Research Note 01 · September 2026 · Energy transition · packaging & range
How much range do you get for a liter of car?
A fixed volume budget, split between battery, gasoline, and hydrogen storage, validated against a real vehicle, the Honda CR-V family, the only nameplate sold as a gasoline SUV, a hybrid, and a plug-in hydrogen fuel cell SUV on one platform.
Put a battery, a fuel tank, and a hydrogen tank in a straight fight over the same physical space in a car, and the outcome isn't close, but the reason why is more interesting than the result. This is a small model built to see exactly how much range a plug-in hybrid gives up, or gains, as you shift its storage volume between a battery pack and a tank, for both a gasoline range extender and a hydrogen fuel cell.
Updated September 16, 2026: several drivetrain-efficiency assumptions and the occupant-load figure were replaced with independently sourced values (see "How the model was built" and the sources below). The qualitative conclusion is unchanged; the exact kilometer figures moved as a result.
How to read it
At 0% the entire budget goes to battery, effectively a BEV with a dead engine or fuel cell riding along unused. At 100% the entire budget goes to fuel storage, with no battery at all. Everywhere in between is a real plug-in hybrid: some electric-only range, then a fuel-fed extension once the battery is depleted.
The dashed green line is what you'd get if you deleted the converter (engine, or fuel cell) entirely and gave 100% of the whole volume budget to battery instead: the pure-BEV ceiling for this exact packaging envelope.
What it shows
Gasoline wins by a wide and widening margin almost everywhere. At a quarter of the storage volume in the tank, close to what real plug-in hybrids on sale today actually use, the gasoline version already covers 959 km total, nearly triple the pure-battery ceiling. Push the split further toward fuel and the curve just keeps climbing, because gasoline's volumetric energy density so far exceeds what a car actually needs that there's essentially no natural ceiling within a realistic tank size.
Hydrogen never gets there. Even with the entire 440 L budget devoted to a 700 bar tank and no battery at all, the model tops out at 549 km, comfortably above, but not dramatically above, what a well-executed pure-battery version of the same car already achieves with no fuel system at all. The reason isn't fuel-cell efficiency, which is actually good: a hydrogen fuel cell converts stored energy to motion more efficiently than a small gasoline engine does. The reason is storage. Compressed hydrogen, tank included, stores about 0.64 kWh per liter at today's technology; a gasoline tank stores about 7.2 kWh per liter. That roughly eleven-to-one gap in volumetric density is not something a ~1.4× efficiency advantage can make up for.
There's one narrow region worth naming: below about 3% tank share, hydrogen briefly out-ranges gasoline, because a fuel-cell stack physically packages smaller than an engine, generator, and exhaust system, leaving slightly more room for battery. It's a real effect, and it's also the only place hydrogen wins.
| Configuration | Battery | Fuel | Electric range | Total range |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gasoline PHEV, 25% tank share | 33 kWh | 50 L | 139 km | 959 km |
| Hydrogen PHEV, 100% tank share | 0 kWh | 6.1 kg | 0 km | 549 km |
| Battery only, full budget | 80 kWh | — | 334 km | 334 km |
The Honda CR-V, by the numbers
The model above is built around the Honda CR-V's actual dimensions, not a generic "compact SUV" stand-in. Here's the full comparison across the three powertrains it's sold with.
| Spec | CR-V 1.5T (gas) | CR-V Hybrid | CR-V e:FCEV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Length | 4,694 mm (184.8 in) | 4,694 mm (184.8 in) | 4,765 mm (187.6 in) |
| Width (excl. mirrors) | 1,867 mm (73.5 in) | 1,867 mm (73.5 in) | 1,867 mm (73.5 in) |
| Height | 1,682 mm (66.2 in) | 1,682–1,689 mm (66.2–66.5 in, 2WD/AWD) | 1,692 mm (66.6 in) |
| Wheelbase | 2,700 mm (106.3 in) | 2,700 mm (106.3 in) | 2,700 mm (106.3 in) |
| Ground clearance | 198 mm (7.8 in) | 198–208 mm (7.8–8.2 in, 2WD/AWD) | not published |
| Curb weight | 1,586 kg (3,497 lb) | 1,702–1,781 kg (3,752–3,926 lb, by trim) | 2,023 kg (4,460 lb) |
| Payload† | ~386 kg (850 lb) | not published | not published |
| Seating | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Cargo, seats up‡ | 1,028–1,113 L (36.3–39.3 cu ft) | 983–1,113 L (34.7–39.3 cu ft) | 714 L (25.2 cu ft) |
| Cargo, seats folded | 2,166 L (76.5 cu ft) | 2,166 L (76.5 cu ft) | 1,727 L (61.0 cu ft) |
| Fuel / H2 tank | 53.0 L gasoline | 53.0 L gasoline | 4.3 kg hydrogen |
| Horsepower | 190 hp | 204 hp combined | 174 hp |
| Towing capacity | 680 kg (1,500 lb) | 454 kg (1,000 lb) | not rated |
† Honda does not publish GVWR or payload for the CR-V, common across this vehicle class since the figure depends on installed options and only appears on each individual car's door-jamb sticker. The one number here is a third-party aggregator estimate for a single gas trim, not a Honda-published figure; treat it as indicative rather than citable, and check your own door-jamb sticker for your car's actual number.
‡ Two sources disagree on gas and hybrid cargo volume: Honda's own press kit gives 1,028 L / 36.3 cu ft (gas) and 983 L / 34.7 cu ft (hybrid); a separate spec aggregator gives 1,113 L / 39.3 cu ft for both. This is most likely a trim or measurement-standard difference rather than an error in either source, but it hasn't been resolved to a single canonical figure yet.
How this compares to your own car: the packaging tradeoffs shown above apply directly if your car sits within roughly ±10% of the CR-V's dimensions, 4.7 m long, a 2.7 m wheelbase, 1,586 to 2,023 kg at the curb depending on powertrain. In a meaningfully smaller or larger car the shape of the curve holds, but the kilometer figures shift: a smaller volume budget compresses every number on the chart, a larger one stretches them.
How the model was built
This isn't a spec-sheet comparison of unrelated cars. It's one fixed packaging envelope, swept continuously from all-battery to all-fuel, so the only thing that changes between any two points on the curve is the split itself.
- Road load and consumption come from a synthetic drive cycle (45% urban, 25% suburban, 30% highway by distance, mean speed 48 km/h) run through a standard road-load equation: rolling resistance, aerodynamic drag, and inertia, with regenerative braking and a fixed auxiliary load.
- Fuel mass is integrated along the route, not held constant: as the tank empties, the car gets lighter and consumption per kilometer drops accordingly, exactly as it does in reality.
- Hardware is calibrated to the real Honda CR-V family: glider mass from the 2026 CR-V's published curb weight, engine mass from the actual L15B7 1.5T dressed weight, hydrogen storage density from the U.S. Department of Energy's own onboard-storage program record, and battery density from published LFP pack figures.
- Validated, not just calibrated: reproducing the real production Honda CR-V e:FCEV inside this exact model, at the volume split that car actually uses, lands within 4% of its real EPA-rated range, on a model tuned to none of its numbers except fuel-cell efficiency.
The honest caveat: this is a compact-SUV-sized packaging envelope with a synthetic drive cycle, not a regulatory test. Treat the curve's shape and the qualitative conclusion, that gasoline's volumetric advantage over hydrogen is large and structural and not a matter of fuel-cell efficiency, as the finding, and the exact kilometer figures as good-to-a-few-percent estimates.
Sources
- Honda CR-V (2026) curb weight and fuel economy — Kelley Blue Book; EPA ratings via fueleconomy.gov
- Honda CR-V e:FCEV curb weight and EPA electric range — Kelley Blue Book
- Hydrogen onboard storage system status (0.86 kWh/L, 1.71 kWh/kg, system level) — U.S. DOE Hydrogen Program Record 24006
- LFP battery pack density — BYD Blade and CATL cell-to-pack published figures
- Engine thermal efficiency (40% BTE) — Honda and Toyota manufacturer claims for current hybrid-dedicated engines (Honda 1.5L Atkinson >40%; Toyota Dynamic Force 40–41%)
- Traction chain efficiency (88.6%), WLTC cycle-averaged combined motoring/regen "machine efficiency," single-speed EV (arxiv.org/pdf/2006.04705)
- Fuel cell system efficiency cross-check, real Toyota Mirai dynamometer testing, DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
- Occupant load (1.75 persons at 60 kg): Jakarta private-car occupancy trend (Hanna, MIT working paper); average Indonesian adult body weight (Muljati et al. 2016)
- Full-vehicle specifications — Honda's 2026 CR-V Specifications & Features press release; Kelley Blue Book's 2026 CR-V EX, CR-V Hybrid TrailSport, and CR-V e:FCEV spec pages; TheCarConnection.com's 2026 CR-V spec aggregation; TowingSpecs.com, which documents the GVWR/payload gap in Honda's own materials
Model and analysis by Luthfan Akbar. Built as part of ongoing research into powertrain packaging and decarbonization pathways for private vehicles.