A road trip on the hydrogen highway

25:42First Element made a big push right out of the gates, and it got around 15 stations up and running by the end of 2016. That speed was a calculated risk. They built more, smaller, cheaper stations to prove out the network and encourage automakers to start selling cars. And the plan worked a little too well. The cars came more quickly, the stations were overwhelmed more quickly, and the customers drove the cars more than we anticipated early on. What became obvious to us is that this technology for hydrogen stations was actually not really ready for prime time commercially. The equipment that we're using in the field today, it hasn't gone through sort of hours of testing to make sure the robustness is there, to make sure that, you know, little design kinks or design flaws have been worked out.

26:30And then when it's used, you know, regularly every day on hundreds of customers, all of a sudden you start to see that it maybe doesn't hold up as well because it's never been tested under those conditions. Which lines up with our experience at the pumps. Lots of little quirks and rough edges. We had a lot of hiccups on uptime. We had performance issues. We had logistics issues on supplying the fuel, and we actually had a lot of fuel runouts to the station. First Element has spent years trying to fix that first big mistake. Its newer stations are bigger, more expensive, and more robust. They can store more fuel and dispense more at a time.

27:07They actually store hydrogen as a liquid now rather than a gas, which has been a lot easier. And, you know, the reliability is getting much better. than what it was as well. I don't think we're all the way where we could be, but we're now at a point where we see a commercially viable product. That also tracks with what we saw. We just had fewer hiccups using the newer stations, and drivers told us they were more reliable. But those older, flimsier stations are still there. They account for nearly half the overall network, and they're not going anywhere. We've invested quite a bit of money into permanent infrastructure that's in the ground, To upgrade the station is not really an option.

27:48And the other thing is we don't want to leave customers hanging that may be depending on that station, even if it's an older generation. So drivers are stuck with temperamental hardware and First Element is stuck maintaining it. So right now we're charging considerably more for hydrogen than what we'd like to be and what we think we should be. And that's not the only cause of expensive fuel. First Element and others have had a hard time competing for hydrogen against much bigger industries like oil refining and agriculture. There just isn't enough to go around. There have also been supply chain problems and other market issues.

28:23The war in Ukraine is even playing a role. So prices have been spiking, and not enough hydrogen is making it to drivers. But unfortunately, that's the reality of the landscape today. First Element is now staring down the barrel of a vicious cycle. The more the fuel network struggles, the less viable the cars look. It's the exact opposite of what they were trying to do by opening all those stations in the first place. Our transportation editor Andy said it best. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like enmeshed in like the worst chicken and egg scenario that you could possibly imagine. You know, like people aren't going to buy hydrogen cars because there's just there's no way to fuel them.

29:03Right. And then you're not going to have anyone building any fueling stations because so few people own the hydrogen cars. So you're just kind of like trapped in this limbo state. It's just not making it the right kind of argument to people who are out shopping for these types of vehicles.

29:22We got to take a short break. We'll be right back.

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31:10It's four o 'clock. We've been driving for about three hours, and we're somewhere in central California. Our tank is half empty, and it's time to start looking for Harris Ranch, our hydrogen oasis. So far, we see a lot of parched farmland. Andrew, what is your weather app telling you? See, right now it says 70. Oh, I just don't have service right now. Okay, now updated weather. What you got? Palinga 101. Excessive heat warning until 8 o 'clock tonight. A few more miles of nothing, and then an exit sign. There it is. You see it? Oh, Harris Ranch. All right. Harris Ranch is perfectly spaced between San Francisco and L.A., so it's a waypoint for all kinds of drivers.

32:01There's a Shell gas station and what is currently the largest bank of Tesla superchargers in the world. Over the years, though, the owners of Harris Ranch have made it a destination unto itself. They've built a massive Spanish hacienda-style hotel, multiple restaurants, and the only gift shop I've ever seen with a butcher counter. All right, there's the Shell station. We drive past all of this. Past palm trees, past a barbecue pit slash convenience store, past an under-construction RV park. And there, off on a lonely plot of concrete, is one first-element hydrogen pump. This is a very weird place.

32:43There's a couple flies in the car. Well, should we gas up? Let's do it. We pull up to the pump, get out, and my God, the heat. It just hits you. It better not take seven tries to get hydrated. The buttons are hot. Unfortunately, the pump doesn't care how hot we are. All right, it's done. That doesn't feel like a full tank's worth, but we'll see when we turn the car back on. Please seek attendant. We got fuel. I don't think there's an attendant here. I hope I didn't just break it for everybody else. Did you get a full tank? Well, let's see.

33:35236 miles. No, we didn't get a full tank. We start the process all over again. This time, the pin pad freezes, then gives us an input error. But then it resets and fuel starts flowing. Dispenser is... Okay, we're getting more hydrogen. We finally get our full tank, but then the nozzle gets stuck to the car. Again, 101 degrees, no shade, dwindling patience. I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

34:07Look, I know I'm harping a lot on these finicky pumps. And I know normal gas stations don't work perfectly either. But it's shocking how much trouble we've had in just a couple days of driving. And it's not hard to imagine frustrations like these dragging down the whole idea of hydrogen. Anyway, the nozzle finally comes free. We retreat to a picnic table under a tree and wait for other fuel cell drivers to show up.

34:38We wait for an hour. two hours, three hours. We watch cars come and go from the Shell station, the Tesla chargers, the convenience store. We get dinner at the barbecue pit, and we eat it while staring across the parking lot at the pump. We dub this, of course, the stakeout. It's a nice break from the road and the heat, but we are beat, and I am pretty sick of loitering at gas stations.

35:08Finally, around 8pm, as dusk is falling Is that a Mirai? I sprint over like a lunatic The driver, Billy, is happy to chat And he wants to know if the pump is working Did you guys just fill up? It was earlier today, no, we've been here for a few hours Have you seen anybody else? Nope Oh really? No, no one else Do you ever, do you see people when you stop here? Sometimes, sometimes But yeah, you don't really see that many people. It's, you know, Harry's age. Billy lives in LA, and he's gone up to San Francisco a few times. He even tips us off to a second route. There's a station in Santa Barbara a couple hours up the coast from LA.

35:51It's far enough north that from there, you can get all the way up to San Jose along Highway 101, as long as you drive conservatively and don't hit any detours. It's a more scenic drive. But does it feel a little scary? At the same time, yeah, you get a little bit anxious, because by the time you get to the next station, you have like 50 miles left. You have to plan it out. If you don't plan it out, it becomes a nightmare. Yeah. Have you never run out of gas? Almost, almost. But, I mean, Toyota gives you the service where you can, they'll tow it for free. Yes, that is another real perk that Toyota offers, free towing.

36:30I have not used that at all. So luckily, I didn't have to go with it. And that was the end of the stakeout. Billy filled up and left. It was fully dark out, and we were wiped. So we called it quits and found our hotel. The next morning, we shoved off for LA.

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38:39Cruising through a very hot and dry central California, it was hard not to think about the broader environmental mission behind this car. The hydrogen highway might have been created to fight smog, But today it's promoted more as a tool to fight climate change. And in that light, hydrogen is pretty controversial. You have this supposedly green fuel that's actually made in a not very green way. Justine Kalma covers all things energy and climate here at The Verge. I called her up somewhere along I-5. I wasn't driving. So tell me why this does not make sense for cars. Why should we not be in this hydrogen fuel cell car right now?

39:21OK, so there are a lot of reasons. So first of all, the majority of the hydrogen that we have today, even though it doesn't emit carbon dioxide, you know, when it's used to power a car in a fuel cell, that hydrogen was most likely made from gas. 95 % of the hydrogen made today comes from a process called steam methane reforming, which produces carbon dioxide emissions. It also depends on a supply chain that tends to leak methane. Those are two gases we're desperately trying to keep out of the atmosphere right now. Methane is a greenhouse gas pollutant that is even more potent in the short term than carbon dioxide.

40:04And so a majority of hydrogen today is what you call gray hydrogen. Meaning basically dirty. Now, there is such a thing as green hydrogen, fuel that's clean and climate friendly. So the way that green hydrogen is made is typically using renewable energy to power electrolysis, which is splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Right now, electrolyzers are pretty expensive. And green hydrogen is something like four times the cost of gray hydrogen right now. So costs have to come way down. To be fair, lots of power that's used to charge batteries isn't green either. About 60 percent of the electricity in the U.S.

40:48comes from gas and coal. And to pull off a clean battery electric future, we're going to need a lot more green energy and big upgrades to the grid. None of that is going to be easy or cheap. But even in an ideal future that's flush with green electricity, hydrogen is still less efficient. A passenger vehicle can much more easily plug into the grid and run on a battery that you juice up with renewable energy. So with hydrogen, you're adding another step to that, right? You're basically using renewable electricity to create the hydrogen to then run the vehicle versus you could also just run the vehicle on renewable electricity in the first place.

41:34So if the question is, where do we spend the hydrogen we're making? The answer might be things that are harder to plug into the power grid. There's more hype around it for industrial uses, for aviation, for shipping, because it's much harder to get a plane off the ground or to have a ship that is battery powered. Passenger vehicles are just so low down on the list. I didn't say turn right. Turn right.

42:11After another long stretch of Highway 5, we pulled into LA. Alright, here's the palm trees. 1 ,000 feet. Turn right onto San Fernando Mission Boulevard. We were excited to check out the scene. There are more fuel cell cars and stations here than anywhere else in the state. But we'd also read about a months-long hydrogen shortage. And our fuel map showed a lot of offline stations. I see it. It's glowing. Those blue awnings. Oh, it's nice looking. Are those? It's a little futuristic looking. They're a little snazzier. We found lots of fuel cell drivers really quickly. And, well, here's your vibe check.

42:51It's been awful, to be completely honest. I'm trying to trade it in for a regular car, like a gasoline car. We bought this with the idea of saving the earth or whatever. And, of course, saving for the gas, but it never happened. Have you ever run out? Of course. Yeah. You get towed? You get towed. We heard lots of familiar things. Love for the cars, frustration around fueling, flaky stations, brutal prices, range anxiety, regrets. We also saw one Hyundai Nexo. The owner, Tigran, actually solved a mystery for us. He told us why fuel nozzles kept sticking to our car. So I've been standing here for five minutes trying to yank it off.

43:32Yeah. And sometimes it just... Okay. Like right now is a good example. Okay, this has happened to me. So it gets like really cold. Like, you could tell there's, like, ice. Oh, okay. So that's, it is just, like, freezing. It turns out that the more the pumps get used, the colder the hardware gets from all the cooled hydrogen moving through. So the nozzle can freeze to the car. Oh, wow. Yeah, my finger almost stuck to it. So that was actually not bad. It took about 10 seconds. But other times I've literally sat, waited five minutes for it to loosen up. Oh, we thought we were pulling on that handle wrong or something.

44:08We thought there was some trick that we didn't know, and it's the freezing. It's just the freezing, yeah. I later realized that Shane from First Element had warned me about this. I even found a video from Toyota about it. At times, the nozzle may become temporarily frozen and unable to disconnect from the vehicle for several minutes. Do not try to remove it forcibly, or you could cause damage to the nozzle, vehicle, or dispenser. Shane had told me the problem was largely resolved, which doesn't seem to be the case. I met people here. They're like, oh, I carry a bottle of water with me, and I just kind of pour a little bit.

44:44Just loosen it up a bit. Do not pour water or spray chemicals on the nozzle. All in all, Tigran is at the end of his rope. Does it feel like you're just in this kind of pilot program? Yes. Yeah. But it wasn't sold like that. When I got it, it was like, oh, you just go to, it's like filling up your gas at a regular station. You just go put it in and you're done. And when it's working, it's fine. That's generally true. But most days, it doesn't just work. So what do you think you're going to do with the car long term? The resale value is very bad. Oh, God, you're just really stuck. Yep. I looked to trade it in for a Tesla, and Tesla's like, we'll give you$10 ,000.

45:24Yeah. I owe$30 ,000 on it. That feeling of a bait and switch, we've heard that a lot. One Mirai driver, Denise, says the dealer misled him about the value of the car. At the time of closing, they told me the actual value, this car was about$23 ,000. After it closed, they told me its actual value is$7 ,000. What happened? So I think what they do, they try to factor in the fact that they give you a fuel card for$15 ,000. Oh, they consider that part of the value of the car. Gotcha. Okay, so now the resale value of the car is not what you thought it was. No, it's not. It's not what I thought it was.

46:04I asked Toyota about this and they declined to comment on it, but they did confirm that the fuel cards are not transferable. Altogether, these stories started to paint a picture about how these cars were sold to lots of people. Over and over, drivers told us that they were shopping for a battery electric car, but someone, a friend, a salesman, the internet, talked them into a Mirai. It was a new, zero-emission, luxury car. It's like driving a Lexus or BMW. And it was priced like a Toyota Camry. It was a win-win. Except it wasn't. Here's one more Mirai driver, Jonathan. What do you think you're going to do with it long term?

46:43Get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I will. But I do like the newer models. Don't get me wrong, they're very beautiful. But it doesn't matter what model of the car comes out. It's just this. Yeah, if you can't drive it. If you can't drive it. Talking to these drivers made me think back to a very clarifying moment at Harris Ranch. During our stakeout, we got bored and wandered over to the Tesla area. And after hours spent listening to fuel cell drivers talk about hanging in there, meeting Tesla owners was a shock. Where are you coming from? Where are you going to? We live in Matika. We're headed to Anaheim to go to Disneyland.

47:22Super reliable and super easy to get charging everywhere. Yeah. So I'm excited, yeah. Road trips are amazing when you have a Tesla and you have the whole thing. They were all just so unburdened. That's the best end state for any new technology. You forget about it and just use it. And right now, hydrogen just isn't there.

47:49After everything we saw on this trip, there's one player I can't quite figure out. Toyota. Why is Toyota still so committed to the Mirai? In the first half of this year, about 322 fuel cell cars were sold in California. Total. For reference, during that same period, maybe 200 ,000 battery EVs were sold. In California alone. And yet, Toyota is still marketing Mirais and pushing them at huge discounts. During the Paris Olympics this summer, Toyota provided 500 Mirais to shuttle around athletes and bolster the green credentials of the Olympics, which actually upset a lot of environmentalists. So what's Toyota's angle here?

48:36I spoke with Craig Scott, the general manager of Fuel Cell Solutions. Craig said that hydrogen has been a big hedge. It's back to the foundational things of what are we trying to accomplish or trying to remove carbon to the tailpipe, and the only way to do that really in a complete way, in a zero-emission way, is there are two competing technologies, batteries and fuel cells. And so, you know, we wanted to make sure we had a good foothold in both. Toyota continues to hedge more than most major automakers. It made hybrids a huge success with the Prius, but it's dragged its feet on full battery EVs.

49:13Today, the company sells just one battery-powered Toyota and one model Lexus, compared to more than a dozen hybrids and the Mirai. Critics have spent years dinging Toyota for this, and the company does have a lot more battery models in the works. But it hasn't abandoned the Mirai. I put this question to our transportation editor, Andy. Why is Toyota sticking with the Mirai? He's mystified too, but he argued that it's not just about the Mirai. These companies have this technology. They want to use it in some way. They spent a lot of money, they've invested in it, and they want to get something out of it.

49:49So they're all sort of casting about and looking for ways in which this fuel source can be useful for future applications. Toyota is working on powering buses, trucks, and trains with its fuel cells. It's developing stationary generators. And Honda, Hyundai, and other companies are doing similar work. First Element is investing in truck refueling. This is what our environment reporter Justine was talking about. There are other places that fuel cells might make more sense. It's the next step in that hedge. If any of those industries go all in on hydrogen, Toyota and others will be there. And the Mirai?

50:27Its success or failure might not matter so much.

50:36This is the big one. We gotta see what the final price tag is. It's the end of our road trip, and we're at a gas station back in the Bay Area. Our rental was not point to point, So after we were done in LA, we had to turn around and drive back across California. We ended up taking the more scenic high-risk, high-reward route along the 101, the route Billy from Harris Ranch told us about. It gave us one last hit of range anxiety. If the first station is out of order for any reason, then it's another 10 miles to the next station. Which we have budgeted in. Yep. And if that's out of order, it's another 10 miles.

51:17so I could see this getting a little hairy, but so far, we're okay. We pulled into San Jose with 40 miles left in the tank. All in, we put about 875 miles on the car in a little more than three days. We also had to return the Mirai with a full tank, so we were treated to one last shock. 120 bucks? 130? What do we think? It's got to be more than the most. Okay. 4.605 kilograms,$165.78. That's a big finish for the road trip. If we'd been driving, say, a Toyota Camry, we'd have spent about$30 on gas. Road trip complete. It's a good, doable souvenir. The most expensive tank I've ever purchased.

52:15In the back of my head throughout this story, I've thought a lot about Laserdiscs, of all things, the failed competitor to DVDs. I've wondered, is that what this is? Is this just an alternate history story? A why the world went this way instead of that way kind of thing? After taking this trip, I don't think that's quite right. Batteries won, but I think that there's still some part of the future that's up for grabs. Hydrogen is still more portable than batteries, and it's a much faster way to move energy around. And there are still lots of hydrogen believers out there. California is funding new stations.

52:55First Element alone is trying to build 34 more right now. Honda just launched a plug-in battery-slash-fuel-cell hybrid car. The federal government is pouring money into green hydrogen production. My point is, that if-you-build-it-they-will-come energy is still out there. So, fuel cells may yet find their niche. Maybe the hydrogen highway will be full of semi-trucks. Or maybe it'll be a hydrogen waterway or an airway. I don't know. Here's one last thing that I do know. In spite of everything, it was weirdly fun to be part of the fuel cell club. Most of the drivers I talked to were so open and honest and helpful, it was great to swap tips and stories with everybody.

53:39I got the sense there was a community here, even if it was based on shared grievance. That's probably not the way that Toyota or First Element wants drivers bonding, but I got a kick out of it. Case in point, after we filled up at the final gas station, I happened to see another Mirai driver wandering from pump to pump looking at all the little screens. I asked him what was up, and he said he couldn't get his pump to work. The screen was frozen. I told him the pump we used was fine, and he pulled over to that one. And just like that, I was a fuel cell driver too.

54:36This episode of The Verge Cast was produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. It was edited and mixed by Andrew Marino. Fact-checked by Jasmine Ariel Ting. If you want more hydrogen in your life, we have lots more for you. There's a video version of this story, which you can find on The Verge's YouTube channel. We also have a fun story on the website and there's a really cool interactive map on the site where you can click around the route and see some extra videos and photos. All of that is on the website, theverge.com. We'll make sure we link in the show notes too. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

55:07If you have questions, comments, feelings, or hydrogen facts you want to share with us, you can always reach out at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. We love hearing from you. Nilay, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about all things tech news. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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