Jim: No. Of course, cars are potentially a much larger market. In the past (I've been on this thread a while) I argued that the fc bus market is unlikely to be more than a few thousand units a year. Other posters here (who regularly say I've been "discredited" when more than one of them disagree with one of my opinions) argued that the market would be 50,000 per year or more. I am glad that Daimler agrees with me. Even great success in buses amounts to almost nothing, in terms of the company's potential EPS.
The bus market is interesting, though, for other reasons. It should be much easier for fuel cells to succeed with buses than with cars. Technically, the task of coming up a fc bus that works reliably should be cake compared to a fc car, which will need a complicated mini chemical factory on board to process the fuel. Buses, which have tanks of hydrogen on their roof, don't need that. The failure of the buses in Chicago is pretty disturbing, since that shouldn't have been hard to get right.
In terms of marketing, the bus customer has certain social obligations that an individual car buyer may not feel, and is thus more willing to pay a relatively high price for the product. Car buyers are spending their own money, and if, when they are introduced, fc cars cost a whole lot, get inferior mileage compared to a hybrid or conventional car, and require as a fuel methanol which is not readily available, the public will stay away in droves.
So the very modest ambitions that Daimler for bus sales makes me think that its fc car ambitions may also be a lot less ambitious than Ballard shareholders might like to think. This fits in with the theory that research on fc cars exists as much to keep the Greens off its back as to actually come up with a commercial product. |
