Fuel Cell Vehicles to Hit Streets

ED GARSTEN AP Auto Writer reported that After almost a decade of hailing fuel cell technology as the ultimate replacement for the internal combustion engine, automakers are slowly starting to sell some fuel-cell-powered vehicles.

Honda Motor Corp. plans to make a very small, but undetermined, number of fuel cell vehicles available next year, said Ben Knight, vice president for automotive engineering. "It's a great way to get feedback," he said.

DaimlerChrysler AG is launching a program in Europe with 30 fuel cell buses in 10 cities, said Dirk Walliser, one of the heads of the automaker's fuel cell project. "We find it is the furthest we can go into commercialization right now," he said.

And Ford Motor Co. is sending five fuel cell vehicles to California this year for evaluation, said Bruce Kopf, director of Th!nk Technologies at Ford. A "limited volume" of vehicles for fleets will be available in 2004, he said. "We haven't achieved a commercially viable design."

The automakers are sticking to their estimates that mass-produced, widely available fuel cell vehicles will not be possible until 2010 at the earliest, mainly due to cost, infrastructure and safety issues.

"Certainly there are technical challenges, but there's been so much public and private investment the public ought to expect these vehicles within the decade," said Jason Mark, a transportation analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Fuel cells use a chemical reaction between oxygen and hydrogen to produce electric power. When pure hydrogen is used the only tailpipe emission is harmless water vapor.

When hydrogen is extracted from gasoline or other fuel, harmful emissions are reduced, but not eliminated. However, to use fuels other than pure hydrogen, vehicles must be equipped with a heavy and expensive reformer that extracts hydrogen from those fuels.

Hydrogen, however, is a flammable gas posing safety concerns, especially in a crash. Several suppliers are working on strong but light onboard storage systems. The lack of a network of hydrogen filling stations presents another obstacle.

DaimlerChrysler expects to make more fuel cell vehicles available in the United States in 2004, mainly for fleet operations, Walliser said. GM and Nissan Motor Co. said they plan to make the vehicles available for fleet sales in 2005.

Toyota Motor Corp. has made two hydrogen fuel cell vehicles based on its Highlander SUV available to the California Fuel Cell Partnership for evaluation, but it has not set a timetable for making fuel cell vehicles available for fleets or general consumers, spokesman Joe Tetherow said.

In January, the federal government announced a partnership with the U.S. automakers called Freedom CAR with the goal of accelerating the development of fuel cell vehicles and a hydrogen fueling infrastructure.

While the cost of fuel cell vehicles has fallen since they were first built in the late 1990s, they are still too expensive to sell at a profit.

With gasoline still relatively inexpensive in the United States, people are not motivated to pay more for vehicles that run on something else. "Who is going to invest in mass production without a market?" Ford's Kopf asked.

Daniel Becker, the Sierra Club's director of global warming and energy programs, said U.S. automakers are dragging their feet in bringing fuel cell vehicles to market.

"This is the industry that said, `We can't make vehicles with seat belts, we can't make vehicles with air bags, we can't make vehicles that get 35 miles a gallon,'" Becker said.