Spotted this feature when trawling through the industry press this morning, written by the Detroit Times which readers might like to read. Here in Europe we often consider that the US are doing everything right when new technology on a large scale is being delivered. Read on....
When he first bought his Toyota Mirai in 2022, Ryan Kiskis was a happy man. He loved the idea of applying cutting edge hydrogen fuel cell technology to environmental consciousness.
“It’s a great car,” he said. “My background is an engineer, I’m a huge automotive fan, and I felt the the world was finally catching up with what we have to do” to cut greenhouse gases. Then reality crashed in.
He soon learned that hydrogen refueling stations are scarce and reliably unreliable. He learned that apps to identify broken stations hand out bad information. He learned that the state of California, which is funding the station buildout, is far behind schedule — 200 stations were supposed to be up and running by 2025, but only 54 exist. And since Kiskis bought his car, the price of hydrogen has more than doubled, currently the equivalent of $15 a gallon of gasoline.
With fueling so expensive and stations so undependable, Kiskis — who lives in Pacific Palisades and works at Google in Playa Vista — drives a gasoline Jeep for everything but short trips around the neighborhood.
“I’ve got a great car that sits in the driveway,” he said.
Bryan Caluwe can relate. The retired Santa Monican bought a Mirai in 2022. He likes his car too. “But it’s been a total inconvenience.” Hydrogen stations “are either down for mechanical reasons, or they’re out of fuel, or, in the case of Shell, they’ve rolled up the carpet and gone home.”
And don’t get Irving Alden started. He runs a commercial print shop in North Hollywood. He leases a Mirai. He too loves the car. But the refueling system? “It’s a frickin’ joke.”
The three are part of a class action lawsuit filed in July against Toyota. They claim that Toyota salespeople misled them about the sorry state of California’s hydrogen refueling system. “They were told the stations were convenient and readily available,” said lawyer Nilofar Nouri of Beverly Hills Trial Attorneys. “That turned out to be far from reality.” The class action now amounts to two dozen plaintiffs and growing, Nouri said. “We have thousands of these individuals in California who are stuck with this vehicle.”
Kiskis believes Toyota sales staff duped him — but says, “I’m just as irritated with the state of California” for poor oversight of the program it’s funding.
Toyota told The Times it is “committed to customer satisfaction and will continue to evaluate how we can best support our customers. We will respond to the allegations in this lawsuit in the appropriate forum.”
Hyundai also sells a fuel cell car in California called the Nexo, and although the the suit is aimed only at Toyota, the hydrogen station situation affects Hyundai too. Hyundai said it “shares the concern regarding the current state of the hydrogen fueling infrastructure in California” and that “we are also closely collaborating with government agencies such as the California Energy Commission, which provided a majority of the funding for public refueling stations.”
It’s more bad news for California political leaders’ attempts to turn the state carbon neutral by 2045. Zero-emission vehicles are key to that goal, but the state is already struggling with a bungled rollout of public charging stations. The top reason car buyers give for not considering EVs is lack of availability for public chargers, according to a recent J.D. Power market survey, which concluded that “concerns about public charging infrastructure are only getting worse.”
Fuel cell cars are a key pillar in the state’s decarbonization plan. The California Air Resources Board has projected that more than 10% of new cars sold in 2035 will be fuel cell vehicles, growing to more than 20% annually by 2045. That’s a lot of cars — 1.78 million new vehicles were sold in California last year.
Since hydrogen station growth has stalled and hydrogen prices exploded, fuel cell sales have stalled too. In the first half of 2023, 1,765 such cars were sold or leased. This year’s first half: 298.
Full story Refueling a hydrogen car in California is so hard that drivers are suing (detroitnews.com)
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