Jim,
Is this the Financial Times article you refer to? You stated that the article you were referring to was dated April 15thth, but the latest article I could find was dated March 29th 99
Thanks for referring us to this article,
Ron E
ft.com
Newspaper ArchiveMONDAY MARCH 29 1999 Technology
CARS: The clean, mean electric machine
The race to produce cars powered by fuel cells is heating up. Their performance has been improved and DaimlerChrysler is aiming for the chequered flag, says John Griffiths
<Picture: car>Sir William Grove, the English inventor, could never have known what he was starting when he came up with the first fuel cell in 1839.
More than a century and a half later the big vehicle producers are rapidly beginning to regard the fuel cell as clear front runner for an environmentally "clean" powerplant to succeed the petrol and diesel engines that have powered cars since the first Benz clattered into life more than 100 years ago.
The cell is approaching commercial production at a rate much faster than motor industry research and development engineers thought likely even three or four years ago.
So fast, in fact, that in Washington a few days ago a Mercedes-Benz A-Class, the small "people carrier" made by DaimlerChrysler in Germany, demonstrated that the fuel cell can now be fitted into the same space as a conventional engine and provide similar performance while emitting not pollutants but water vapour.
Little more than two years ago, motor industry engineers could only just fit a working prototype fuel cell within a full-size panel van.
By 2004, DaimlerChrysler co-chairman Jü rgen Schrempp insists, the fuel cell A-Class should be on sale at a price only a little above that of a conventional petrol or diesel equivalent. The company is committing $1.4bn (£875m) to the project.
After driving the car, even cynical motor journalists admitted that the motor vehicle appeared to have arrived at a watershed.
DaimlerChrysler unveiled Necar (new electric car) 4 as the first zero emissions fuel cell-powered car suitable for production. The prototype uses hydrogen to generate electricity to drive the vehicle and produces mainly water vapour for the exhaust. The full production version is expected to use methanol.
Whatever the final fuel choice, it is claimed that Necar 4 is capable of reaching 90mph and travelling nearly 280 miles before refuelling. The production version will be lighter, more efficient and thus provide an even livelier performance.
Necar 4 and similar vehicles being developed by most of the big car manufacturers would appear to signal the end for the industry's protracted attempts to produce viable zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) using battery power.
While hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the search for a viable "superbattery" capable of providing acceptable range and performance for everyday car users, the results have been discouraging, not least for the world's biggest vehicle maker, General Motors.
GM hoped that its battery-powered EV1 cars, which complied with a state mandate for 2 per cent of cars sold to be ZEVs by 1998, would be acceptable to Californians. But they are languishing unsold - they cost far more than a conventional car and their range of 80-100 miles was hopelessly inadequate for vast urban sprawls and wide open spaces.
A similar fate has befallen other manufacturers' attempts. The collective battery effort has fallen sufficiently flat to have forced the state's clean-air authorities grudgingly to roll back their minimum ZEV sales requirement.
The contrast between the development of the two technologies is striking. Efforts to improve battery technology to achieve a viable ZEV have intensified over the past decade but at the same time the barriers of cost and complexity have proved increasingly formidable.
The pace of development of the fuel cell - which has been largely overlooked by the industry for decades - is, however, accelerating.
DaimlerChrysler acknowledges there is still much to be done to determine the most appropriate fuels, to drive down costs and further improve the technology and its packaging. But Ferdinand Panik, head of the DaimlerChrysler fuel cell project, says that unlike the hunt for the elusive "superbattery", all the problems are capable of being solved by systematic development.
"We don't expect consumers to change drastically their buying habits in the next decade. We will continue development of petrol and diesel engines because they, too, can be much improved in their performance and emissions. But already we have proved [with Necar 4] that people can have a stylish, good-performing fuel cell vehicle that still seats five passengers."
Presuming that DaimlerChrysler is first into production with a fully commercial fuel cell car, it will not be alone for long. Ford is about to start testing a fuel cell vehicle, and GM says it will introduce a commercially viable fuel cell car in 2004, using a combination of its own technology and that of Ballard Power Systems of Vancouver, the partner to Ford and DaimlerChrysler.
Mr Schrempp insists that the vehicles must become price and performance competitive in their own right, and not rely on purchase subsidies which some governments have used to encourage people to buy battery cars.
"There has got to be a free market in these cars. If a government wants to give incentives to buyers to get older, dirtier vehicles off the road (as already happens with petrol and diesel cars in some European states) then that's fine. But otherwise we want no linkage whatsoever between these cars and subsidies," says Mr Schrempp.
The fuel cell technology has been developed by Ballard and is being taken towards production through dbb Fuel Cell Engines, a German-based company Ballard owns jointly with DaimlerChrysler and Ford.
The fuel cell works by combining oxygen from the air with hydrogen - supplied pure from an on-board tank or released from a liquid fuel such as methanol - to make electricity. This is used to power electric motors driving the wheels. Using raw hydrogen, the only other byproduct is water vapour. The use of methanol or petrol produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide but only about two-thirds the level of a conventional engine. A liquid fuel cell improves economy by 50 per cent compared with a petrol engine.
The biggest hurdle facing its widespread adoption is the supply of fuels.
Raw hydrogen, which powers Necar 4, is extremely difficult to store. Therefore the most likely use for hydrogen-fuelled vehicles will be those operating in close range of specially-provided fuelling facilities.
Methanol, derived mainly from natural gas, could be dispensed from a fuel pump at a conventional fuel station, and in the longer term can be produced from renewable resources such as organic waste or timber. It would, however, need separate storage tanks and fuelling equipment, and has the additional disadvantage of burning with an invisible flame.
Fuel cells can also use petrol, the most attractive option in terms of the existing supply infrastructure. However the on-board reformulation process to make it usable is complex and impurities can quickly damage the cell. Sorting out these problems, says Mr Panik, could take until 2010.
Some industry estimates suggest that more than 30m fuel-celled vehicles could be in use by 2020.
As for his group's estimate Robert Eaton, DaimlerChrysler's co-chairman, says: "We really don't know. I've been involved in advanced vehicle projects before. And where volumes estimates are given they usually turn out to be wrong." |
