What was announced as a 2050 pipe dream by Kawasaki, the company's hydrogen-powered, four-hooved, all-terrain robot horse vehicle Corleo is actually going into production and is now expected to be commercially available decades earlier – with the first model to debut in just four years.
Untrained people handling hydrogen just sounds like a bad idea. And for most part the talk about hydrogen as fuel is just to keep combustion motors around for longer.
Even space agencies hate dealing with hydrogen despite the extremely high fuel efficiency, because it’s a nightmare to handle and requires ridiculous design compromises in rockets. Hydrogen-fueled rockets have a limited number of times they can be loaded and unloaded (for example, scrubbed launches due to bad weather) before the hydrogen embrittlement makes fuel tanks too compromised to use safely.
The Columbia disaster happened because foam insulation (needed to keep the hydrogen a liquid in warm Florida weather) came detached from the big orange propellant tank and smashed heat shield tiles. That kind of insulation just isn’t needed with propellants that stay liquid at higher temperatures, such as kerosene (very common) or methane (more recent but gaining popularity). The whole space shuttle design was wildly unsafe for numerous reasons and it’s a miracle that more astronauts didn’t die in them.