The best technology doesn’t always win a standards war. There are some benefits to green hydrogen cars over BEVs, just like Beta had some benefits over VHS.

As far as I can tell, the only benefit is green hydrogen can be faster to fill as long as the filling station has had a rest between cars.

The disadvantages include some killers: the woeful energy efficiency ensures the cost of driving a FCEV can never be less than three times the cost of driving the same distance in a BEV, and that’s even if someone just waves a magic wand and a trillion dollars worth of hydrogen infrastructure appears out of thin air.

Fuel cell EVs kind of make sense as plug-in hybrids, where you have around 80km of battery range for daily use and use hydrogen for longer trips. You need a lot less filling stations and spend a lot less time using expensive hydrogen that way, but that’s not Toyota’s vision.

Comparing charging infrastructure and hydrogen infrastructure isn’t really an apples-to-apples comparison, because charging reuses a lot of pre-existing infrastructure. You can buy and drive an EV with zero charging stations, just plugging it in to an outlet in your garage overnight. In the early days there was a lot of charging from caravan parks and the like. I’ve got a portable charger that plugs in to the three phase outlets you find in parks and showgrounds. There’s no hydrogen equivalent to any of that, 100% of your energy needs to come from a FCEV filling station.