Electric Vehicles

Batteries used to be pretty bad, so I expect they thought "since people already go to stations for petrol, they will be fine going to stations for hydrogen." Maybe they even thought they could get into the production/sales side of hydrogen, and get to reap huge profits from controlling a variable commodity like gasoline.

Turns out batteries got way better, and people enjoy fuelling their vehicles with a simple plug at home. Some people also gladly make the "fuel" with cheap solar panels. Electricity is just way cheaper and more adaptable, so people are making a pretty simple choice by opting to use it instead of hydrogen.

Imagine it's the year 2000, 25 years ago now (deargod). The idea back then was that you switch over to Blue hydrogen (still sourced from Fossil Fuels) and build out that market for Green Hydrogen. As a usability switchover, it's very close to Petrol as you can have petrol companies make and sell the hydrogen, so for the customers, everything is the same.

But, everyone dragged their feet on this. The government was successfully convinced that CC wasn't real, companies (Toyota, Honda) had Hydrogen with their loser teams that didn't make money, no one wanted to invest. Now we're 25 years later, the whole world has changed, but Toyota couldn't really change strategy because they never invested in BEVs (they wanted Hydrogen), but because Hydrogen also failed (and the ship has sailed on that now. BEVs are literally more convenient now) they're stuck.

To succeed now they need to admit they fucked up really bad, and that's going to kill their stock price, and that's going to basically end the company so they can't switch over to BEV investment this late in the game.