Fuel cells: Future or fantasy? Part one

Ditto in 1999 when Honda dragged out its FCX (Fuel Cell eXperimental) V1 hydrogen fuel cell vehicle (with hydrogen stored in a metal absorbing substrate) and its methanol-reformer fuel cell sister the V2, from its Collection Hall at the Twin Ring Motegi circuit in Japan. Despite the fact the V2 didn’t start and was hauled unceremoniously away, Honda said developing this technology would take at least a decade. Nobuhiko Kawamoto, Honda’s chief executive, was so convinced about a hydrogen future he had pulled his company out of Formula 1 involvement in 1992 to transfer resources into fuel cell development.

His company’s efforts culminated in the gorgeous Honda FCX Clarity which was launched as a prototype in 2006, and which I drove in California with The Intercooler’s Andrew Frankel. I drove it again in 2007 and again in 2009 as a production car when it came to Europe. With its upright fuel cell and lithe looks, together with quite respectable handling, the Clarity seemed to have it all.

It went on commercial release in 2008 with a limited number available in Southern California at $600 a month. It was estimated that each car cost Honda between $1 million and $2 million to build. But by the time of the second-generation Clarity in 2016, Honda was covering its bets with a plug-in hybrid and a battery electric version as well. In recent announcements by Toshihiro Mibe, the company’s new chief executive, there’s been much more about a battery-electric future than being at the vanguard of fuel cells.

Back at the turn of the century, Toyota was equally bullish about its own fuel cell research vehicles, a series of Kruger SUV-based FCEV models, which I drove at various events throughout the Nineties and Noughties. As we know, it still is.

Meanwhile, General Motors was matching Honda and Toyota’s development pace for pace and produced a series of HydroGen research cars – these were Zafiras also stuffed with fuel cells and wire. In 1999 I was invited to the company’s secret test track in Arizona to help set a new FIA-endorsed, 24-hour endurance record in that vehicle, and later drove the non-hybrid directly-fuelled fuel cell HydroGen 3 model around the South of France, which is still one of the most impressive pieces of engineering I’ve ever laid hands on. Members of that research team are now working with Stellantis on its fuel cell programme destined for medium and large vans, and large saloons.

In 2005, I interviewed Dr Larry Burns, GM’s vice president in charge of research and development and one of the great fuel cell pioneers. He confirmed that GM would meet its self-imposed 2010 target of producing a fuel cell vehicle, which matches an internal combustion engine on cost (about $50 per kilowatt of power), durability and performance.

‘Sequel [the name of this vehicle] will have a range of 300 miles, with 0-60mph acceleration of under 10 seconds,’ he said. ‘We know we have the durability from submarine uses of fuel cells which have got to 10,000 hours of maintenance-free operation.’

Clearly it didn’t quite work out like that and GM switched research resources into the Volt extended-range battery car, but fuel cells still rumbled on and HydroGen 3 begat HydroGen 4, which was shown at the 2007 Frankfurt motor show; that car was going to be on sale in 2015…

In 2000 I went to Washington to see and drive the Necar 5 (an experimental Mercedes A-class with the fuel cell hidden in the sandwich floor) and interviewed the project’s head, one professor Ferdinand Panik. And he said we’d be a while off a production version. Say, 10 years?

Mercedes doggedly kept on with the project, though, with the Necar series eventually giving way to the F-cell. In 2014 in California I interviewed Lee Heesoo, who kindly let me drive his Mercedes B-class fuel cell car, which he’d leased for 18 months as a family charabanc. He’d moved into the fuel cell Merc after years using a car-sharing service which he hated; he and his family loved the hydrogen B-class.

In the last 30 years I’ve driven just about every fuel cell vehicle ever made, be they from Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Renault, Ford, Hyundai, Peugeot, Riversimple, or obscure experimental Chinese cars and tiny fuel prototypes. I’ve travelled the world to see fuel cell and hydrogen programmes, interviewed some of the smartest people on the planet, made friends with engineers and visionaries, drunk coffee with groups of engineers at the Californian Fuel Cell partnership and had lunch with scientists working on metallic storage structures at Hughes Research Laboratories high above the Pacific Ocean in Malibu, California. I’ve talked to senior figures in the US Department of Energy and the US Government, as well as the most senior people in the motor industry.

Weirdest by far was on the other side of the Pacific when in 2006 I flew to Yakushima Island, a small island off the bottom of the Japanese coast. It was on this tiny 504 sq km world heritage site where I got a vision of the future when the oil wells run dry. This rainy island produced its own hydro-generated electricity which powered the homes of the 14,000 residents.

But they had electricity to spare (some 1150GWh of it, in fact) and Hiroshi Ishii, the president of the local electricity-generating company had big plans for all those sparks. By using his electricity to electrolyse water and make hydrogen, Ishii reckoned he could heat the people’s homes, replace the island’s 9500 cars with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles such as Honda’s FCX and power the 1200 tourist buses, the sizeable fishing fleet and even the rockets that flew into space from the nearby Tanegashima Island.

Toyota and Honda kept the faith and depending on who’s counting, produced the world’s first commercially available fuel cell vehicles. And Hyundai, which came from the back with its bought-in UTC fuel cells and sheer enthusiasm, now builds the Nexo, with its own in-house developed fuel cell, which with the Mirai are the only commercially available fuel cell vehicles in the world.

Yet last month I was a passenger in BMW’s iX5, a really well worked fuel cell version of the BMW X5 in Munich. To me it felt and looked ready to go, but Juergen Guldner, head of the project was adamant that this was just a prototype and there won’t be an on-sale iX5 until the second half of the current decade.

‘There’s one more generation of engineering to go,’ he said and in mitigation of what seems such a long development period, he points to the long gap between BMW’s first all-electric car concept produced around the time of the 1972 Olympics and the appearance of its first battery-electric production car, the i3 in 2013.

He did say that fuel cell development will be faster than that, however. Guldner’s engineering team are building a small run of prototype fuel cell X5s next year and they will go on trial with selected customers and institutions.

Let’s not beat about the bush here – this perfectly admirable BMW is probably a decade away at a time when BMW is launching its latest range of battery electric cars, the iX and i4. Even Jaguar Land Rover and Ineos, which have sworn allegiance to the fuel cell for respectively the Defender and Grenadier all-terrain vehicles, don’t think the technology is ready yet.

Of the recent signees to a Japanese collaboration agreement to share production, transportation and use of hydrogen, only Toyota has a viable fuel cell car, while Kawasaki, Subaru, Mazda and Yamaha’s efforts are still on the bench and test tracks. Even start ups such as Hyzon Motors in the US have over a decade of experience in hydrogen fuel cells, yet they are only just starting to build commercially available fuel cell trucks.

So, on the face of it, my friend is right, hydrogen fuel cells are as out of reach as the white rabbit in Alice In Wonderland, forever 10 years out of reach in fact. But are fuel cells shortly and finally soon to come of age, or is this 182-year-old technology which only became a practical motivator towards the back end of the 20th century a ‘big pain in the arse’ as Tesla’s egregious chief executive Elon Musk described it in January this year? He’s previously been quoted as calling fuel cells ‘fools’ cells’…

Read part two