Toyota's fuel cell is warranted for 15 years. After that, you probably would get a new car anyway.
Using a E-CEM the Navy is extracting hydrogen from seawater, there are alternative approaches that people are looking at and so we will see where this winds up in a couple of years.
Yes, people also thought that gas stations would be blowing up too. Fortunately, enough people were open minded to continue figuring out ways to safely transport and store gas.
It is always amusing that some EV supporters accuse ICE-defenders as being close minded, then some turn around and have similar knee-jerk negative reaction to hydrogen, call them "fool cells", not keep up with the tech, etc.. LOL Sure, Toyota is spending $4B for PR benefits...sure, that makes sense. LOL. Double LOL.
There are a fair number of people here who have looked at the science and economics of hydrogen and it doesn't really make sense most of the time. It does have properties that make it very useful for space craft, but that's a whole different set of engineering problems.
This article lays out the waste involved in using hydrogen:
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/toy...gen-fuel-cell-vehicles-compete-with-evs-60374
There are quite a few others that make similar analysis. As you can see, if you start with 100KWh of energy and use it for hydrogen or electric vehicles, you get around three times the energy out of an electric vehicle than you do a hydrogen one. Now gasoline has even worse economy, there are about 100 KWh of energy in 3 gallons of gas (33 KWh per gallon for common automotive gasoline). With a typical car you'd only get about 90 miles out of those three gallons, but you can get over 200 miles out of the 69 KWh the EV has.
Hydrogen also has severe transportation and storage problems. People complain about vampire losses with EVs, it's much worse with hydrogen vehicles. Hydrogen is the smallest molecule in existence. It's so small it goes through everything and will leak out of any container. All you can do is slow down the leak with a good container. Liquefied it leaks out less readily, but to liquefy hydrogen requires cooling it down to below -240 C (the coldest possible temperature in the universe is -273 C). That takes a lot of energy.
Making hydrogen from water with solar powered electrolysis is possible, but that's limited to where you have the water and sunlight. The further you transport hydrogen the less you have. So if you make hydrogen out of sea water in Galveston, TX and transported it to Dallas, you'd probably lose 1/2 or more on the way. If you put it on a truck, you have to factor in how much energy the truck is consuming driving to Dallas. If you put it in a pipeline, the pipeline has to be an order of magnitude tighter built than oil or gas pipelines. The pipeline would have to be pressurized to pressures way higher than any other pipeline. A tiny leak could cause a staggeringly large loss of the hydrogen. If you want to liquefy it you have to keep the pipeline cryogenicly cold.
A leak in a hydrogen pipeline could also turn into a very dangerous situation, worse than a typical oil pipeline leak. Since the hydrogen is under incredible pressure, a leak would pump a very large amount of hydrogen out the leak before the pipeline was shut down. Fortunately the hydrogen would disperse into the atmosphere relatively quickly if it doesn't explode, but hydrogen fires are scary because they are hard to see.
Gasoline can sit in an underground tank for months without any problems, but a hydrogen station needs more hydrogen daily and will have losses of stored hydrogen even underground. A hydrogen fueled car that sits at the airport for a week may have a dry tank by the time the owner gets back from their trip.
The reason hydrogen tanks are only certified for 14 years is because as hydrogen leaks through the walls of a tank, some of it interacts with the atoms of the metal and makes it brittle. Hydrogen will also damage any other parts it comes in contact with.
Not all that long ago lead acid batteries looked like the only viable option for propelling electric cars. Back then, hydrogen looked like a more viable technology. But batteries have come a long way in the last 20 years and especially in the last 5-10 years. The Li-ion batteries in use in the pure EVs today are barely adequate for the job. Basically either the range sucks or the car is very expensive. We're on the cusp of all that changing with the Bolt and Model 3 coming soon, but today, that's where we are. There is a tremendous amount of research going into batteries right now. It's a gold rush and nobody knows when or where the next big breakthrough is going to come, but everyone expects it to happen at some point in the next few years. There are a lot of promising research projects.
There has been a lot of speculation why Toyota went all in on hydrogen. They have a yearly R&D budget of $10 billion. Toyota is throwing a fair bit of their own money at hydrogen car research, but governments are throwing money at them for it too. Even if it does cost them $4 billion, that isn't all in one year. If they throw 5% of their R&D budget at hydrogen fuel cells for 8 years, that's $4 billion there. 5% is not nothing, but it's a small slice of their overall budget.
