[hkarthik]

It's unclear if hydrogen had serious R&D problems, or just the go to market approach for hydrogen cars was flawed.

Hydrogen needed a Tesla-like company to strip away everything that made a car a car, and rip away all the legacy at once.

Getting away from ICE requires starting from the ground up, and avoiding picking up too much legacy auto baggage along the way. This is exceedingly hard to do.

Toyota branding their vehicles as hydrogen with the Toyota logo and trying to go it alone was sort of doomed to failure. They had no opportunity to build a buggy v0 of these vehicles with something novel and exciting to entire new customers because they had to convert the average Toyota consumer. They had to utilize the existing dealer network (and get them to buy in), and simultaneously work with governments to build up the infrastructure and work through government approvals.

I see a few of these Mirai's hanging around in California but nothing compared to the number of Model S, Model Y, and Model 3 that I see at every 4 way stop.

[WorldMaker]

There was a Tesla-like company that stripped everything away only to discover that Hydrogen is not economically viable for cars: Tesla. I don't know how much of the original "manifesto" documents of Tesla survive at this point post-Musk's takeover, but they were very public early on about pointing out Hydrogen as a huge red herring that traditional car companies threw way too much R&D money at and treated as a sunk cost to recuperate, and that was most clearly a direct "subtweet" of Toyota. Stripping a hydrogen car all the way down: In addition to an expensive to build fuel cell and an expensive to maintain "tank" for liquid hydrogen, you've got an electric motor and a need for a large battery. Why carry around the weight of an expensive fuel cell and an expensive to maintain "tank" when you've already got the ingredients for an okay BEV (electric motor, large battery)? Everyone without the sunk costs of say Toyota's massive multi-decade R&D effort should look at that on paper as a massive red herring and that you should just optimize your weight distribution for a better/higher density battery rather than waste weight/space on expensive fuel cells and tanks.

[WorldMaker]

To be fair, when most car companies began researching Hydrogen in the 80s there was no indication that bets on battery research and the incredible density wins we've seen in especially the Lithium-Ion family of batteries would pay off nearly so well. At this point though, the writing should be on the wall that hydrogen fuel cells can't compete with modern battery density.

[N1H1L]

Could you locate that original paper somewhere? Really want to read it

[panick21]

> Hydrogen needed a Tesla-like company to strip away everything that made a car a car, and rip away all the legacy at once.

That would not have worked. Because a startup could never finance a hydrogen infrastructure like Tesla did for charging. Its simply 10-100x more expensive to do and not practical or green.

Even Toyota and co haven't managed hydrogen infrastructure even in Japan where they had a policy and have been going at it for decade.

Beyond that building the cars is insanely complex, expensive and hard to automate. Fuel-cell mass production is and was even less mature that then battery mass production.

The reason there is not Tesla for Hydrogen because a Tesla for Hydrogen was not actually a practical thing.

Musk himself laughed at a reporter who asked him in 2013 and called them 'fool cells', point out that discussions was not worth it, and the next 5-10 years would clearly show it.