The Vergecast - A road trip on the hydrogen highway

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of hydrogen futures:  The Verge’s William Poor, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin head to California to figure out why hydrogen fuel cell technology, once a super-promising successor to gasoline, lost out to battery electric cars. They also put the embattled tech to the test with a road trip across California’s “hydrogen highway.” Further reading:  Check out the interactive map of our trip here, and the video version of the story here. Read Andrew Hawkins’ story about the future of hydrogen fuel cell tech here. Read Justine Calma’s coverage of federal green hydrogen programs here. Go deep into California zero emission transportation policy here. Credits: Fact Check by Jasmine Arielle Ting Thanks to: Bill Elrick, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership Michael McCurdy, California State Library Archival footage courtesy of Global ImageWorks, LLC Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Hydrogen Futures. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am trying to redecorate a bit. So if you watch the Vergecast on YouTube, you've noticed that we just recently got a really awesome new studio in our New York office. You may have also noticed that Nelai got a really awesome new studio in his house. So I'm very jealous of all of this, which has really led me to spend, I would say, an inappropriate and unnecessary amount of time trying to figure out my own. own background. I feel like everyone went through this like in 2020 when we all started being home more often. You started to be aware of kind of how your space looks on camera. I make a podcast on camera now and so I notice it more than is probably healthy or reasonable. And I've just been

trying to figure out how do we make this look a little nicer, a little more studio-ish and less like the basement slash home office slash guest room slash child play place that it actually is. So I suggested this to Liam, our producer, that maybe I want to do some stuff. He sent me a long list of things to do. He wants me to put blinds on the window. He wants me to move the guitar that's over here. But I think I actually just need to get rid of it because I don't play it enough or well enough for it to feel honest to have a guitar on the shot. I already put some books up that I think look nicer than the mugs that were there. The mugs are now up there. There's just a lot going on. Will I eventually put some like cool purple lights and go full YouTuber? Probably. It's going to happen.

I'm excited about it. If you have ideas for my home studio, video, please hit me up, ideally, if they don't cost a million dollars and won't make my wife very angry. Anyway, we have an awesome show coming up for you today. We're doing something a little different on the show today. Will Pour, our producer, got very interested in what I would call an alternate future for transportation. Right now, we're in the middle of this incredible revolution in EVs.

We're rethinking the way that charging networks work. They're being built out all over the place. There's huge money being put into it. Lots of companies. Every car company is suddenly in on. what if the future of cars is batteries? But that's not the only future that we could have had. And in fact, there was a minute where it looked like that wasn't going to be the future that we did have.

So Will and a couple of other folks on our team went out to California and went on a road trip to see what that future might have looked like and what we missed. All that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I have to move this stuff behind me because now I notice all the clutter and I hate it and I got to fix it. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week, unexplainant to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

20 years ago, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California announced that it was time to rethink the car. Thank you very much for a nice introduction. He argued that gasoline and other petroleum fuels were polluting the air and keeping us hooked on foreign oil. California was ready to get serious about a post-petroleum future. And the best technology to get it there was hydrogen. We will not just dream about the hydrogen highway. We will not just dream about the hydrogen fueling stations. We will not just dream about the hydrogen cars.

We will build it. This was 2004, years before Tesla got every. everyone jazzed about battery-powered electric cars. Batteries were promising, but another technology was farther along. Hydrogen fuel cells could power an electric motor using only hydrogen gas. The cars produced no emissions or by-products except pure water. Governor Schwarzenegger got very excited about fuel cells, and he proposed an elaborate hydrogen highway to support them.

The government would help fund a network of fuel stations, which would encourage automakers to build cars. More cars would lead to more stations, and by 2010, the plan went, every Californian would have access to hydrogen fuel. From there, advocates predicted a nationwide expansion. It could spell the end of the petroleum era in America. That is not what happened.

San Jose Snell Avenue under maintenance. Oh, offline? Since this morning at 1050, the station is offline. for repairing. 20 years later, I found myself driving across California in a fuel cell car, a Toyota Marai. Rolling again.

I was there to find out what became of that grand green vision of the future. We are 23 minutes away from the closest station. Today, there are hydrogen powered cars you can buy in California, and some stations to fill them up at. But the statewide network never materialized, let alone a national one. And those stations are failing. Maybe one pump worked for months at a time. Sometimes none of them worked.

The cost of fuel is skyrocketing. $36 a kilo is, and it's insane. And car sales are plummeting. I'm trying to take it back to Toyota. The hydrogen experiment is teetering on the brink. Right now, the auto industry is making this huge seismic shift to battery-powered cars. Why not hydrogen? Why didn't that version of history win out?

Who's still fighting for hydrogen today? And what's happening to the thousands of drivers still sticking it out with their cars? This all felt like a lot of questions that only a road trip could answer. So in June, I roped in fellow producer Andrew and our video director, Alex. The three of us flew to San Francisco, rented a Marai on Turo, and charted a course from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, along whatever was left of the hydrogen highway. Here to here, we are going there.

We picked up our marie in the parking lot of a mini-golf course outside San Jose, just south of San Francisco. It's a very ordinary-looking sedan. If it weren't for the little fuel cell badge on the back, you wouldn't know there was anything unusual about it. Under the hood, a Marai and a Tesla are surprisingly similar. They're both powered by electric motors, and a fuel cell is basically a battery. Just instead of pumping in electricity to store and use later, you're pumping in hydrogen

to react with oxygen and generate electricity on the fly. In other words, a Marai's hydrogen tank and a Tesla's battery are just two different ways of storing energy until it's needed to power the car. Oh, there's one other difference. The fuel cell creates a decent amount of water as a byproduct. In the Marai, it's almost a cup per mile traveled. So the car does need to pee. As the Marai drives, it occasionally shoots water out a little hole underneath the car.

You can also make it pee on command by hitting a button on the dashboard. Yeah, go ahead and start the car. The remote is in the middle you saw. The remote. The guy we rented from, Salman, gave us a quick tour of the car. It's a luxury car. It drives beautiful, actually. Once you drive this, you'll feel it.

The Marai has a classy interior and a flashy nav system with a gazillion cameras. The only oddity is this hump in the back row of seats. The main hydrogen tank sits underneath it. It makes sitting in the middle kind of awkward. Selman told us we'd love the car, but he wasn't sure about our travel plans. When I came to know you were in L.A., I was like, wait a second. I was a little uncomfortable. The problem is most of the fuel stations in California are clustered around the Bay Area

and Los Angeles. There's just one pump on Interstate 5 in between. It's at a place called Harris Ranch. We kind of need to refuel there. The drive to L.A. is about 325 miles, which is right at the max range of this car. But we also need luck, because apparently, hydrogen stations just don't work sometimes.

There's always a credit card issue sometimes. The card system is down. Sometimes the pump itself is down. Sometimes there is not enough hydrogen. Which makes our stop at Harris Ranch very high stakes. If that pump is down, then you're stuck. You've never driven down to... No, not yet.

Yeah, I didn't want to take a chance yet. Not exactly a pep talk. Oh, and there was one other FYI, the price of hydrogen. Two years ago, it used to cost like $50 or $60 to fill the whole tank. Right now, it's like $180, $180 to fill the tank. So that is killing everybody right now. $180 to fill up a sedan. Yeah, I don't think we budgeted enough money for the fuel for this trip.

Yeah, so that's why I got disappointed. I said, you know what, I'll just put on Tiro. Yeah. And live with it like that. And with that, there was nothing left to do but hit the road. Excited and suddenly very nervous. Thank you, Siri. Our first goal was to visit as many fuel stations as we could find in the Bay Area.

On paper, there are about 17. But according to the station finder apps we downloaded, lots of them were offline or under some kind of maintenance. All right, we're coming up on it. I never know, you never know what kind of gas station it's going to be. Almost all the stations here are operated by a startup called First Element Fuel, but they're co-located at Chevron or Shell or other gas stations. First Element leases the space from station owners. The pumps themselves are bright blue with these eye-catching awnings. Some of them are slotted right in between gas pumps. Others are set apart in their own little pads and parking lots. Well, let's try to figure this out. The mechanics of filling up a hydrogen tank are familiar enough. Insert a credit card,

select fuel, connect pump to car, hang out for five minutes. But unlike gasoline, these pumps are moving around a compressed, freezing cold gas, so there are locks and sensors to keep everything safe and reliable. The nozzle is a heavy metal cylinder with a collar that keeps the hose in place. It's all a bit of a learning curve. It says, uh, hide the yellow mark. I don't see a yellow mark, but I think pulling this sleeve down locks it. So we just push it in and then lock it. Oh! There it goes to the yellow. Okay. We're filling up. We tried fueling at most of the stations we visited. And we always got fuel, but we hit a glitch or two in just about every part of the process. The screens are both wigging out a little bit, but it seems like it's fine.

I don't know what door sensor means, but... Oh, I think it timed out or something. I gotta run my cart again. One constant struggle, the nozzle kept sticking to the car after we were done filling. I hate that. I hate yanking that hard. on anything. But that was just our experience.

We also talked with every Marai driver we ran into. Hey, excuse me. Do you have time while you feel to chat with us for our story? And their stories were more extreme. This is the third station we are right now. We came. Oh, you tried to go to two others?

Yeah, there's one station in San Juano Zen. This is one in Cupertino. Half of the time, these don't work here. Yeah. So they're either out of gas or there's the problem. And even sometimes it shows you to insert card. When you insert the card, it says transaction canceled, and it doesn't give you anything out. It just doesn't work.

It just doesn't work. Menadip and Rupesh have been driving their Marai for about four months, which for them has been a non-stop hunt for working stations. I had no idea just how frequently they run out of fuel or glitch or lose pressure and can't fill tanks completely. And it's always a pressure on you mentally because you never know which one's going to work. which one's not going to work. Fuel has been so hard to find that these guys have been stretching every kilogram.

That's how hydrogen is measured. When they drive, they accelerate and break carefully. They avoid air conditioning because it uses more fuel. And when the car says it still has a hundred miles left in the tank, they look for a station. Boy, so you have to really think about how you're driving the car. You have to focus on the road and also on your mileage here. Yeah, yeah.

Manatee bought the car, because of a huge incentive from Toyota. Every new or certified used Marai comes with a $15,000 preloaded fuel card. Toyota told us it's there to absorb any volatility in fuel prices. And that's not the only big promotion out there. So this car I got for $15,000, hard to beat, right? Rebecca said she went shopping for a battery electric car,

but she couldn't find anything for less than $40,000. But then, a Toyota dealership offered her that killer deal on a 2022 Marai with only 23,000 miles on it. Toyota's also been offering big discounts on Numerize. Earlier this year, you could get $40,000 off some models. That's a 60% discount. That's it. I'm paying a fortune in hydrogen, but it'll take something like 13 years. I did my math.

Okay. It'll take 13 years before this vehicle will come. cost me more than if I were to buy a 40,000-something electric vehicle. Rebecca loves her marai, so she's content for now. I'm going to stick with my marai as long as I'm in California. Menadip and Ruppesh, not so much. I don't think, to be very honest with you, after the gas cut is finished, it's not worth maintaining this car.

Menadip left us with some words of caution about our trip, which, believe me, we took to heart when we said goodbye to the bay and headed south for Los Angeles. No AC, go easy on the pedal. Yeah. Always know where the next station is. Yeah. Call the stations. Stick to the speed limit.

If possible, go below the speed limit. Try to be in the rightmost lane. This is not the road trip that we were looking forward to having. You know, I'm really sorry for spoiling your road trip. We can start with the windows down. Also, how fast do you think I should drive? We should play with the settings on the car to see it tells you how efficiently you're driving. On the road to L.A., I had a lot of downtime to think about everything I'd seen.

And most of my questions boiled down to, how did we get here? Which you can think about in two ways. There's the big broad version. How did hydrogen cars start out so promising, but stumble so badly? And then there's the more specific, why is it so hard to? to get fuel for your car. So as we cruise down I-5, let's start with the big how did we get here. For that, I called up Keith Wipke.

He's an industry veteran from the National Renewable Energy Lab. You did come to the right person I've been involved in hydrogen technologies for over 20 years. Keith took me all the way back to 2004 again. Back then, fewer people were talking about climate change the way we all are today. But California had a smog problem. had the worst air quality, especially in the Los Angeles Basin, and so they had a strong driver to clean up local air quality. Battery electric cars existed, but they were not the obvious air apparent to gasoline.

In fact, as a storage medium to power a car, batteries kind of sucked. Batteries were not good at the time. It was lead-ass of batteries, and nickel-metal hybrid was the up-and-coming thing, which, of course, is what Toyota launched their Prius hybrid with was nickel-metal hydride batteries. That was a challenge for batteries at the time, 80-90-mile range, a very heavy, a lot of compromises on the vehicle itself to get reasonable performance. So hydrogen kind of was being born into that era. Meanwhile, hydrogen was showing a lot of promise. You could get all the emissions benefits of a battery electric car without the battery.

Plus, fueling was a faster and more familiar process for drivers. It looked like a great successor to gasoline. and California got on board. I'm going to encourage the building of a hydrogen highway to take us to the environmental future. The original plan called for at least 150 stations by 2010, but that never happened. Around 10 demo stations came and went,

which were co-funded by a federal program. Everyone learned a lot, but it was an R&D exercise. By the end of the decade, lots of people were asking, where is this hydrogen highway? But in 2013, California reset and recommitted. It put up $20 million a year for stations, and between 2015 and 2020, at least 37 new stations came online. I do think that I and a lot of other people thought it was just going to be a bunch of dominoes falling, that the hydrogen stations were going to go 50, 100, 200 stations in California. The northeast market would launch and take off there, and then people like me in Colorado would maybe get a backbone

across interstates, and we would be able to drive a hydrogen car as part of our daily commute. The car companies played their part too. In 2008, Honda began leasing a fuel cell sedan called The Clarity. Toyota made a big splash with the Moray in 2015. This isn't just another car. This is an opportunity to really make a lot of. difference. The name we've given to our new car is Mirai, which in Japanese means future. The other fuel cell car you can buy today, the Hyundai NXO, hit the U.S. in 2018. So I've seen and witnessed various launches, and for me, each one of them felt like,

okay, this is it, now we just need more of that car, we need more fueling stations, and then we see the other companies launch, okay, that's further validation that this is going in the right direction. The fuel cell market has come a long way in 20 years. But along the way, something else happened, too. Batteries got good, good enough to power cars. And in the race to replace gasoline, batteries had some big advantages over hydrogen. I called up the Verges Transportation editor Andy Hawkins to explain.

And he started with the fact that we already have a power grid. With EV charging, it's pretty simple. You install the charging station, you plug it into the grid, and barring any software problems or anything else like that, it's good to go. It should work. That was a huge advantage in the early days of battery EVs. Drivers could just plug in at home. It's a different story with hydrogen. There needs to be a supply chain.

You need to truck the hydrogen in for where it's being produced to the filling stations, fill up those tanks at the filling stations. And then once the hydrogen has been depleted, the whole process starts all over again. Now, granted, it's taken years for a public EV charging network to mature. In fact, it's been a mess of competing standards and flaky charging ports. But it's getting better. And the reason reveals another huge difference between hydrogen and batteries. The hydrogen car industry, as it were, didn't have a Tesla. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Elon Moss.

Tesla hit the scene in 2008 with the $100,000 Roadster, and it has utterly defined the battery electric business ever since. Over the past 15 years, its cars have steadily gotten cheaper and more ubiquitous. And along the way, it also built a huge charging network, which is so good that pretty much every other automaker in the U.S. is now signing on to Tesla's standard. We're getting the entire industry realizing that Tesla has the best charging network. They have the best chargers, the most reliable.

We're all going to just end up using Tesla's, as we probably could have realized a lot sooner. In other words, say what you will about Elon Musk, and on this podcast, we surely do, but Tesla gets a lot of credit for dragging the battery electric market into existence, which is something that hydrogen just never had. There was no Tesla startup company that was out there innovating, taking its lumps, losing millions and millions of dollars in the process, but also generating lots of buzz, generating lots of hype and speculation amongst investors and on Wall Street,

in the government as well, and sort of proving eventually, ultimately, that there was going to be this huge untapped market for battery electric vehicles. In the end, the numbers tell the story. Battery electric cars and charging stations exploded across the country. Today, there are roughly 43,000 public charging ports in California alone, whereas hydrogen seems to be backsliding. There still is this plan that exists like state grants to companies to build out stations. The only problem is the companies that have agreed to do so are now backtracking on those plans.

Like, for example, Shell said that it was going to create a huge network of hydrogen stations in the state. But then they saw sort of like the writing on the wall and decided to start backing out of that plan. They declined a $40 million state grant to build like an extra $50. stations and then they went ahead and just closed practically all of their stations in California. Gotcha. So basically there's money out there and there just aren't takers for it right now. There's a pretty strong belief right now and sort of in California and elsewhere that battery electric vehicles, they won. Hydrogen could have, you know, surpassed EVs at some point, but over the last like 15 or 20 years, it's very clear that battery electric vehicles are the

preferred alternate technology for private vehicles. And high. hydrogen is kind of becoming a bit of a footnote. So there's the big picture, how do we get here? But that doesn't fully explain what we saw. Glitchy stations, the price of fuel, the shortages. To understand those problems, I needed to talk to First Element, the company that runs almost three quarters of the stations in California. So I called up one of the co-founders, Shane Stevens,

who was pretty candid with me. We've been doing some, I would say, field testing on customers to get this equipment kind of commercial ready to where it needs to be, right? And it's, you know, we didn't mean to do that, right? But we've sort of were forced into that situation because as we started operating these stations, we just uncorked all sorts of issues that needed to be addressed. Here's what happened. Back in 2013, the year California announced new funding for hydrogen stations, Shane was working at the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine. He watched the wave of interest in hydrogen build again, and he saw an opportunity on the fueling side of things. So that same year, he and two partners founded First Element. From there, we actually

got some initial financing from Toyota and Honda, and we were able to leverage that private financing and go get California state grants. We won 19 stations, and we were able to develop the initial network of hydrogen stations. First 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 kings or design flaws have been worked out. And 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. They 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, flimsyer 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.

And 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. The 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, right? 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. We've got to take a short break. We'll be right back.

Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel, comedian, writer, and floating head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page, and I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called, That Sounds Like a Lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines, and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this. But guess what? I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be like fucking annoying. Maybe an actor.

They go, feminism has gone too far. You go, why? Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. You're the one with a charmed life. Could be a politician.

Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs. We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio. So yes, you can watch it on YouTube or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news. But it is the place to feel a little better. It sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas.

Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today Explain drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. one, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse.

And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the real. mood up everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. That doesn't, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America

Actually. Let's begin. Because that was the one I had a foot in charging case all day. Okay. It'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? What you got? 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. There'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.

There'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. I better not take seven tries to get hydrant. 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. 236 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. Look, 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. We 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 steak out. It's a nice break from the road and the heat, but we are beat, and I am pretty sick of loitering at gas station. Finally, around 8 p.m., as dusk is falling...

Is that a Marai? 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, or...? 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. Yeah.

But, yeah, it's... You don't really see that many people. It's, you know, Harris' age. Billy lives in L.A., 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 L.A. It'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 more scenic drive. But is it feel... At the same time, you... Yeah, you get a little bit... 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. If you never run out of gas or fuel. 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. I have not used that at all. Yeah. So luckily, I mean, I've not come with. 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 L.A.

This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition. And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly, awkward to absolutely unhinged, and I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you're rich BFF. Cruising 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 very, 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? Okay, 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. And so a majority of hydrogen today is what you call gas. 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% of the electricity in the U.S. comes 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, a passenger. A passenger is a passenger. A passenger your 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. So 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. Turn right. Turn right. After another long stretch of Highway 5, we pulled into LA.

All right, here's the palm trees. 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? A little futuristic looking. They're a little snazier. We found lots of fuel sell drivers really quickly. And, well, here's your vibe check. It'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 never happened. Have you ever run out? Oh, of course. Yeah. Do you get towed? You get towed? We heard lots of familiar things.

Love for the cars, frustration around fueling. 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. Yeah. 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... Yeah.

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 waited five minutes for it to loosen up.

We thought we were pulling on that handle wrong or something. We 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, just kind of pour a little bit, just to loosen it up a bit. Do not pour water or spray chemicals on the nozzle. All in all, Ticaran 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. Right. 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. I owe 30 on it. That feeling of a bait and switch, we've heard that a lot. One Moray 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. Okay.

After I 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. Yeah, they consider that part of the deal. Gotcha. Okay. So now the resell value of the car is not what you thought it was.

No, it's not what I thought it was. I 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, talk them into a Marai. 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 Morai driver, Jonathan. What do you think you're going to do with it long term? Get rid of it. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I will. But I do like the newer models.

Don't get 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. 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. Super 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 tech.

You forget about it and just use it. And right now, hydrogen just isn't there. After 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 Marai? 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 maries and pushing them at huge discounts. During the Paris Olympics this summer, Toyota provided 500 maries 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? I 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 turn to move 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 a huge success. but it's dragged its feet on full battery EVs. Today, the company sells just one battery-powered Toyota and one model Alexis, compared to more than a dozen hybrids, and the Marai.

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 Marai. I put this question to our transportation editor, Andy. Why is Toyota sticking with the Marai? He's mystified, too, but he argued that it's not. not just about the Marai. 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. So 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 Marai, its success or failure might not matter so much. This is the big one. We've got to 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 L.A., 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 order, it's another 10 miles.

So, like, 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 Marai 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 bucks on gas. Road trip complete. It's a good, uh, dealable souvenir. The most expensive tank I've ever purchased.

In the back of my head throughout this story, I've thought a lot about laser disks of all things, the failed competitor to DVDs. I've wondered, is that what this is? Is this just an alternate history story? Uh, 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. First 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 stuff. stories with everybody. I 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 Moray 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. This episode of the Vergecast was produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpour. 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, the verge.com. We'll make sure we link in the show notes too. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. If 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 Verge11. We love hearing from you. Eli, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about all things tech news. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

Thank you.