In Northern California, drivers in affluent Marin County rely on a single fuel station, which on one afternoon in late March had only enough hydrogen to fill up a few cars. (Three days later, it went offline due to “mechanical issues.”) On the other side of San Francisco Bay, Shell’s exit cost Berkeley, where fuel cell car sightings aren’t uncommon, its sole open station.

Across the state, the closures and downtime are leaving drivers scrambling to find fuel. On Reddit, one Mirai owner posted that their car had been towed twice recently after running out of fuel, as every hydrogen station within 25 miles had gone offline. A Sacramento-area tow truck driver chimed in that they tow several marooned hydrogen cars a month to the only fueling station still open in the state capital region.

Complaints about fuel prices are just as common. Filling up a Mirai, a Hyundai Nexo or a Honda FCX Clarity runs a California driver about $200 — the equivalent of paying $14.60 for a gallon of gas.

“The car is AMAZING but the fueling infrastructure and cost of hydrogen per mile is TERRIBLE,” wrote one Mirai owner on Facebook. On Reddit, a hydrogen fuel cell car owner in Southern California vented that, “The cost is the equivalent of driving a monster truck that gets 9 mpg.”

The sky-high fuel prices are discouraging even hardcore hydrogen enthusiasts like Tina Imahara. A documentary film editor in Southern California, Imahara bought her first fuel cell car, a 2017 Mirai, after working on environment-themed movies. “The car itself is incredible,” she says. “I lived 84 miles from my closest station when I first got my first one, so I really had to plan. There were some close calls when I was running on fumes.”

By the time Imahara upgraded to a 2021 Mirai — which came with a $15,000 fuel card — the number of stations had grown and she now lives close to one. But as hydrogen fuel prices soared last year, she reluctantly traded the Mirai for a battery-electric Toyota bZ4X SUV.

“We went right through our card,” she says. “Hydrogen was double the price of gas and we weren’t going to go back to gas.”

Just a decade ago, hydrogen cars’ future looked brighter. In 2014, I visited Honda’s North America headquarters in the Los Angeles suburb of Torrance to take a spin in the carmaker’s 2013 FCX Clarity. The sedan could travel 240 miles on a tank of H2, an impressive distance for an EV at a time when most battery-electric models had 80 miles of range. I stopped by a Shell hydrogen station near Honda’s corporate campus, where it took only a few minutes to fill the Clarity’s tank. It seemed like a game-changer.

When I returned to Torrance last month, the game had indeed changed: Honda discontinued the Clarity in 2021. I was there for a preview of the 2025 Honda CR-V e:FCEV, a battery-electric hydrogen hybrid version of the company’s CR-V compact SUV. The e:FCEV has a range of 270 miles and can run on battery power for 29 of them, mitigating the volatility of the hydrogen market and the unreliability of fueling stations. Honda’s pitch is essentially: Do most of your daily driving on battery power, charge at home, and save trips to a hydrogen station for longer journeys.

Honda has sold nearly 6 million internal-combustion CR-Vs in the U.S., and the e:FCEV I drove around LA wouldn’t look out of place in any suburban driveway. The ride is as quiet and smooth as EV drivers have come to expect. But the specs are nothing special: My Uber from the airport, a Tesla Model 3, had more than 300 miles of range. Honda anticipates leasing just 300 hydrogen CR-V’s a year to start, only in California and for a price to be announced later.

...continued

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.