How Toyota And Honda Accidentally Created A Black Market For The Universe’s Most Common Element

The rarer a substance is, the more expensive it is, and the more likely it is that a black market will spring up to supply it. Think drugs, human organs, or counterfeit handbags. Or, more recently, hydrogen—which has a wild new black market springing up in California in which people are — perhaps illicitly — selling “fills.”

Hydrogen was supposed to be the fuel of the future. It seemed to be the perfect way to run green cars—cleaner than gasoline while retaining the benefit of fast refueling. Cut to 2025, though, and the hydrogen dream hasn’t quite panned out. Conventional battery-powered EVs have gone from strength to strength, while charger networks have improved rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, hydrogen remains an oddball fuel for oddball cars, only available in a handful of obscure locations on the west coast.

With hydrogen prices skyrocketing, owners of fuel cell cars have been feeling the pain. With no relief in sight, some enterprising individuals have started selling the universe’s lightest gas… on the sly.

Hydrogen Cars Cost More To Run Than A Dodge Viper Or Ford F-250

Back in 2021, there was hope in the hydrogen world. More cars were hitting the streets, and fuel was affordable. You could score hydrogen for as little as $13 a kilogram. True believers bought fuel cell cars like the Toyota Mirai and Honda Clarity, aiming to help the environment while avoiding the inconveniences of a pure EV. Sales have largely been limited to California, which is the only state with more than one hydrogen filling station.

Sadly, the economics have since turned sour for fuel cell vehicles. Recent years have seen the hydrogen price nearly triple, with many owners stuck paying up to $36/kg for fuel. Adding insult to injury, fueling stations often suffer breakdowns or run out of fuel, leaving owners scrabbling to get a fill. Without access to hydrogen, their cars soon become little more than attractive paperweights. Since Shell abandoned its hydrogen stations in 2024, the market is largely split between three major players—Iwatani, Air Products, and True Zero—with prices regularly exceeding $30 across the board.

I did a double take, $36 per kg
byu/Lil_cheep inMirai

Do the maths, and it’s obvious that hydrogen car owners are now in an awful situation. Take the Toyota Mirai, for example. It will drive about 72 miles per kilogram of hydrogen. At current prices of $36/kg, you’re paying 50 cents per mile in fuel alone. If you drive 10,000 miles a year, you can expect to pay $5,000 for gas. Hydrogen gas, that is.

Compare that to an old Dodge Viper, which achieves 12 mpg in the city with its 8.0-liter V10. Presently, premium gas is sitting around $4.80 a gallon in California. That pencils out to 40 cents per mile, making it $1000 cheaper to run those 10,000 miles than the Mirai. Alternatively, you could get a Nissan Versa, which does 32 mpg, and run it on regular gas for $4.40 a gallon. You’d be spending less than 14 cents a mile on fuel, saving over $3 grand a year on fuel!

Hydrogen refueling equipment is a little more complex than traditional gasoline pumps. Uptime is poor at pumps across California. 

The Cars Come With $15,000 Fuel Cards

Automakers are not entirely oblivious to this situation. To help entice customers to make the change to hydrogen, Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota have all offered $15,000 fuel cards with their new hydrogen cars at times. Toyota has even offered the same for certified pre-owned used models, too. At current rates, owners can expect a $15,000 fuel card to get them somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 miles assuming prices remain stable at current highs.

The idea behind the fuel cards was simple. Automakers would ease motorists into the hydrogen world by covering their fuel costs. However, they’ve inadvertently created a black market for hydrogen amongst owners desperate for cheaper fuel.

People Are Selling ‘Fills’

The way it works is remarkably simple. There are people out there with hydrogen fuel cards that they’re not using. Maybe they’ve parked up their fuel cell car and started using another car. Maybe their vehicle was crashed and is now off the road. Left with a card for thousands of dollars worth of fuel, they’re doing the only thing that makes sense. They’re selling the fuel to owners in need. With 18,000 or so hydrogen cars sold and leased in the US, are more than a few people looking for hydrogen on the cheap.

Like any good black market, if you want to buy illicit hydrogen, you have to know where to look. Head over to Reddit, and you’ll find a handful of people “selling fills.” The business case is simple. You message them, and arrange to meet at a hydrogen filling station. They fill your car, and swipe their fuel card to pay at the pump. You pay them—via cash or Venmo—at a reduced rate.

Where California’s hydrogen pumps are currently charging $30 to $36 a kilogram, you can buy hydrogen from these enterprising individuals for much lower prices. Rates sit at around $20 to $22 a kilogram—a discount of roughly a third.

Meanwhile, for the seller, they’re pocketing straight cash. As an example, the Toyota Mirai has a 5.6-kilogram fuel tank. An average fill-up of 3 to 4 kilograms could see them pocket $60 to $80. The fuel cards are otherwise valueless if you don’t want the fuel for yourself, so it’s easy to see why some are trying to cash them out in this fashion. It makes a lot of sense in cases where the owners are running up against the 3- or 6-year time limit on their cards, if they’ve still got thousands of dollars worth of credits to use.

Anyone needing to sell hydrogen?
byu/Longjumping_Matter_9 inMirai

Some desperate owners seek underground hydrogen sellers online, hoping to keep their cars on the road.

The problem is that you’re not really supposed to do this. Toyota specifically states that its fuel cards are not transferable. If you sell the vehicle back to Toyota or another buyer, or the vehicle is totaled in an accident, the fuel card is supposed to be deactivated. Hyundai says much the same, as does Honda. However, much of the legal boilerplate specifically refer to transferring the card itself. The shortform disclaimers don’t specifically say anything about meeting someone at the pumps and using your card to fill up their vehicle. The Autopian has contacted the relevant automakers regarding this situation.

Selling The Cards

Indeed, for the above reasons, it’s rare to see posts about selling fuel cards outright. The chances of a card being deactivated are nonzero, which could make a card with thousands of dollars of value instantly worthless. That’s not to say nobody tries, however. Here’s someone on Reddit:

Here’s a listing on OfferUp:

The description, in case you can’t see the image directly above, reads: “Hydrogen fuel card with appx. $1900 left on it. Sodl my Toyota Mirai and no longer need it. I’ll take $900. That’s $1000 free fuel. My loss your gain.”

I even found a listing on Craigslist:

“Hydrogen fuel card with balance $11000. Asking 6900 for it. It is good until 6-1-2027” reads the post. Then there’s the site hydrogenfuelcard.com. There’s not much info on who runs it or whether it’s actually operational, but there do seem to be a few fuel cards for sale:

It’s Not Clear How These Deals Actually Go Down

It’s also funny to contemplate how these deals must go down. Were I based in California, I’d have done some real investigative journalism and bought some bootleg hydrogen to tell you what it’s really like. Instead, we can only speculate.

The full terms of service of these cards aren’t publicly available. Regardless, in any sort of cashback or subsidy scheme like these, there are always rules and regulations to stop you profiting out of the deal. Cardholders that are reselling their fuel allowance likely risk the deactivation of their cards and forfeit of existing balances, or worse.

looking for gas card
byu/samcheeto inMirai

Without the subsidized gas card, Mirai owners are finding themselves hundreds of dollars out of pocket just to drive a few hundred miles.

One assumes you’re meeting these backstreet hydrogen vendors at a filling station, or nearby. Do they get in your car and roll up to the pumps with you to keep it looking natural? Or do they just stand by a pump waiting for their customers to show up?

Either way, it seems likely they’d be spending a lot of time at various filling stations to serve those in need. Maybe they just lurk around in an overcoat and dark shades, walking up to drivers as they pull in. “Hey, buddy…” a gravelly voice calls over from the shadows. “You wanna buy some hydrogen?”

Can You Make Money On This?

All this got me curious. What are the numbers like on this gambit? Can you make real money by selling expensive hydrogen at a discount, or are you wasting your time? Sure, it makes sense that you might sell some hydrogen off your card if you’ve got a Mirai you’re not driving anymore, just to recoup a few bucks. But could you buy a Mirai just for the card, and then come out ahead by selling the hydrogen?

I started by hunting for the cheapest possible Toyota Mirai that still came with a fuel card. Forget buying new—while the current Mirai can be had for around $17,000, you’re not gonna make that back with a $15,000 fuel card. Instead, you need to look at the certified pre-owned models.

Down in El Monte, California, I found what I was looking for. A 2019 Toyota Mirai for just $6,788, which comes complete with a full $15,000 hydrogen fuel card. It’s cheap, but by no means an outlier. You can find plenty of certified pre-owned examples for under $8,000 all over California. It makes sense—nobody wants to pay $8,000 for a car that will be more expensive to run than a Viper as soon as the fuel card runs out.

But let’s pretend we don’t care about driving the vehicle. We’re just interested in selling $15,000 worth of hydrogen on the black market. If prices remain steady at $36 a kg, you could get 416 kg of hydrogen out of your fuel card. Let’s then assume you’re charging punters a discount rate of $20/kg to fill up their cars. That comes out to $8,320—or $1532 more than the purchase price of the vehicle.

That’s a slim profit, and doesn’t take into account your time. Let’s pretend you were super efficient at dealing with random people on Reddit and Craigslist, and you could book in two fills an hour at 4 kg each. It would take 52 hours to cash in your card, so you’d be working for about $29 an hour. The figure gets worse if you factor in travel time and however long you got stuck at the dealership filling out paperwork to buy your Mirai in the first place. It sounds like a lot of fuss.

It’s not a bad job, but it’s probably not very stimulating either. The business case is also very fragile. If you get stuck waiting around at the pumps for owners to show up, your hourly rate is shot. Empty or malfunctioning pumps will also ruin your day, and that’s pretty common in the hydrogen world.

The figures get a little better if you can find a better price on hydrogen. There are a handful of pumps that will sell you hydrogen for $30 a kg, which would get you 500 kg out of your $15,000 card. Selling at $20/kg would then net you $10,000, for a $3,212 profit.  You’d have to work 62.5 hours to drain the card at two big fills an hour, but you’d be earning closer to $51 an hour. Not bad!

Sadly, unlike a normal job, it’s unlikely you could do this eight hours a day, five days a week. Instead, you’re probably going to have to do little fills here and there depending on the customers you can rustle up online. Plus, you’ll have to go where the hydrogen is. Stations are always going offline or running empty. At the time of writing, just 37 out of 65 stations are currently listed as “up” by H2-CA.com. Eight are empty, seven are out of order, and one is in limited operation, with a further 12 of unknown status.

There’s also the case of what to do with your Mirai when your fuel card runs out. Your best bet is to sell it to whoever will take it—but they’re fairly worthless without a fuel card. Nobody wants a middling luxury sedan that costs more to run than a Ford F-250. You might get $4000 selling it third party, or maybe you could trade it back to the dealer. Even if you got half of that, it would significantly up your profit in the exercise. People are getting wise, however—there are stories all over the Internet of Mirai owners ruing the day they took a bet on hydrogen.

You might be excited to pursue this course of action, but I would by no means condone that behavior. I don’t need to be a lawyer to tell you this is a bad idea.

Chances are your fuel card would quickly be flagged for suspicious activity, and there would be some term or condition that would see it suspended in short order. You might even risk accusations of fraud or chicanery. Would you go to jail? Maybe, maybe not. But will you get rich selling bootleg hydrogen? I highly doubt it.

In The End, It’s A Bit Sad

Fifteen years ago, the world was a very different place. We had only the limpest electric cars, lacking in both range and rizz. Hydrogen fuel cells seemed to offer so much more—clean emissions and decent range without the hassle of long recharge times.

Today, though, the world looks very different. EVs can go fast and far, and you can recharge them all over the country and all over the world. Meanwhile, you can barely sell a new hydrogen car even at $30,000 off, because the fuel is so expensive and you can hardly it anyway.

These conditions have created a very strange and twisted world, where a small handful of “gas-gophers” are “selling fills” on the cheap. Expect the hydrogen black market to last for a while yet—at least until hydrogen gets cheaper, or automakers abandon the concept entirely.

Image credits: Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Hydrogen Fuel Cell Partnership