The performance of a fuel cell power plant that decays, in an electric vehicle which makes frequent starts, is recovered by partially shutting down (65-67) the power plant. Recovery is enabled by a recovery enable flag (25) upon conditions such as vehicle using (22) low or no power (16), vehicle speed at or near zero (22), electric storage SOC above a threshold (23), and no recovery (19) during the last half-hour (or other duration). The recovery restart resets a timer (79) to ensure (19) that recovery is not attempted too often. The power plant then remains in a recovery stand-by mode (72) until a recovery restart flag (35) is set to 1 (74). The restart causes start-up of the fuel cell power plant (50, 52, 55), reaching an operational mode (57).