oyota seized a decisive lead in green motoring a decade ago with its Prius hybrid. Now Honda is chasing the post-petrol market by offering not only hydrogen-powered cars, but home power-stations to go with them. By Nick Valery ...
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, September 2007
IN ITS BID TO wrestle away Toyota's halo, Honda is testing a flashy family saloon code-named FCX--the third in a series of hydrogen-powered electric cars Honda has been quietly developing since 1989. The FCX is not the first electric vehicle to hit the road with a hydrogen fuel-cell under the hood: in a recent test on public roads General Motors showed that its Chevrolet Sequel could travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen.
But compared to the FCX, the rest are experimental mules. Honda proposes a roomy family saloon with all creature comforts that breezes along with a hum, accelerates briskly to 100mph, rounds bends with barely a hint of roll, and goes 270 miles on each tank of fuel. As far as everyday motoring is concerned, no compromises have been made to accommodate the vehicle's radical innards.
The FCX gets the equivalent of 75 mpg--three times the 24 mpg achieved in the city by the relatively frugal Honda Accord. In performance terms, the two cars are pretty much the same, except that the FCX's greater low-end torque makes it a lot quicker off the mark.
The FCX is also vastly cleaner. Because a fuel cell works like a car battery in reverse--combining hydrogen from the tank with oxygen from the air to produce electricity--there is no combustion processes and therefore no greenhouse gases from the car itself. The only waste coming out of the FCX's tailpipe is water vapour.
Carmakers everywhere see the fuel cell as the ultimate replacement for the internal combustion engine. But they've been idling along on the assumption that the changeover won't happen until 2020 at the earliest--after a decade spent building the infrastructure for making hydrogen widely available to the public. Right now there are only 60 or so hydrogen stations in the whole of America (50 of those in California) compared with 160,000 petrol stations.
Why has Honda turned up the heat? For one simple reason: it is not waiting for the hydrogen infrastructure to get built, but intends developing a network of refueling stations of its own instead. And it plans to put them, not on petrol station forecourts, but in motorists' own homes.
Honda's plan for marketing the FCX presumes that motorists will buy or lease the home-brew equipment to make their own hydrogen from natural gas. The Home Energy Station uses the natural gas supply to produce hot water and heat for the home as well as hydrogen for the fuel-cell car. If the domestic power supply goes on the blink, a built-in inverter can take juice from the car's fuel cell to produce alternating current for running the home.
California's authorities love the idea. They want to see clean co-generation in the home and energy efficient cars on the road; and they hope FCX owners will be tempted to leave their fuel-cell vehicles running in the garage rather than taking them for a spin. By selling their surplus electricity back to the grid, FCX owners could help local utilities meet their peak demands and avoid California's dreaded summer brownouts.
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