Hydrogen Car Hype

Joseph Romm has a good post at Technology Review debunking the current hype about hydrogen cars.  Excerpt:

Would you buy a car that costs 10 times as much as a hybrid gasoline-electric, like the Prius? What if I told you it had half the range of the hybrid? What if I told you most cities didn't have a single hydrogen fueling station? Not interested yet? This should be the deal closer: what if I told you it wouldn't have lower greenhouse-gas emissions than the hybrid?

Other than the traditional media, which is as distracted by shiny new objects as my 16-month-old daughter, nobody should get terribly excited when a car company rolls out its wildly impractical next-generation hydrogen car. Too many miracles are required for it to be a marketplace winner.

Take Honda's new FCX Clarity. As the New York Times reported, "the cars cost several hundred thousand dollars each to produce," although Honda's president Takeo Fukui "said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase."

But why would production volumes increase for a car that delivers no real value to the consumer and has no significant societal benefit to motivate government support? Answer: They wouldn't, so prices may never drop below $100,000.

And who, exactly, is going to buy a car that can't easily find fuel? On the other hand, who is going to build tens of thousands of fueling stations--price tag $2 million apiece or more--until the cars are wildly successful? That is the so-called chicken-and-egg problem, which is especially acute for hydrogen. After all, why should oil companies spend tens of billions of dollars building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure, which at best will take away business from their tremendously profitable gasoline sales, and at worst will be a complete business loss, assuming, as now seems likely, that hydrogen cars never catch on?

And yet the media can't get enough of these hi-tech Edsels.

Link: The Last Car You Would Ever Buy -- Literally.

Comments

[JJR]

If I recall, Hydrogen is a loser also because it's a net energy sink...the energy that goes into creating hydrogen in the first place is more than you get out of it at the other end. The age of Happy Motoring is over, America. Good riddance.