First Honda Fuel Cell car, 74 mpg, sent to CA today
 

THANK GOD. More choices other than petroleum based vehicles. Equivalent to 74 mpg, the car is not an econo-box, over 3,000 pounds, has a 270 mile range, goes up to 100 mph.

THANK GOD. Competition for oil. Prior to today, they were really the only game in town; gas or diesel was really your only choice. Check this out....

http://www.ajc.com/ajccars/content/ajccars/content/stories/2008/06/16/honda_fcx_clarity_emission_hydrogen.html

jeff

Well, unless you are a celeb or a wealthy California businessman (woman), looks like you don't get one.

No thanks for that $600 a month lease I could get a nice BMW or MB.

the $600 includes maintenance and insurance. not bad if you ask me for a cutting edge car that gets 74mpg. soon i hope, this car and/or technology will be common place. i can't wait myself

LOL! Its not even remotely competition for anything. There is no infrastructure at all to distribute hydrogen and there is this little problem of hydrogen production consuming more energy than is made burning it or converting it into electricity.

Did you happen to notice they conveniently left out of the story HOW the hydrogen is stored, HOW much it cots per MPG and HOW much HP it produces? Probably because having a 10,000psi bomb behind the back seat, costing 2x per MPG as a gas car and taking 15 seconds to reach 60mph wouldn't settle too well with many people.

Once that three year lease is up the EXACT same thing will happen to it as did with the EV1.
http://evnut.com/images/ev1/ev1_grave/ev1_crush4.jpg

Agreed, people freak out enough with a 3000PSI CNG tank, let along a LNG tank.

I love the celebs that eat these up while they take their jets everywhere :)

I don't even care anymore what they do. Its all bs and has no future. I guess im just getting sick of listening to people talk about hydrogen and waiting for technology to solve their energy problems.

I work on fuel processing and fuel cell technology for a living.

What they seem to forget is there is still a penalty for making hydrogen. Whether it is inefficiency of electrolysis (free sunlight may be nice for driving the process, but it might be used better elsewhere), the carbon generation reacting fuel or NG to hydrogen, etc., there is always a penalty.

Maybe when the Hollywood types actually understand thermodynamics, will I care about their opinions and the statements made by providing such cars to them.

Granted, again, this technology brings me a paycheck and a successful career, I love it. But they try to put a lot of spin on it, and the claims arent necessarily indicative of what is considered a zero-emissions, sunshine with a smiley face on it. There are a LOT of benefits, and a lot of reasons to move to this technology in various applications. There are a lot of reasons why not to do it for automobiles...

JMH

Well said. Hollywood-types and the media make the solutions seem so black & white. Like so many other things in life, the "solution" isn't simple. When people ask the tough questions, they are labelled as part of the problem.

Why is it that both BMW and Mercedes have been working on hydrogen technology in vehicles for nearly two decades and still have not produced anything truly commercially viable? That is because there are some significant hurdles to overcome with hydrogen like economics and safety.

GM has been experimenting off and on with fuel cells since the mid 1960's In their museum they have their first FC vehicle, a panel van thta still operates today. The problems with FC vehicles are what have been discussed in the previous posts. Without an efficient means of making hydrogen fuel cells are a waste of energy and will never catch on.


Also how did Honda come up with a 74mpg estimate? Is that gallons of 'liquid' H2? It seems that with the issue of using fossil fuel created electricity to make the H2, the actual mpg is much lower

Until they crack the problem of Efficient production of hydrogen, (which aint really likely, seeing they have been trying for more than a hundred years!)--

Then stupid vehicles like this fuel-cell crap Honda will just be an automotive curiosity driven/owned by research depts, or the easily lead...

Yup--It'll go the way of the EV1--(Which was actually not a bad car according to those who leased one):rolleyes:

Nah, we are stuck with the ICE as the prime-mover due to its overall efficiency...

What they should be looking at is a better fuel for the ICE rather than wasting hurds of dosh on crap like these fuel-cell rubbish things....

Public relations, it works.

No thanks. I'll stick with my Benz and run it on Biodiesel B99! This is trhe only fuel so far that is liquid, less polluting, stable and safe, easily available at least here in the valley and more than pays for itself. You get more out than you put in energy wise.;)

X2 dude, X2!