Carmakers Split on Fuel-Cell Future
THIS....Chevrolet Volt typifies battery-electric cars GM's Lutz wants to promote.
Or THIS.....Honda FCX Clarity uses hydrogen fuel-cell electric drive system.
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
The schizophrenic nature of auto industry in an increasingly green market was perhaps never more evident than this past week, as major carmakers split on the future of fuel-cell vehicles.
Larry Burns, vice president of research and development for GM, kicked things off Monday on a positive note for fuel-cell fans, talking up the importance of company's Project Driveway. That's GM's just-initiated 30-month test program involving 100 Chevrolet Equinox Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Electric Vehicles being driven by consumers in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, D.C.
Ready for Prime Time
"We just coauthored a paper with Shell that makes a compelling case that the hydrogen infrastructure is real, it's viable, it can be done affordably and safely," Burns told reporters covering an alternative energy conference in New York.
"So the next step here as we learn from these hundred Equinox Fuel Cells will be getting into the thousands. We see that happening within the 2011-2012 timeframe. And then once we get to thousands we need to get to hundreds of thousands and millions. We think that within the next decade that is within our grasp."
So far, so good.
But only hours later, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz was reading from a different page.
Batteries Better?
Addressing reporters at the Geneva auto show, he said that recent advances in lithium-ion batteries indicate that future electric cars might be able to travel 300 miles before they need to recharge, making them much more practical as a mass-market product than vehicles packing hydrogen fuel cells.
"If we get lithium-ion to 300 miles, then you need to ask yourself, 'Why do you need fuel cells?'" Lutz said, adding that fuel-cell vehicles are still far too expensive to be considered for the mass market. "We are nowhere near where we need to be on the costs curve," he said.
Toyota, Too
At a separate event at the show, Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe echoed Lutz's concern about the high costs of fuel cells, and he noted the lack of an infrastructure to produce and distribute hydrogen fuel to a wide swath of consumers. Those factors leave him with the impression that "it will be difficult to see the spread of fuel cells in 10 years' time," he said.
Fuel cells use hydrogen to create electricity and have been hailed as the technology that will power no-emissions cars of the future. GM was so smitten with the technology's promise several years ago that it essentially dropped its work on battery-powered cars to focus on fuel cells.
Assuming vice chairman trumps vice president, the world's two largest automakers -- Toyota and GM -- are now on the same page regarding hydrogen cars.
So, for the next two decades at least, is BMW.
Jochen Schmalholz, the company's clean technologies director, recently said BMW doesn't expect hydrogen fuel to be commercially viable for 15 to 20 years. And without hydrogen fuel, neither fuel-cell vehicles nor the hydrogen internal combustion engines BMW favors are very practical.
Fuel-Cell Fans
That might have caused some auto executives to squelch their enthusiasm for fuel-cell technology, but it didn't deter Dieter Zetsche.
The chief executive of Mercedes-Benz told reporters he is "very, very serious" about mass-producing fuel-cell cars and expects to see production of limited quantities of them in the B-Class Benz beginning in 2010.
He said he was sure the company will be making upward of 100,000 of the economically competitive fuel-cell models a year by 2014-'15.
Honda is also taking fuel cells very seriously. Its very-limited production FCX Clarity made its European debut at the Geneva show and will be available, as part of a real-world market test, to lease in three areas of Southern California beginning this summer and in Japan this autumn.
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- John O'Dell March 7, 2008, 6:54 PM
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- Alternative Fuels, BMW, Batteries, Daimler, Fuel Cell, General Motors, Honda, Hydrogen, Plug-ins and Electric, Toyota
Shell authoring a paper on why hydrogen is better than electric is like Exxon authoring a paper on why gas is better than electric.
Shell is PROVIDING the hydrogen! Please, let's not waste any more time on an obviously impracticable technology that uses many times more energy and money than battery-electrics.
That's the rub, xwfilm, is doesn't "use more energy" than battery-electrics because the current generation of batteries are so inefficient. Cost is moot at this point, as neither is anywhere near mass production, and future prices would only be speculation.
Personally, I don't see why not fleets run hydrogen internal combustion. But I'll spare everyone my opinion and leave it to the engineers to figure out. Problem with that is that they're pretty divided, which certainly isn't a good sign.
Both fuel cell cars and battery powered cars are just electric cars. One uses batteries to store the energy and the other uses hydrogen.
Batteries are far superior and will make fuel cells redundant long before they are affordable.
With hydrogen you will use electricity to free the hydrogen, consume more energy to compress it to 4000psi and then the fuel cell will just turn the energy back into electricity again (wasting more energy in the form of heat). Not a very efficient procedure.
Batteries skip all those steps. Same electric car as the fuel cell but minus the fuel cell and the hydrogen.
There have giant advances in battery technology in the past 10 years but little change in fuel cells.
It reasonable to expect practical electric cars on the market in the next 5 years and once they are common the price will fall fast as batteries improve futher still.
If you have been around long enough, you will remember the first fuel crisis in the 1970's. To me, that was the proverbial fork in the road for our country to develop alternatives to our dependance on oil. We took a baby step at the fork in the road, then Detroit said, we'll make more efficient cars,then Regan became President and his polocies were to go back to status quo. This continued into the 1990's when everyone with a family ditched the family station wagon or the Van, and opted for the Sport Utility Vehicle with it's normaly ineficient gas guzzling oil loving passion. In the midst of this California said we need a zero emmisions mandate,thus the electric vehicle. Then came the new NiMH Battery and all seemed to be headed back down that fork in the road, then GM and others said,"wait, wouldn't you like a civilian version of the Humvee like Arnold's??? California canceled the zero emisions mandate, and GM kept promoting gas guzzlers to keep profits up, and all the other auto makers followed suit, but then Japan said,"well how about taking a look at our Insight". That went by the wayside due to an Oil company buying up the patent on the NiMH battery technology and sueing for patent infringement. All this to say, that now that the Oil companies have us where they want us, we have found ourselves in a weakened economy, with an almost plumeting value of the Dollar, and oil prices heading skyward with the potential for a nut in Iran to destablize the Persian Gulf Region even further which was take a great toll on our economy, and what options are we given? Everyone wants the umbilical cord cut from the oil companies, but no one has a big enough pair of scissors! Personally, I think we have been dupped and we do not have the pleasure of time to develope hydrogen cars for as long as it will take. So for us Hydrgen technology at best is a long term remote possibility that I believe can only have half a chance if the Oil companies and automakers allow development of better battery technology for pure electric vehicles. Two more comments. Battery technology will not increase unless an oil company or possibly an auto manufacter buys the patent if it doesn't already hold it, and if it can't get it; then only then will battery technology possibly make the leaps to 300 miles per charge independant of any other form of Hybrid technology. Personally I think that a non-oil hybrid automobile is the best and perhaps the only long term path down that fork in the road to Freedom of Oil dependance. Only lessening a dependance on Oil will bring prices down!!!