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

To: William Peavey who wrote (3373)	12/5/1998 12:32:00 PM
From: Sid Turtlman	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5827

The new issue of the Hydrogen & FC Letter covers the failure of the Ballard buses in Chicago, and it doesn't look pretty. They buses taken out of service in July, only a few months into the planned two year test (which fact the company didn't care to mention to shareholders at the time, pretty outrageous given that this was the first real life use of any Ballard product.) The company hopes to have them fixed up for another try in February. It turns out that the problems were not just trivial, non fuel cell related things, but problems with "heat management" and "gas sensors" as well, which are certainly failures of the basic fuel cell technology. Given that these buses used hydrogen as fuel, and were thus a fraction of the complexity of a car that must manufacture its hydrogen from methanol or gasoline, this failure surprises even a skeptic such as myself. I think the odds have gone way up that Daimler will have to add at least a few years to its projected fc car introduction date. According to the H&FC Letter, there are already some hints of this. The editor asked "an expert from a carmaker in the forefront of the field" [Daimler???] whether fc cars would actually be introduced in 2004-5 and he said "Technically it's doable, maybe with one or two years slippage." Beyond technical issues, he mentioned some other "imponderables" such as whether there would be a large enough market at the time "to produce sufficiently large number of vehicles to bring the price down." "Slippage"? Hmmm... That's new too. And given Ballard's secrecy, it is not clear that this expert even knew about the bus failure. I wonder how much longer Ballard will be able to keep up the illusion that everything is going along just fine.