The aim now for Daimler and its allies is to ensure that the number of fuel-cell powered vehicles running on generatively produced hydrogen is constantly increasing, demonstrating the market maturity of the fuel cell solution.
"We are building 200 cars for Germany, Norway and the United States this year," Brock said.
Seventy of those will be Mercedes-Benz B-Class F-CELL vehicles going to California. Daimler began manufacturing a small series of this model in late 2009, then quickly decided to make it the first fuel cell passenger car it would mass-produce. It has an operating range of about 250 miles and a 700-bar hydrogen tank, and its electric motor develops an output of 100 kilowatts with a torque of 290 newton meters. The engine's power is similar to that of a 2-liter gasoline engine, and the car has a top speed of 106 mph.
For about $100,000, you get silence and power
"The difference is the silence while you drive; you hear almost nothing from the engine," Brock said. "It also has very powerful acceleration because you have high torque from the beginning. It's very fun driving it."
Daimler won't reveal exactly how much the B-Class F-CELL costs, but industry analysts generally say a fuel cell car costs about $100,000 today. The cars are currently leased by manufacturers at a loss to build public awareness of the technology and to test performance. By 2015, carmakers hope to be able to reduce costs to about $50,000 per vehicle.
The most aggressive is Hyundai, which plans to build 1,000 fuel cell cars already next year and 10,000 per year by 2015. Toyota, Nissan and General Motors have also said they aim to have fuel cell cars for sale to the general public by 2015.
The main technical obstacles to the fuel cell technology used to be range, longevity of the fuel cell and operation at cold temperatures. Fuel cell cars can now start at temperatures below minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, as experiments in Iceland and Norway and during the Vancouver Winter Olympics have shown. The range before refueling has become acceptable, as well, after manufacturers switched to high-pressure 700-bar tanks. But there's still room to improve the lifetime of the fuel cell.
Daimler also makes a fuel cell city bus, the Mercedes-Benz Citaro. It has a hybrid system with fuel cell, electric motor and lithium-ion batteries. It stores 77 pounds of hydrogen in seven cylinders on the roof, which give it a range of 125 miles. The water-cooled lithium-ion batteries have a capacity of 27 kWh, which is sufficient to power the electric motors at a constant 120 kW, or 163 horsepower. The bus emits no pollutants and is almost completely silent, with a top speed of 65 mph.
The 4-minute refueling
Three Citaros operated successfully every day for three years in punishing weather conditions on the streets of Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, before the financial crisis and the collapse of the country's biggest banks postponed Iceland's dreams of becoming the world's first hydrogen-powered economy.
Now Iceland says it is more likely that its future vehicle fleet will combine fuel cell vehicles with battery-powered electrics, which suits Daimler just fine.
"We think we will have a mix of vehicles in the future with various powertrain options," Brock said. "That's why we are concentrating on building high-technology combustion engine cars, hybrid cars, as well as electric cars powered either by batteries or fuel cells. The battery-powered cars are good for short trips and city driving. The fuel cell electric cars are better for longer ranges and have shorter refueling times. You can fill a hydrogen tank in three or four minutes."
Fuel cell vehicles have been overshadowed recently by battery electric vehicles. Models like the Tesla Roadster, Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt have been launched with great fanfare. Innovative companies like Better Place and Nuvve are testing speedy battery replacement systems and ways to sell power from battery electrics back to the grid, respectively.
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22 Comments
Add CommentThis is why Germany, China and others will rule 21st century technology as the US falls further and further behind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIndustry would not make these kind of riskier investments in future technology if they weren't comfortable about long term government support for greener technologies.
Meanwhile in the US we have all the leading GOP presidential candidates distancing themselves as far as possible from climate change science and promising to disinvest in alternative energy technologies or sources.
Thank goodness somebody is willing to act on hydrogen's clean and sustainable production, transportation and storage.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not a scientist, but where are all the rare metals coming from for all these batteries? When it goes into mass production, that's a problem...I wish Scientific Am. would do an article, if they haven't, on how the fuel cells work, and what their limitations/advantages are.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the one hand the Germans are moving in the direction that could reduce fossil fuel consumption yet in the crucial area of hydrogen production they are moving away from such a course. There are two basic ways of producing hydrogen. One is from fossil fuels & the other is via hydrolysis. Splitting water into its constituents of hydrogen & oxygen. This process is highly electricity intensive. There is no way the amount of energy required for this process can be powered by alternative energy. Only nuclear power can do the job & they are closing their nuclear power plants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCarlyle: "Only nuclear power can do the job & they are closing their nuclear power plants."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy? The source of electricity will be coal fired generators
The headline is bad journalism. The potential amount of hydrogen fueled vehicles is not significant in the future plans of Germany. It's a few percent of one company. There are tens of millions of vehicles on German roads and over 90% of them will still be running on fossil fuels in 25 years (at a minimum)
Don't forget the US is a lot bigger then Iceland or Germany, that makes it less economical to develop a whole new transportation infrastructure. Prices will have to come down like 90% before hydrogen fuel cells will be practical there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is active research into artificial photosynthesis which is a process where you use light to split water without converting the light energy into electricity first. Hydrogen made from artificial photosynthesis would not need nuclear power. Germany was pursuing the building of solar thermal and solar photovoltaic electricity plants in north Africa before the Arab Spring. Those projects will likely move forward even faster as those arab countries become more established in their more democratic forms.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead the whole article and it didn't explain the energy source that is used to make the hydrogen in Germany. I assume it is electricity, but how do they make that Hydrogen is little more than an energy storage system. You need an energy source to make or liberate the hydrogen initially. I mean it would be kind of ironic if they were making the hydrogen from electricity produced by coal driven plants, wouldn't it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI said one method was from fossil fuels. Surely that includes electricity powered by coal burning?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI thought that was funny too, Carlyle.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have been very skeptical of hydrogen being the next big thing because of storage safety concerns, instead figuring pure electric with its 80%+ efficiency and safer storage would make more sense. People just had to move past the idea that rechargeable was exclusively synonymous with Ni-Cad.
But hey, with noise about safe hydrogen storage being right around the corner...have they really come this far?
I am an old man & have been reading about methods of obtaining hydrogen gas since I was a child reading about the early Montgolfier Brothers using hydrogen gas to lift the early baloons. One of the methods they used was to pass steam over red hot iron. My earliest experiments used metals & acids or alkalis. Dangerous.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll methods use much more energy input than the energy content output.
Using any biologically based system, particularly those using light directly, require very large areas exposed to sunlight & usually with very expensive infrastructure to obtain large quantities of hydrogen gas. Then you have to convert it into a transportable form.
I'm one hundred percent behind their efforts, but I suspect they are barking up the wrong tree. The key words in the article were "Local" emissions. Meaning the hydrogen would likely be produced using fossil fuels. It takes more than filling stations to make a hydrogen energy economy and then there is the very valid point about the materials to make the fuel cells. What they are doing may make it possible for them to outsource their pollution though... Yay? In fairness, they do get a fair amount of their electricity from renewable sources not enough to keep them from burning fossil fuels to make hydrogen, of course but I suppose it's a start.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNow isn't that a laugh. Germany, who is shutting down its nuclear power plants, has an unstable network due to it's 20% goal for wind power and buys a lot of their power from the French nuclear power plants now wants to run their transportation on Hydrogen. Is there plan to buy the electriciy from France's Nuclear power plants to produce Hydrogen?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisExactly. France will see their industries overtaking the nations relying on unreliable & expensive alternative energy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHydrogen is the energy carrier and good potential fuel for the vehicles. Hydrogen is produced and used in large scale in the industry. Energy is necessary to produce hydrogen but using by fuel cell cars does decrease total energy because of the high efficiency of electrochemical process of electric generation. Hydrogen can be a united fuel for next clean mobility based on the wide variety of production method including the renewable. Anyway it is very important for Germany and Japan to decease oil dependency. That is why these countries move to hydrogen. I do not know why US has same necessity but action is stand still
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCars running on fuel cell are a bad idea. You have to mass produce H2 and put up the infrastructure. Pure electric cars don't need H2 and you just plug in to your electric socket.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWorse, the article didn't mention that to compress H2 to 700 bars requires 3 times more energy than what you can get out of that H2. And you need an H2 fuel tank 5 times larger than your gasoline tank to get the same amount of energy.
On this one, the American Tesla Roadster will definitely beat the German hydrogen cars.
Fuel cells won't be the answer to 'continue doing what you are doing now'. MOST vehicle journeys, certainly in Europe, are still over ridiculously short distances of a mile or two. We, and Daimler, should be putting far more effort into the simplest alternatives like cycling or battery assisted bikes with some kind of protection from weather. Moderate journeys, such as commutes into cities, should also be approached by mass transportation such as tram systems, which are far more economic and energy efficient, and avoid congested roads.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is only when longer distances or travel into rural areas becomes a factor that independent transport systems, ideally using fuel cells, should become the norm. But long distance travel between cities always makes far more sense by high speed rail networks, far more energy efficient and less polluting than air, and infinitely better than independent car travel.
sjn - Would it not be better to observe this Hydrogen plan while leaving out your agenda. I would enjoy reading from, what to me, has been a source of phenomenally interesting information over the years. And I believe that source has been able to see through the junk science of global hoo haa provided by Al Gore et AL. There has been a discovery on your own shores which will make this fuel cell thing little more than an interim step. You might do better with your time to look into that, it appears to have genuine merit.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisZ
Hey Poker That's the idea! There has been a discovery here in our country that make this fuel cell thing but an interim step. Matter of time - less political agendas too! Yeah! ! !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisZ
Hydrogen cars are not really "clean." They emit water vapor, the most abundant greenhouse gas. They are worse than gasoline cars. Hydrogen fuel cell reaction emits 4 moles of H2O per megajoule of energy released vs. 3 moles of H2O and C2O per MJ in gasoline combustion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you believe in AGW, hydrogen cars will make it worse.
Note the good news that Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in the United States June 6th to be presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, coming shortly after her announcement that Germany plans to phase out nuclear energy by 2022 and accelerate the transition to a clean energy system largely built on renewable energy and energy efficiency
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEarth was made to walk on. Soil can only absorb our sweat, not the chemicals that we extract from it. Let;s walk! Why worry about carrying our lazy behinds when we can simply walk or bicycle!
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