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The Norwegian Company Blamed for California’s Hydrogen Car Woes
A civil fraud case reveals that the hydrogen fueling stations promoted by Toyota, Shell, and Chevron never worked in the first place.
A California court has advanced a civil fraud case against a Norwegian company at the center of the state’s failure to build workable hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which has already left thousands of car owners in the lurch. A case involving allegations of fraud against Oslo-based Nel ASA is moving toward a trial in October 2026 after a California judge left intact the core claims brought by a major player in the rollout of hydrogen infrastructure in the state, Iwatani Corporation of America, a subsidiary of one of Japan’s largest industrial gas companies. The judge ruled that there was “active concealment,” citing examples including that Nel did not disclose the fact it that it had never built a working model of the H2Station nor sufficiently tested it in real-world conditions, and had no actual data to support their H2Stations’ performance claims.
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