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Technology Stocks : Ballard Power -world leader zero-emission PEM fuel cells -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: peter dumbrille who wrote (4596)	12/2/1999 9:19:00 PM
From: Hawkeye	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5827

Clean engine comes of enlightened self-interest Carmakers should follow forward-thinking Honda December 2, 1999 In September, a huge sign of intelligent life in the automotive universe appeared when Honda Motor Co. President Hiroyuki Yoshino announced that his company had developed new clean-burning gasoline engines. These engines cut emissions to less than 50 percent of Japanese government standards and increase power. Honda expects to start putting them in cars next fall and have them in every one of its products within five years. By then, they'll surpass government fuel-consumption and emissions targets in all weight categories through to 2010. That was impressive enough. But what impressed me even more than the actual development of the engines was the urbane Yoshino's explanation of why Honda had taken this step: "First, because we are capable of it. Second, because it's key to our independence." Those two sentences are a sophisticated statement of enlightened self-interest. What automakers can do and what they do are too often separate worlds. Patents have been sat on for decades, as happened with antilock brakes, which took 30 years to make the leap from airplanes to cars. Technology gets relegated to the back seat, as happened, until recently, with research on fuel-cell-powered cars -- a stagnation broken only by smog-choked lawmakers in California. Now, companies such as Honda are looking further ahead than your usual three-year product development cycle. In Honda's case, it means 50 years. That's why Honda engineers followed up the announcement of the engines by unveiling two prototype fuel-cell cars -- one running on methanol, the other on pure hydrogen. And why they smiled broadly as their boss announced that Honda planned to have a fuel-cell car in production by 2003, thus upping the ante on the 2004 and 2005 target dates set by most of its rivals. But Honda's techno-enviro one-upmanship can seem confusing. On the one hand, traditionally powered gasoline engines. On the other, hydrogen-powered fuel cells. How can they go both ways at the same time? To which the Honda answer is evidently, "How not?" This is a company working on forecasts as far ahead as 2050, by which time it expects that half the cars on the road could still be driven by gasoline engines. And though interest in hydrogen is on the fast track, Honda doesn't expect widespread adoption of fuel cells in cars until 2020. Just as the whole basis of telecommunications has changed in the last 20 years with the Internet, the whole basis of auto-motion will change in the next 20. As Silicon Valley has proved, the race is to the swift and the flexible. And Honda, with championship wins in CART and solar cars, aims for both. You can write to LESLEY HAZLETON c/o the Detroit Free Press, P.O. Box 2022, Detroit 48231.