I just saw this thing on Top Gear. FTW people!



http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/

Here's the episode. http://hessmo.com/Hessmo/TG_Season_12.html
Go to episode 7.

James test drives it in LA, and even has a short visit with Jay Leno at the Big Dog Garage.

All I can say is forget hybrids and battery powered cars.

 

but I did drive the Ford Fusion fuel cell car. In marketing copy, they sure sound good! But the fuel tank for the compressed hydrogen takes tons of space. There are few sources for the hydrogen, and in large quantities, current state of the art in fuel cells requires 10x-50x as much platinum per car than is used in current catalytic converters. To equip a significant portion of the light vehicle fleet with fuel cells would take more than the current world wide production capacity of platinum! Needless to say, hydrogen powered electric vehicles are even longer ways off than electrics or much better hybrids. Thank the "partnership for the next generation vehicle" program for so much money put into something with many more technical hurdles to cross than series hybrids like the Volt.

The claim of zero emission is somewhat true, if you only count the car. If you count the creation of the hydrogen, things get a bit murky... The cheapest way to do it is via dissociation of natural gas, and this has a carbon footprint. If you do it off the current electrical grid, then the carbon footprint varies from somewhat favorable (our here in the west coast with lots of hydro) to about the same or worse than current gas cars (if you're electricity comes from coal based power plants).

Anyway, while this is good demonstration of technology, this is a very, very long range solution. (Probably pre-mature for any end user involvement, but what they hay, it's' progress of a sort.) If we did Volt like cars with 100 mile range, we could get somewhere around 80% of the benefit of a fully electrified light vehicle fleet, while still using gas as a range extender for those than need to go many miles in a day, and charging batteries for those that don't have to drive too far at night....

Matt

 

Platinum. Well, the platinum used in catalytic converters could be redirected, and if we could wean people off of platinum jewelry and spark plugs......

 

you'd still be left with the fact that the hydrogen would come from natural gas....

If hydrogen cars are to become a reality, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome that make them at best a longer range solution....

Matt

 

Natural gas isn't the only source of hydrogen. Just currently the most convenient.

Two hurdles to overcome:

Efficiently (cost effective) creating hydrogen from water.
Fuel tank capacity.

 

And plenty of hydrogen fueling stations.....

 

I know beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that is one ugly car. I'm just sayin...

 

Nothing like riding around in a butt ugly hydrogen bomb on wheels.

 

It's better looking than the Prius, IMO, or the Insight (good Lawd...).

So we need a better way to produce hydrogen. I like the idea, and the emissions aspect is fantastic.

 

Hindenburg ?


Overall I say in the words of Jeremy Clarkson "your still driving a Honda"

 

I agree!! Isn't a windtunnel capable of coming up with something intersting?!?!?!

 

That's what I ask myself every time I see the bodywork design on our Formula SAE car. There's a time to use wings and there's a time not to use wings. When your average speed is about 30 mph, I guess it's time to use BIG wings .

Seriously, there are several hurdles to developing fuel cell cars. The thing is, R&D is the only way to find a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Even if you throw out the global warming argument, it's going to run out sometime and the longer we wait, the worse off we are going to be when it happens.

 

Ugly indeed!

I'm sorry but the Prius is way sexier then this thing.

 

Natural gas is the only cost effective way to get hydrogen now... The other ways are using electricity or superheated steam. Both cost a lot more to do than the dissociation of natural gas. At least if you did that at a central location, you could capture the CO2, but that takes some of the energy as well.

Once you have the hydrogen, you have to pressurize it (currently to 5000 PSI, moving to 10,000 PSI to get enough to go anywhere) or you have to cool it to liquify it. This takes lots of energy as well.

The point about the "hydrogen bomb" isn't quite valid. If your range on gas is 350 miles and the same car on hydrogen is 250, there's actually less energy in the hydrogen tank than the gas tank. It's just that you can't really see the flames from the hydrogen burning...

Really, hydrogen as an energy transport medium isn't that good, it's the emissions picture that is most compelling.

Matt

 

Matt is correct.

The car isn't in fact a bomb. The hydrogen is at such a high pressure, it will escape the tank and evaporate before it would ever have time to do any damage.

People have no idea how much energy gasoline has. Don't take it for granted.




As far as using a hydrogen separator to extract the hydrogen, its not anywhere near feasible right now. The energy it takes to process water into hydrogen to use a fuel is huge compared to just using a comparable fossil fuel.

 

This is a good example of why methane is a better alternative. We already have a large infrastructure. How many people have natural gas lines in their houses? Honda has a Civic that run on only methane. It comes with a wall station that will pressurize and refill your car for you in a reasonable amount of time.

Gas company trucks run on methane. Some city buses are CNG already. Taxi's in NYC are also running on CNG in some cases.


Also, no road use tax on methane!



(Edit: Heres that Civic from Hondas website. http://automobiles.honda.com/civic-gx/ )

 

The Top Gear guys need to stick to their wacky adventures and reviewing Ferraris, Lambos, BMW M cars, and AMGs and stay away from politics and environmental issues. They're the Rush Limbaugh of the car world, appealing to folks who like knee-jerk simplistic answers and don't like to think about things too much.

They like the Clarity because it has zero on-the-road emissions like a pure battery powered car, but doesn't have the cripplling range limitations and long charge times. To them, this is totally compelling - done, end of story.

What they completely ignored is the monumental difficulty to develop a system to generate and deliver hydrogen to millions of cars and the impact of the hydrogen generation on emissions and the environment.

In reality, there is very ittle difference in the "greeness" of any of the alternative fuel types being proposed: pure battery-powered vehicles have the impacts of power generation and distribution, hybrids burn fossil fuels just like pure gas/diesel cars, and hydrogen generation also has similar impacts.

What is key is to develop a strategy that first emphasizes conservation and then provides a migration path to shift more and more energy consumption to renewable and carbon-neutral sources. It will be very difficult and expensive to migrate from gas/diesel distribution to hydrogen, nor are there any viable alternatives to easily generate hydrogen without consuming fossil fuels.

What we do have is the infrastructure to distribute gasoline/diesel and electricity. In the foreseeable future, I think highly efficient diesel hybrids with supplemental plug-in recharging capability for rapidly developing battery technologies is our best bet. You then couple this with advancing wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, and tidal generating options, with wind/solar amenable to small-scale local rooftop generation. And you beef up our electricty distribution network to efficiently deliver power from where it is generated to where it is needed. This combo of technologies, not hydrogen, is probably our best bet to start a slow but steady process of weening ourselves off fossil fuels.

- Mark