An interesting second part of the program was that if you live near a hydrogen station but it's broken, Toyota will instead reimburse a rental car and gas for the rental, one week at a time but presumably for as long the hydrogen fuel station remains broken.
Currently hydrogen fuel if you can get it is about 15 quid a kilo in the UK, giving a tank range of around 400 miles for £80. This makes it a little more expensive than diesel, considerably more expensive than petrol, and roughly the same price as electric.
By comparison Autogas LPG is around 92p/litre (or about £1.80 per kilo) and in a very large heavy 4.6 litre Range Rover you get around 250-300 miles for your £80 tankful, depending on how heavy your right foot is.
Ironically the stack comprising fuel cells of different types is possibly very well studied since decades.
For me the Wells to wheel efficiency never made hydrogen worthwhile for short to medium distances and this battle is effectively over.
The other difficulties (low energy density, ability to leak through many materials, massive explosion risks, near-invisible flames, etc., etc.) are all inherent to H2 as a molecule.
Hydrogen is such a terrible idea it was never getting off the ground. There seems to be some kind of psychosis around it being the next oil and therefore greedy people want to get in early on. But this blinds them to the basic chemistry and physics.
It's coming from Toyota because Toyota can't wrap its head around not making engines. Ironically, the place hydrogen might work is airplanes where the energy density of batteries doesn't work.
Of course they can. Toyota sells BEVs. As time goes on BEVs will become a greater percentage of their sales.
There's a very well financed propaganda campaign.
Bind it to various length carbon chains.
When burned as an energy source the two main by products are carbon dioxide which is a plant growth nutrient, and water which is also essential to plant growth.
Environmentalists will love it!
And they can prise my turbo diesels engines from my cold dead hands.
It is actually less dangerous than other fuels, for the simple reason that it is extremely light and buoyant. A gasoline fire is bad, because the gasoline stays where it is until it fully burns. A hydrogen fire is less bad, because it will tend to move upwards.
If you assume a realistic fuel capacity for a hydrogen vehicle, the hydrogen tank will be both much larger than a gas tank and the hydrogen will be under extreme pressure. A tank like that in your car would be extremely dangerous even if it were filled only with inert gas.
Imagine we have this electrolysis plant, splitting up water to produce the hydrogen we need for an area. That's fine.
But it needs fed electricity to keep the process going. Lots of it. It needs more electrical power to split the water than combining it again produces.
So it starts off being energy-negative, and it takes serious electricity to make it happen. Our grid isn't necessarily ready for that.
And then we need to transport the hydrogen. Probably with things like trucks and trains at first (but maybe pipelines eventually). This makes it even more energy-negative, and adds having great volumes of this potentially-explosive gas in our immediate vicinity some of the time whether we're using it individually or not.
Or: We can just plug in our battery-cars at home, and skip all that fuel transportation business altogether.
It's still energy-negative, and the grid might not be ready for everyone to do that either.
But at least we don't need to to implement an entirely new kind of scale for hydrogen production and distribution before it can be used.
So that's kind of the way we've been going: We plug out cars into the existing grid and charge them using the same electricity that could instead have been used to produce hydrogen.
(It'd be nice if battery recycling were more common, but it turns out that they have far longer useful lives than anyone reasonably anticipated and it just isn't a huge problem...yet. And that's not a huge concern, really: We already have a profitable and profoundly vast automotive recycling industry. We'll be sourcing lithium from automotive salvage yards as soon as it is profitable to do so.)
Hydrogen wastes a large amount of energy.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur%E2%80%93iodine_cycle
and: https://www.jaea.go.jp/04/o-arai/nhc/en/research/hydrogen_he...
Interestingly, liquid hydrogen is nowhere near the most energy-dense way to store and transport it. I don't recall the exact numbers but absorption in a rare-earth metal matrix is said to be much better on a volumetric basis. [1] Still not exactly cheap or convenient, but it mitigates at least some of the drawbacks with liquid H2.
1: https://www.fuelcellstore.com/blog-section/what-hydrogen-sto...
It's hard to work with, and what's the point? For most uses, electricity supply is everywhere.
https://www.carscoops.com/2024/02/toyota-offers-crazy-40k-di...
The long term value of a car is only really relevant if one is constantly cycling through cars and needs the trade-in/resale value. If a car isn't viewed as an investment and/or the intention is to drive it into the ground, depreciation is purely positive because it means that there's insanely good deals on some great cars right now. Of course everybody's needs are different, but for a lot of people there's nothing that comes remotely close of the value of a gently driven, practically new 1-3 year old lease return EV.
The MSRP doesn’t matter. The S stands for suggested.
With all the recent outrage and lawsuits, I wonder how many buyers actually did their due diligence and weighed the risk before committing to them? Or maybe the huge fuel subsidy was seen as a win even if this event played out? Idk but I commend Toyota for taking the risk and going for it.
Edit: typo
"This new initiative reinforces Air Liquide's commitment to decarbonizing transportation and accelerating the shift toward sustainable and low-carbon mobility solutions."
https://www.airliquide.com/group/press-releases-news/2025-11...
Of course, Air Liquide would also profit massively from building hydrogen infra if it did become commonplace.
https://www.airproducts.com/company/news-center/2025/02/0224...
As they should. If the terms of the deal change, you need to start over with the business case and financials.
If you want someone to be mad at, it’s the politicians making these bad tax credit decisions. Not the companies trying to respond to the tax credit incentives. Getting companies to build things they otherwise wouldn’t is the entire purpose of tax credits.
Now, green hydrogen for ammonia, and Ammonia fuel cells? Yes.
EDIT: My understanding was wrong - it's produced locally onsite but via steam-methane reforming: https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-na...
Globally over 95% of hydrogen is sourced from fossil fuels, particularly natural gas wells. Electrolysis is very limited to niche applications or token projects.
Either way there aren't many trucks full of hydrogen zipping around.
This is akin to how almost all power used to charge cars, is not-green. For example, there are still Ng, coal, and other types of power plants. If cars switched to gas, instead of electric charging, then some of those could be shut down.
But the true point, is as we convert to more and more solar, we'll eventually shut down the last of the fossil fuel burner plants, and eventually the cars will all be green power sourced.
Same with h2. Getting non-polling cars out the door and into people's hands, is key. Eventually, where the power comes from will be clean. And really, we're already having issues with power infra, even before AI, so re-purposing Ng pipelines for H2 would be a great thing.
Furthermore, most H2 is produced by fossil fuel extraction. We aren't cracking water to get H2, we're pulling it out of the ground. Cracking water is hideously expensive.
All in all, combustion engines are more efficient than green hydrogen. That's the core problem. We simply don't have the absurd amounts of unused energy required for green H2 production. If we did, we'd be pumping fully half of that energy into the atmosphere as waste heat.
Hydrogen cars aren't going to happen. We won't have grid-scale hydrogen. It's just a terrible idea. Hydrogen is too difficult to handle and incredibly dangerous to store. The efficiency is so ludicrously bad that you would genuinely do better to create syngas from captured atmospheric carbon and burn it in regular combustion vehicles.
Avoiding carbon emissions is not the only concern in regards to the climate. Focusing on carbon and nothing else leads you to really dumb and bad ideas like piping hydrogen gas across the continent.
Ng pipelines are everywhere, so it makes perfect sense.
if hydrogen even gained widespread adoption, it would be mass produced via steam reforming of natural gas
(which is why the oil majors are the ones desperately pushing it)
Turns out compressed gas fuel is a big PITA.
H2 can be generated anywhere there is power. Any power that can be used to charge a car's battery, can be used to make H2. Yes, I'm sure you have 1000 reasons, but I don't really care, it's just not reasonable to discredit h2 because of made up paranoia.
We should embrace any way to get a clean running car on the road.
Only if it's also feasible to fuel that car in a clean way.
And looking at where the hydrogen would come from is not "made up" or "paranoia".
you are vertically integrated, you have billions invested in oilfields, refineries, distribution, and the retail channel ("gas stations")
if transport switches to electric, what's your role?
answer: there isn't one, you are completely redundant
but what if hydrogen took off instead?
if you produce via electrolysis, you only keep the retail channel
but if you can get H2 established, then you can do a switcheroo and feed in H2 produced from your existing natural gas infrastructure, and massively undercut everyone's electrolysis business
at which point you're back to the old days, just instead of selling gasoline from your oilfields, you're supplying hydrogen produced from their gas
... and that's exactly what they're trying to do
No. We should embrace the technically most feasible, which opens up new technology to the most people.
EVs are the clear winners. Every cent spent on hydrogen infrastructure is a cent wasted, because it could go to making the one feasible technology better. Arbitrary openness to technology long after it has been clearly established that the technology is inferior is not a good thing, it is a path to stay on ICEs forever.
Hydrogen is a bad idea. The only way to defend it is by pretending modern EVs do not exist, since they solved all the existing problems and offer numerous benefits over hydrogen.
Additionally the customer has already chosen and he has chosen the right technology, because the value proposition of an EV is far greater than that of a hydrogen car.
Most hydrogen fueling stations receive it from the next steam reformer, which will make it from fossil gas.
On the vehicle side, you can make a gasoline tank in pretty much any shape you want. We have lots of experience making batteries in different shapes thanks to cell phones.
High-pressure tanks only want to be in one shape. And it’s not especially convenient.
Batteries create a lot of toxic waste. I'm willing to live with that if it doesn't cause climate change but there is an advantage to hydrogen? What is the impact of H2 fuel cells?
The lead in automotive lead acid batteries today is almost entirely recovered and remanufactured into new batteries.
Yet the market still thinks differently. Lots of countries still keep subsidizing EV despite them already being mature technology for such a long time.
We didn't have to subsidize the smart phone to make it successful, we shouldn't have to subsidize electric cars either.
This way, for example, Alaska in the winter could conceivably get solar power from panels in Arizona.
With this sort of storage, Alaska in winter gets its energy from Alaska in summer.
If the grid is insufficient in a particular place or corridor, investing in upgrading it will provide a better long term solution than converting electricity to hydrogen, driving that hydrogen around on roads, and converting it back into electricity.
Storage is a bigger issue for sure.
Sure but they don't have electric vehicle recharging electricity.
They have run the pumps and power the lights electricity.
Hydrogen stations don’t. If you have to build new ones, especially if you have to supply them with enough power to create their own hydrogen for water, what’s the difference from just building EV chargers?
And if you’re going to add hydrogen to existing gasoline stations then same question.
If hydrogen was somehow able to use existing gasoline infrastructure it would make a lot more sense. But it’s not.
This like saying obviously we can distribute grain using gasoline infrastructure: after all, also both transported by trucks.
Here is the european charging station map https://h2.live/en/ Benelux countries, Switzerland, and the Ruhr area are most likely the best places to own this car
This was a €71,000 car four years ago. That is 86% of the value gone. And you were driving around on very expensive hydrogen (compared to diesel and BEV).
That original owner was probably doing all those miles on the free hydrogen given by Toyota.
I’ve driven my own vehicles through 65 countries on 5 continents, and even the most remote villages in Africa and South America had electricity of some form.
I’ve never seen a hydrogen filling station in my life. The idea we can build out that infrastructure faster than bolster the electric grid is laughably stupid. Downright deceptive.
Not sure that a fuel cell vehicle isn't just an EV with extra steps, however.
The other interesting thing about these cars is the output is water out of the tailpipe.
Battery electric is now pretty much inevitable.
None of this is to detract from the attractiveness of battery vehicles.
There's a bit of a movement for battery electric ships, but currently limited to short haul ferries. I have a suspicion this simply won't be "solved" for quite some time after car and heating electrification.
For flights, a combination of batteries for smaller, regional planes starting with "islands hoppers" now and SAF from either Biofuel or produced from Electricity (with Hydrogen as an intermediate step). Although I think that we might first see moves to reduce the 2x non CO2 Climate Impacts which can be much cheaper to tackle (such as Contrails).
For maritime applications, batteries when regularly near ports, probably hybrids with methanol for cross-ocean passage far away from coasts.
Feasibility is key.
The hydrogen also comes from water reacted (mildly endothermically) with carbon, and by further reaction of carbon monoxide with water.
C + H2O --> CO + H2
CO + H2O --> CO2 + H2
https://www.myartbroker.com/investing/articles/top-10-most-i...
At least it’s not as blatant of a green energy scam as the high speed rail to nowhere. In this case they actually built a few stations that worked.
Stations running out of fuel and stations going offline for hardware failures runs rampant.
Oh, and some stations might not be able to provide the highest pressure H2, so you might be stuck taking an 85% tank fill... and at nearly $30/kg and a 5.6kg (full) tank, that's an expensive fill.
Pure range is 500+ miles but not many Hydrogen stations.
https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/fcev-sales-in-japan-fal...
An EV is a clear simplification of an ICE. Add a Battery and replace the mechanical complexity of a combustion engine with a relatively simple electric motor. So many components are now unnecessary and so many problems just go away. EVs also make charging simpler.
Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
I just do not see a single reason why hydrogen cars would catch on. EVs are good already and come with many benefits.
Is it? Then why isn't it cheaper to produce and cheaper to own?
> Hydrogen cars on the other hand are very complex and also quite inefficient, requiring many steps to go from hydrogen generation to motor movement. And they require a very sophisticated network of charging infrastructure, which has to deal with an explosive gas at high pressures. Something which is dangerous even in highly controlled industrial environments.
It's a standard combustion engine, nothing special.
EVs aren't cheaper to produce yet, but battery costs are still falling and they will reach parity with ICE vehicles soon.
I spend more of my time pumping gas in my ICE car than I do waiting on my EV to charge. Quite a bit more time despite having a similar-ish mileage.
And yes, EVs can be more convenient also for street parking. It’s just an infrastructure problem and by now there are dozens of different solutions for every parking situation imaginable.
It’s frankly absurd reading debates about this online from Norway. It’s over. Yeah Norway has money and cheap electricity, that’s what makes it possible to “speed run” the technology transition. But other than that it’s a worst case scenario for EVs. Lots of people with only street parking in Oslo. Winter that’s brutal on range. People who love to drive hours and hours to their cabin every weekend. With skis on the roof. Part of schengen so people drive all the way down to croatia in summer. We gave EVs and Hydrogen cars the same chance. Same benefits. EVs won. End of story. Though a hydrogen station near me blew up in a spectacularly loud explosion so maybe that makes me a bit biased.
Is it more convenient than plugging in an EV overnight at home, and having a full "tank" every morning?
It is not.
Electricity supply is everywhere. More so than Gasoline supply, and far far more so than hydrogen supply.