous CR-V a clever bridge to a hydrogen-fueled future or a detour down a blind alley? Considering Honda will only build a few hundred examples, to be leased (rather than sold) to a few folks in one state, indicates the latter. Honda has big plans for hydrogen, primarily in heavy trucks, in construction equipment, and for agriculture. Light vehicles, not so much.

Still, if you want to contribute to the body of data surrounding fuel cell passenger vehicles—and if you live in California, home to all but one of the 50-odd hydrogen fueling stations that exist in America—then you might make a good CR-V beta tester driver. And to its credit, Honda has taken steps to make the CR-V easier to live with than existing FCEVs, with a novel plug-in option that allows the CR-V e:FCEV to take on (a limited amount of) electricity without hydrogen. 

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Plugging In and Easing the Strain

For those unfamiliar with FCEVs, they’re electric cars that use a hydrogen fuel cell rather than a battery to power the electric drive motors. The fuel cell combines hydrogen with oxygen from the air to produce electricity. FCEVs have tailpipes, but all they emit is water. The chief advantage over a battery electric vehicle (BEV) is that it takes about five minutes to fill up with hydrogen, far quicker than it can take to charge an EV.

At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work. We’ve had a couple of Toyota Mirai FCEVs on our long-term fleet—a 2016 Mirai and a 2021 Mirai—and we found fueling to be the biggest headache. We frequently encountered empty or broken fuel stations, and on at least one occasion we had to park the car until the stations were repaired. Station reliability improved over time, though the number of stations—about 50 in the U.S., nearly all concentrated in a triangle between Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento, California—hasn’t changed recently. Nor, apparently, has reliability; on the day we wrote this story, about 20 percent of the stations in California were offline.

Hence Honda’s addition of a 17.7-kWh battery to this new CR-V, which gives an advantage over the Mirai and the Nexo, Hyundai’s FCEV SUV. Unlike the small buffer batteries in other FCEVs (similar in capacity and function to the batteries in a hybrid like the Toyota Prius), the CR-V’s battery can be plugged in and charged, providing an EPA-rated 29 miles of range and reducing its reliance on hydrogen alone. The car still needs the fuel cell to operate at full power, but if your local hydrogen station goes down, your CR-V e:FCEV isn’t reduced to the role of lawn art—provided you can plug in someplace nearby. The battery also lets the CR-V extend its battery range through regenerative braking, just like a battery EV.

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A Special CR-V That Tries Not To Be Special

Honda set up a very short drive loop near its Torrance, California, headquarters, inviting us to drive both the e:FCEV and a gas-fed CR-V hybrid. At first, we had trouble telling them apart. The hydrogen version presents like a CR-V with a different front fascia; in fact it’s nearly 3 inches longer than other CR-Vs. All-new sheetmetal ahead of the A-pillar provides room for the running gear and fuel stack, the latter developed in conjunction with General Motors. Wheels, taillights, and body trim also differ, and of course there are no exhaust outlets in the back bumper. (Water from the fuel stack drains just ahead of the right-rear wheel.)

It's a similar story inside: But for the full-digital instrument panel (as opposed to the half-LCD/half-analog panel of other CR-Vs) and the push-button shifter found in other Honda and Acura models, the cabin will be familiar to any CR-V driver. Same for the back seat: The bottom cushion is thinner to accommodate one of the CR-V’s two hydrogen tanks, which lives underneath, but there’s no difference in space or comfort.

Cargo space is one concession to hydrogen. The second fuel tank eats up about half the floor space and is covered by a stairlike box. Honda came up with a clever load-bearing shelf that can form a load floor level with the top of the step. The back seat folds down, though it doesn’t do the magic-seat thing where the cushion slides forward; instead, it folds more or less level with the step.

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Driving the Honda CR-V e:FCEV

Step on the brake, press the button, and you’re ready to go. Like most PHEVs, the CR-V e:FCEV has the ability to drive on pure battery power (EV mode), to preserve the battery and run entirely off the fuel cell, or to charge the battery from the fuel cell. We imagine most driving will be done in “auto” mode, which mixes H2 and battery sources to maximize range. The CR-V boots into EV mode, but once you put the accelerator pedal anywhere near the floor, it switches to “auto” and stays there; you can’t re-engage EV mode without shutting the car down. Honda tells us there are a bunch of valves that need to open when the stack is activated and close when it shuts down, and they’re apparently trying to avoid too much stress on them.

Power-wise, the CR-V e:FCEV feels like a typical single-motor EV, accelerating strongly off the line before thrust trails off as speed climbs. Keeping up with traffic is no problem, but you won’t feel the explosive burst of acceleration you get from a dual-motor EV. Nor will you want to; in our experience, in situations where gas cars use more fuel, hydrogen FCEVs use a lot more fuel. 

The rest of the driving experience is, well, CR-V-like. Honda is the master of electric power steering, so it’s no surprise that the hydrogen-powered CR-V feels just as nimble as the other variants. Rear spring rates are stiffer to compensate for the weight of the tanks, but we noticed no detriment in ride quality; in fact it felt more settled than the hybrid on the one section of rough pavement we found. 

What? Huh? Speak Up!

We have to talk about noise. Aural refinement has never been a Honda strong suit, and the CR-V e:FCEV is no exception. When we ran the 2016 Mirai, we talked about the odd ticks and pings of its hydrogen fuel cell system. The second-generation Mirai all but eliminated these, but Honda didn’t get that memo. Among the noises audible to us are the whirring of a blower and a soft sonarlike ping-ping-ping at idle, similar to water dripping out of a faucet and equally annoying. The only upside was that it is drowned out by significant road noise once the car gets rolling. Honda says these were pre-production cars and that its engineers had noticed more fuel-cell-related noises in the example we drove than they expect in production models. Still, considering Honda’s lassaiz-faire attitude toward sound insulation, it’s safe to expect production CR-Vs to be less refined than the current Mirai, which is a bastion of quietude even by EV standards.

While the similarity to the regular CR-V might seem a bit dull—if hydrogen is the future, shouldn’t the hydrogen-powered CR-V feel futuristic?—we dig the fact that as different as this CR-V is, it feels so ordinary. One of our complaints about the second-gen Mirai was that, for such a big car, it was cramped inside; that’s because its largest hydrogen tank ran down the spine of the car. By putting the tanks at the rear, Honda makes no compromises on passenger space. 

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Will The Honda CR-V Relieve FCEV’s Biggest Pain Point? 

Unfortunately, prioritizing passenger space means less fuel capacity: 4.3 kg, as opposed to 5.6 kg in the Toyota Mirai and 6.3 kg in the Hyundai Nexo. Honda claims a range of 270 miles, 29 of which are provided by the battery. Keep in mind that Toyota claims 402 miles for the Mirai, but we rarely saw much more than 350 on the range computer. The Mirai is rated at 74 mpg-e (mile per gallon equivalent), but even with gentle driving, we only averaged 67.8, and we imagine the more upright CR-V will have similar problems hitting its EPA rating, which is only 57 mpg-e. 

That’s why the plug-in element—the “e:” part of e:FCEV—is so important. If our stewardship of two Mirais taught us anything, it’s that owner satisfaction with an FCEV is inversely proportional to the amount time spent trying to fill up with hydrogen. The CR-V’s battery charges quickly—less than two hours on a Level 2 EV charger or overnight (about 10 hours) on a 110-volt plug—and it’s a critical part of the equation. Charge nightly and keep your mileage low, and the CR-V can eliminate a lot of the H2 blues. 

Honda CR-V E:FCEV: To What End? 

It seems pretty obvious to us that the CR-V e:FCEV is more of a beta test for Honda, which sees the fuel cell as part of a larger ecosystem that forges a path to carbon neutrality. Should you sign up to be one of the few and the proud?

The way we see it, home recharging is the key element that will determine if the CR-V is less of a pain in the posterior than other FCEVs. That said, if you have a home charger, chances are that any electric SUV will be more convenient, as you’ll never need to visit a hydrogen station at all. Ditto any gas-electric plug-in hybrid vehicle, which offers two convenient fueling options: charging or, you know, gas stations. At least with the Honda, you don't need an expensive charging setup—we like that the CR-V plays nicely with a 110-volt outlet, the standard you find throughout your home—but if you have nowhere to plug in and you insist on a hydrogen-fueled vehicle, you’d be far better served by a Toyota Mirai or a Hyundai Nexo, which are more refined and go farther when the hydrogen tanks are full.

Still, we have no doubt Honda will find takers for what few CR-Vs they will hand-build. Yes, you read that right: The CR-V e:FCEV is built at Honda’s Performance Manufacturing Center in Ohio, same as the Acura NSX. We don’t yet know what the lease cost will be, but if it’s anything less than five figures—and we’re not including cents—it’s likely Honda is losing a lot of money on each one. The CR-V e:FCEV is an experiment, not necessarily a viable vehicle, and that makes it more of a detour than an on-ramp to the future. 

Still, we have great hopes for hydrogen in other aspects of our society. If this rolling laboratory gets us closer, then good for Honda and good for the folks who will lease a Honda CR-V e:FCEV, because the results will be good for all of us.