The Norwegian Company Blamed for California’s Hydrogen Car Woes

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 allegations center on a lesser-known aspect of the blundered roll-out: Iwatani is claiming that Nel duped it into buying faulty hydrogen fueling stations. And the case has provided a window into the extent to which these same stations were provided to and promoted by major players like Toyota and Shell—stations that have since been abandoned or shut down.

The judge’s ruling last month leaves Nel and its top executives—including current and former CEOs Robert Borin and Håkon Volldal—in the crosshairs. Iwatani’s central claim is that Nel, under pressure to sell a money-losing product, knowingly induced Iwatani into purchasing untested hydrogen fueling stations with false assurances of the technology’s real-world readiness.

Nel denies the allegations, and has put forward procedural arguments to get the case thrown out, saying that California does not have jurisdiction over the company or its executives.

In separate rulings, Judge James Selna of the Central District of California sided with Iwatani on the core claims, while dismissing several others, finding that California does in fact have jurisdiction and that the allegations go beyond a simple breach of contract and into the realm of fraud in selling the equipment, known as H2Stations.

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.

After the lawsuit was filed in January, Nel abandoned the seven Iwatani hydrogen fueling stations and executed a corporate spinout of its fueling division—which Iwatani claims is a means of shielding those assets from a potential court judgment.