The reality is that hydrogen cars are terrible for consumers. Typical price per kg of hydrogen (roughly the same energy as a gallon of gasoline) in California is like $15/kg (although you do get like 50-60 miles of range per kg). There are very few fueling stations, they are specialized (need special permits due to explosive nature of the fuel, like gasoline… plus you need a cryogenic cooler) and expensive (like $1-2million dollars apiece), rely on truck delivered fuel (on-site electrolysis is rare and generally much more expensive), and you’re limited to basically one state in the US. Industrial hydrogen is cheaper, but that’s partly because it’s OVERWHELMINGLY made by steam reforming of fossil fuels.
Hybrids are super easily coopted to just reinforce the status quo fossil fuel centric energy system. They’re somewhat more efficient, sure, but it’s an almost insultingly small improvement compared to BEVs and what we need to actually achieve. It would keep the same dynamic we have today where politicians are hesitant to include a carbon tax or increase fuel taxes.
So how about a compromise: every new vehicle sold must have a plug, be capable of traveling at highway speeds in pure electric, and a 40-50 mile electric range. Including hydrogen cars (which, after all, already are hybrid electric vehicles incorporating a significant lithium ion battery to provide peak power).
This would provide a natural consumer pull for electric vehicle charging infrastructure to be standard in places like apartments and houses and on street parking without hurting anyone’s current use case. It’s enough electric range so that vast majority of people could do it good 80% of the driving on pure electric. Even if you think everyone will have hydrogen cars, this reduces the number of hydrogen fueling stations needed by about a factor of 10. Major car manufacturers have been able to produce decent plug-in hybrids like this for a decade now. And it’s enough range that you could run the car purely electric if you had some reason that you had to do so, like in tunnels or city centers (although some mechanism to enforce this would be needed).
It also reduces the total amount of lithium batteries needed by a good factor of five compared to all-battery, which is important in the near term as we ramp up. And the extra 10-15kWh or so of battery is fairly trivial if you already have an electric powertrain (which HEVs and Hydrogen fuel cell cars do). At automotive volumes, that’s only an extra $1000-2000 or so of lithium ion cells and a vast reduction (>$10,000-20,000) in operating costs over the entire vehicle’s lifespan. (And actually, fuel cells have a limited lifespan, worse than large battery EVs, so making them plug in hybrids would stretch that significantly.)
I just don’t trust Toyota on this. Non-plug in hybrids and hydrogen cars just aren’t sufficient or low cost enough to operate.