With the assumption that hydrogen is indeed &quot;Fool cells&quot;, some possibilities for why Toyota may still be pursuing it (not necessarily in any order. Largely listing for discussion and for thinking about later in more depth).
1) Japanese govt. incentives are sufficient to push Toyota and other Japanese companies to try and make Hydrogen work.
2) It&#x27;s a conspiracy between car companies and oil companies (I don&#x27;t see how this can work because I don&#x27;t see how car companies benefit.)
3) Car companies don&#x27;t like the fact that EVs have lower maintenance, because a large chunk of their profits comes from maintenance and repairs.
4) Car companies are basically behaving like Blackberry after the iPhone. Their current model works, and being incumbents, they find it hard to imagine a world that does not work like the current one.
5) EVs would be too much of a revolution and they would essentially lose all their incumbent advantages. FCV basically follow the same model and so they allow incumbent car companies to better fend off new entrants than if EVs became popular (I find it interesting that all the new entrants are EV manufacturers or rumored to be making EVs (Apple)).<p>Any other ideas?<p>Personally, I think #s 4 and 5 (both of which are basically blindness caused by incumbency) are the biggest factors. This is bolstered by this Toyota quote in the article:<p><pre><code>    “You may think 35 years is a long time,” Senior Managing Officer Kiyotaka Ise told reporters. “But for an automaker to envision all combustion engines as gone is pretty extraordinary.”
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The way Japanese manufacturers seem to be the only ones who are so uniquely focused on hydrogen, however, seems to indicate that Japanese policy is also playing a large role.