Fuel-Cell Vehicles Get Facetime at Speed Festival

A weekend devoted to worship of fuel-swilling, carbon-spewing muscle cars wouldn't seem the ideal place to preach the gospel of clean transportation, but the California Fuel Cell Partnership pitched its tent just inside the entry gates to the Coronado Speed Festival this past weekend -- and got a lot of action.

Almost 1,500 people attending the two-day festival on Coronado Island in San Diego Bay dropped by the partnership's stand to take a drive in one of the eight fuel-cell electric vehicles on hand. 

“It’s actually a smart thing to do,” Hyundai spokesman Kevin Oates said of the decision to force-feed fuel cells to the speed crowd.  “It lets us reach out to the trend-setters. These are people who are dedicated auto enthusiasts, and they can influence the industry,” he said of festival-goers. 

“They’re auto enthusiasts,” he said, “so they’re enthusiastic about their muscle cars and racecars, but they’re also very open to the idea of the fuel cell as a door to the future of the auto.”

In addition to Hyundai's fuel-cell electric vehicle, the CFCP display at the annual show, staged at the U.S. Navy base on Coronado Island near San Diego, included prototype fuel-cell vehicles from Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Volkswagen.

Fuel Cell Partnership spokesman Roy Kim said that Chrysler has joined the Sacramento-based research and development cooperative group on its own since being sold earlier this summer by its German owners, breaking up what had been called DaimlerChrysler.

The newly independent Chrysler is preparing a fuel cell vehicle of its own to join the fleet based at the partnership’s research facility.

"With Chrysler, we'll have nine auto company members, and a total of 34 members," Kim said.  The roster includes fuel-cell developers, fuel companies, several transit agencies (hydrogen fuel cells work well in city buses) and a variety of state, local and federal government agencies.

The partnership's work centers on refining fuel-cell systems for automotive uses—making them smaller, cheaper and able to operate well in a broad band of temperature ranges—and developing efficient methods of manufacturing and distributing the hydrogen gas fuel they use to produce the electricity that powers the vehicles.

One recent breakthrough has been development of hydrogen fuel tanks that can store the gas compressed at 10,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, twice the compression that has been used. Increased density means more fuel on board the vehicle, which means greater traveling distances between refills.

The nation's first 10,000 psi hydrogen pump has been installed at the University of California's Irvine campus in Southern California —where a long-term fuel-cell vehicle test program is under way.

Nothing big is happening overnight in the development of cost-effective, reliable automotive fuel cells, but it does seem that little things -- and they add up -- are happening all the time.  

Posted by

John O'Dell October 8, 2007, 1:01 AM

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Daimler, Ford, Fuel Cell, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Toyota, Transportation Alternatives, Volkswagen