Toyota has a lot of money. If they wanted to make a thousand hydrogen stations they could have done it, even without the option of slow home charging. If hydrogen was a good fuel it would have been a reasonable option.
Even with lots of money, I think that’s a story of how to go bankrupt.
It was built out over time while early adopters had the ability to charge at home. It explicitly didn’t require being built up all at once because people could charge at home.
> Even with lots of money, I think that’s a story of how to go bankrupt.
Well on a pure product/market basis they probably never should have made these hydrogen cars at all.
I'd think Iridium satellite phone is a great example of this. Motorola spent $5B to setup a constellation of satellites to sell $3k phones. It failed. turns out spending a ton of money to create a market is a huge gamble and the market can move in unexpected ways.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellatio...
Zune, Windows Phone, Betamax, HD-DVD - maybe not perfect analogies, but there are lots of examples of people throwing lots of money at something to try to force widespread adoption and failing because the market doesn’t want it.
The other two don't work as well as infrastructure analogies.
I think it's rare for something without adoption to get taken up just because a larger player tries to use funds to force it to against the way the market is already going. I think Windows Phone is a pretty good example.
Hydrogen adoption had a lot of issues of which infrastructure was just (a big) one.
Listing it alongside actual failures like HD-DVD is disingenuous.
Gas stations.
"The first drive-in filling station [...] opened to the motoring public [...] on December 1, 1913 [...]. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks."
So gas stations have actually not been built in a large upfront effort, but existing infrastructure was used to distribute gas.
Other sources of Hydrogen simply can't keep up with power generation or transportation needs.
That's not necessarily true. Several years ago I have read somewhere that industrially water is not split by electricity (at least directly) but by heating metal plates to >1500 degrees Celsius and spraying water on them, or something like that. That's tremendous heat, but nowadays it's possible to reach so high temperatures by just using solar energy [1].
The technology is not yet feasible, but who knows, where it will be in 10 years... It also took some time for solar panel manufacturing to reach today's efficiency numbers [2].
[1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/hydrogen-production-th...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/sponsored/brief-history-solar...