Honda's latest concept car, powered by a hydrogen fuel cell engine. The car is filled with hydrogen rather than petrol and is the world's fastest high performance zero emissions car.
The hydrogen is pushed through a "fuel stack" somewhere beneath the arm rest between the driver and passenger, where it is converted into electricity which powers the engine. While conventional cars give out varying amounts of C02, this rather sleek beast emits only water vapour.
In June of 2005 Honda became the first car company in the world to lease a hydrogen fuel cell powered car to Jon Spallino, of Redondo Beach, California. During the 2005-6 auto show season, they showed off a concept version of their first purpose-built fuel cell powered car. Earlier this year they announced that the car would go into low volume production in 2008 and yesterday they allowed a group of journalists to drive the first two prototypes at the Laguna Seca racetrack along with the two of the current generation FCX cars. I was there.
The day began with a technical presentation of where Honda's fuel cell development has been and where it's going. Unlike most other car-makers working on hydrogen power, Honda is designing and building their own fuel cell stacks. The previous generations of stacks have been laid out much like the ones from companies like Ballard where the gases flow horizontally through the stack. This horizontal flow is what has led to one of the problems with fuel cells in cars, cold weather performance.Hydrogen is — by far — the most abundant element in the universe, but it's usually connected to something else, so it takes energy to strip the hydrogen from, say, the oxygen atoms in water. In order for the whole system to remain non-polluting, the energy used to "crack" off the hydrogen must itself be non-polluting. Honda's fueling station behind its R&D facility in Torrance, Calif., does that with solar-generated electricity. But that takes up acreage, and the Honda Hydrogen station covers maybe a third of an acre and generates just enough hydrogen to fuel one FCX once a day. Hydrogen is also tough to transport in bulk, has to be stored under pressure and is generally more difficult to work with than traditional fuels. Can all these challenges be overcome? Probably. But maybe not. And no one knows when the breakthroughs are coming, or from where.
