Emissions Accomplished

By John Griffiths
Published: February 7 2009 02:00

The best part of driving General Motors' latest sports-utility vehicle is when you're at traffic lights, fingers innocently drumming the steering wheel, feigning unawareness of the neck-craning stares of other drivers - and feeling insufferably smug.
Being entirely without sin (strictly in a motoring sense, of course) I felt tempted to cast a few metaphorical moral stones at the BMWs, Mercedes and Volkswagens of my fellow travellers as we stop-started along the Unter den Linden towards Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. All that carbon dioxide pouring from their petrol and diesel engines; to say nothing of the hydrocarbons and other pollutants pouring from their auspuffs. Disgraceful.
My exhaust was, almost literally, pure as the driven snow. Looked at closely in the bitterly cold evening air, it could be seen emitting only what appeared to be a thin stream of steam.
It was steam. I was driving GM's HydroGen4. It is powered by a fuel cell; the technology which many hope will all but remove cars from the global-warming equation. Fuel cells take hydrogen and oxygen and combine them, in a reversal of the electrolysis process, to produce electrical power to drive the car. The only tailpipe emission is harmless hot water vapour.
The motoring world is on the cusp of a seismic technology shift. January's Detroit motor show could have been overshadowed by the crisis gripping the auto industry, but on almost every major manufacturer's stand there was evidence that environmentally clean hybrid and battery-powered cars are accelerating hard from distant fantasy towards near-term reality, thanks mainly to big strides being made in battery technology.
GM itself showed not only a virtually production-ready model of its plug-in electric Chevrolet Volt, which it hopes to sell from next year, but also an electric-driven Cadillac concept car, the Converj, using adapted Volt technology. Chrysler unveiled both a battery-powered Jeep and a similarly powered concept car, the 200C EV.
The big European companies are advancing on all fronts, too, while Toyota unveiled its third-generation Prius hybrid - now facing stiff competition from Honda's about-to-be-launched Insight hybrid. Small companies are also getting in on the act. Within the next 12 months, exotic, lithium-ion battery powered sports cars are due to be put on sale by California-based Fisker and its local rival Tesla.
Most of these cars are so-called "range extenders", capable of travelling 40-50 miles on battery power alone. In addition, most have a small on-board petrol or diesel engine, which, on longer trips, cuts in to power a generator, giving the car's electric motor sufficient charge for an extra 200 miles or so - enough for most trips.
Such a propulsion system is obviously not as "green" as a fuel cell; but, technologically, the fuel cell has proved a rather tougher nut to crack in terms of balancing power with cost. The biggest problem of all, though, is creating a refuelling infrastructure for hydrogen, requiring investments of many billions. Because of this fuel-cell cars remain in third place in the race to market for "alternatively" powered vehicles, despite a few companies such as Honda, Mercedes and GM having launched limited production trials.
Lars-Peter Thiesen, head of GM's hydrogen and fuel-cell deployment strategy, insists that the gap is closing swiftly. "There is now a consensus that the first fuel-cell cars for normal commercial sale could arrive about 2015," he tells me, as I pull out into the traffic.
If the HydroGen4 is typical of the various prototype fuel-celled cars, including Honda's FCV (already on trial in the US), consumers will have no problem acclimatising to such vehicles when they eventually go on sale. It is the sheer ordinariness of the driving experience that leaves the most lasting impression. Simply switch on the ignition, engage the perfectly conventional automatic transmission and go.
In performance terms, HydroGen4 feels much in line with its standard, petrol-powered counterpart; it does not quite have the "thump in the back" acceleration from standstill of purely battery-powered cars. But apart from its notable quietness - there are far fewer moving mechanical parts in a fuel-cell drivetrain compared with petrol or diesel - there is virtually nothing to distinguish it from any modern "soft roader" SUV. Even the extra weight of the still-prototype drivetrain (fuel cell plus electric motor), at 600kgs, has no seriously detrimental effect; it being packaged very low down in the car and sited amidships. And, as senior GM executives are keen to stress, by the time such vehicles go on normal sale, the weight, cost and complexity of the fuel cell will have been much reduced if they are to be price-competitive with conventional cars.
In Berlin's Spandau district, I pull in at French oil group Total's hydrogen refuelling station, one of three installed in Berlin so far under the Clean Energy Partnership. The CEP is Europe's largest and most sophisticated test project for hydrogen as a road fuel, involving the German government, which has sunk €500m into the project, and 12 industry partners.
Filling HydroGen4's tank is only a little more complex, and takes only a little longer, than filling a conventional car at the petrol and diesel pumps. Safety is a priority: a puncture at pressures of around 10,000lbs per square inch would probably propel the car from Berlin to Munich - at high altitude and without the need of wings.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009