Almost all hydrogen is made from fossil fuels,

Presently yes. It's a by-product of natural gas production. There hasn't been much of a market for it. In Australia there's $230b of green hydrogen production projects on the table. Just one of which in Western Australia is going to produce 3.5m tonnes of green hydrogen per year.

Electricity to hydrogen to electricity is really wasteful,

Yes but electricity transport is very wasteful. There's plenty of sun in Western Australia, falling in desert areas where land for solar arrays is practically free.

It’s really difficult to store and transport,

There's problems yes, but the industry believes these are solvable problems. Toyota is the largest vehicle manufacturer in the world. Japan has several other very large vehicle manufacturers. They're all betting on hydrogen. They've invested $2.3b in a hydrogen supply chain which is already shipping hydrogen.

I think Toyota only promoted hydrogen because they knew it would give internal combustion more time.

Hydrogen doesn't provide power through "internal combustion". A hydrogen fuel cell produces energy by running hydrogen over a catalyst which produces water and electrical energy.

I don't have a good understanding of the storage and handling aspect, other than to say I think most of the leakage is from embrittlement, for which the primary defense is ceramic coatings, or periodically baking the pressure vessel. That is to say it seems like a manageable problem. Design limitations are also manageable IMO. Ok it's unfortunate it can't be made into any shape like batteries but it's also not significantly worse than a fuel tank.

For distribution, of course there's no network if no one is driving hydrogen cars. It's not that much of a leap to imagine that gas stations will start selling hydrogen surely.

Regenerative braking is possible for HEVs. The Toyota Mirai has it.

I don't really follow you with industry synergy. Like people are using batteries so batteries are best? What if we hit peak Lithium (or China puts the squeeze on)? In that case it would be better to have an alternative up your sleeve.

the transition picture with hydrogen is a lot lot worse than EVs.

That may be your opinion but I'm not convinced. Japan and Australia are going all in on Hydrogen. I don't know much about this, but it seems like there's plenty of smart people who believe it's viable enough to invest entire countries economic futures on.

I've provided a rebuttal for the other replies which you might find interesting.

In a scenario where you're considering using roof-top solar to produce hydrogen for your car then yes, the inefficiency of cracking hydrogen from water makes it unappealing.

The thing is, I don't think most of the world has access to roof-top solar and the portion that does will diminish as population and population density increases.

If you consider for example this project in Western Australia covering 15,000km2 it makes a lot more sense. The land (and associated sun light) is practically free. Hydrogen is a far more cost effective method of energy storage to get the energy from middle-of-nowhere-west-aus to market.

I guess one way to look at it is that hydrogen is a better option if the cost of the solar energy is less than a third of what it would be if you produced it nearby.

Every tech has problems.

"Oh we couldn't possibly make an electric vehicle because there's nowhere to recharge it"

There are problems storing hydrogen but we've been working on mitigating those problems.

Australia has $230b worth of hydrogen projects on the board. Do you think no one involved in any of those projects has realised that it's not possible to store hydrogen?