Toyota is one of the most trusted brands across the world. Their cars have extremely high resale value and are generally known to have long usable lifespans. Hydrogen issue aside, they are (at least currently) not 'far behind' their competitors.
The one thing that EVs require is an EV charger network to exist in the foreign countries that Toyota sells the cars to. Without an existing EV charger network, it becomes a chicken and the egg problem for Toyota since, as a Japanese company, it would likely face a difficult time getting financing to build EV charger networks in foreign countries.
Hydrogen fuel theoretically would just be an adaption of the existing petrol gas station infrastructure so the existing players/gas station networks would just need to switch over.
Now that ElectrifyAmerica is more "a thing", Toyota can start shifting strategies.
VW and Tesla/US car brands could move faster since they were required (VW) or had home court advantage and government support (Tesla/US car brands) to finance the US EV networks. The Korean autos switched earlier as they were probably more hungry and had less to lose on ICE than the Japanese incumbents.
There's also the game theoretical play that being the only major petrol based auto producer could lead to pricing power if the transition takes longer than expected.
I charge my EV at home. I’ve charged my EV on someone elses charge (because i needed it, not because I got a better parking space) maybe twice since i moved to an EV with a 180 mile range. Heck, even with my “first gen” EV with a 63 mile range, I charged at home 95ish percent of the time, and those days are behind us now.
$2k to run a 240v external outlet, $500 for a charge station, and you’re set. Apartment dwellers still have issues, but thats simply because govmt/demand hasnt insisted yet.
This could be solved today by using Tesla's Supercharging network, or at least their NACS[0] connector in the North American market. I know that auto makers don't want to rely on each other for _reasons_ but siding with Tesla would give them an instant charging network and completely solve the problem in one go.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/blog/opening-north-american-charging-s...
The fuel cell can't produce electricity fast enough to power the engines for proper acceleration and the battery doesn't have enough buffer.
FCEVs are chemical in the same sense that BEVs are, because a “fuel cell” is, like a battery cell, an electrochemical cell.
The only real difference is that the “fuel” and “waste” are inside a battery, but come from and go to the outside in a fuel cell, which means that an FCEV can be fueled (and exhausts) like an combustion engine vehcile, despite being fully electric.
So are batteries too
They're already a decade behind where they could've been. The main problem is not that it won't take them long to start, but that it's been so damn long already and they've wasted all that time and haven't even started in earnest yet. Market share takes time to earn and they've given competitors a huge lead for no real reason at all beyond their absurd fixation on hydrogen.
Think Titanic
I think most car companies underestimated how easy it would be to 'go electric'
Let's see how many power players inside Toyota try to drag down the company to try to salvage some dignity of the hydrogen guy