Tag: hydrogen fuel cells

Green Cars: A Tough Sell

  • Hybrid cars like this Honda Insight look good to consumers at first...until they see the price tag. (Photo courtesy of the National Park Service)

We’re hearing a lot more from automakers these days about new
technologies that will save you gas. Most of the technologies they talk about
are not in showrooms yet. So when will they be? And which technologies
will find their way to your car first? Dustin Dwyer has some answers:

Transcript

We’re hearing a lot more from automakers these days about new
technologies that will save you gas. Most of the technologies they talk about
are not in showrooms yet. So when will they be? And which technologies
will find their way to your car first? Dustin Dwyer has some answers:


There is already one kind of car out there that will save you a lot of gas. You’ve heard of
it before. It’s a hybrid. And it seems like everyone says they want one. They say they do:


“I live in the world where I don’t deal with what people say they think, or what they give
to a survey. I live in the world where they write the check.”


That’s Mike Jackson. He’s the head of the country’s largest chain of car dealerships –
Autonation. Jackson is pretty much the prototypical, no-nonsense businessman. He’s also
somewhat of an unlikely environmentalist, but Jackson doesn’t have much faith in today’s
hybrids:


“70% of our customers want to talk about hybrids when they walk through the door.
They’re aware of it. They think it’s a great idea. And they’re predisposed to buy hybrids.
You then get them at the table.”


Jackson says that’s when the customer asks how much extra the hybrid costs, and how
long it takes to make that money up by saving at the pump. That’s when the deal falls
apart:


“And we have a two percent closing rate.”


Jackson says, plain and simple, most people just aren’t willing to pay the extra money to
get a hybrid. So he says to really cut gas use, the industry still needs mass market
solutions, and the first technology that he’s looking out for is something that Ford
announced earlier this year. Ford’s chief marketing guy, Jim Farley calls it Ecoboost:


“Which uses direct fuel injection and turbocharging to get big engine power and all that
low end torque we love from smaller, inherently more fuel efficient engines.”


Direct injection and turbocharging have been around,
but mostly as a way to make cars go faster. Now the idea is to use them on small engines
so that when a customer comes in and wants a big powerful engine, Ford can give them
Ecoboost, which promises the same power with 20 percent less gas, and 15 percent fewer
CO2 emissions. Ford plans to put Ecoboost in more than half a million cars per year
within the next five years.


In that same time frame, you can also expect to see more diesel engines coming out from
all the automakers. Diesel will get you better mileage, and it’s now cleaner in some ways
than gasoline. But it can create more smog-forming gases such as nitrous oxide.


Ethanol is also still out there. But at best, most people say today’s corn ethanol really
doesn’t save any fossil fuels when you look at what it takes to raise the corn. So the big
hope is cellulosic ethanol, which can be made from grasses, or even used tires.


Nobody’s found a good way to make it yet and Mike Jackson, the no-nonsense car
salesman, says he’s not holding his breath. Instead, he’s looking for the real game
changer – hybrid vehicles that can be charged through a wall socket and run on electricity
alone for miles before a gas engine has to kick in. Jackson expects those plug-in hybrids
on the road within five years:


“The cost-benefit ratio is going to be so compelling, and people are going to be so
enthralled at the idea they don’t have to go to the gas station, just go home and plug it into
the socket, this idea will win over American consumers.”


The auto companies are scrambling to make a plug in hybrid. Right now the race is
basically between General Motors and Toyota. Both say they might be able to build a
plug in hybrid by 2010.


The problem is the battery. To get the higher charge, hybrids need a new kind of battery –
something called a lithium ion battery. It’s the same kind of battery, it turns out, that’s
used in your cell phone, but there are some challenges scaling that up for an automobile.
Lithium ion batteries can overheat, and right now they’re more expensive than the
batteries in today’s hybrids.


But Bob Lutz at General Motors says you can bet those problems will be solved:


“Every manufacturer in the world is hot on the trail of lithium ion technology, and the
battery manufacturers all say it’s going to work.”


And once you have viable lithium ion batteries, you’re talking about cars that can get
more than 100 miles to the gallon or better.


Most people say the next step is hydrogen fuel cells. With the fuel cells, you put
hydrogen in, and the only thing that comes out of the tail pipe is water vapor.
Some in the industry say fuel cells could be ready for the mass market in the 2020s.
Mike Jackson isn’t so sure. He pegs the arrival of fuel cells at somewhere between not in
our lifetime and never.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

End of the Internal Combustion Engine

  • Fuel cell-powered cars will be much simpler and cheaper to build than internal combustion engine-powered vehicles. (Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Company)

Hydrogen fuel cells have been billed as the next big thing for cutting
down on vehicle emissions. Cars that run on these fuel cells emit only
water. Automakers are investing heavily in the technology, and there
are still some major obstacles. But as Dustin Dwyer reports, there is
at least one big advantage for automakers to push fuel cells:

Transcript

Hydrogen fuel cells have been billed as the next big thing for cutting
down on vehicle emissions. Cars that run on these fuel cells emit only
water. Automakers are investing heavily in the technology, and there
are still some major obstacles. But as Dustin Dwyer reports, there is
at least one big advantage for automakers to push fuel cells:


Of course, automakers want to be seen working on something that could
be good for the environment, and people in the industry will tell you
there are a number of reasons for pushing fuel cells. But there’s one
reason that might matter more than all the others.


(Sound of music…”money, money, money”)


Yep, money.


And if you don’t believe ABBA, you can just take it from Larry Burns.
He’s the head of research and development at General Motors. GM says
it’s spent more than a billion dollars developing fuel cell technology.
That’s money a company like GM can’t afford to waste.


At a recent energy symposium, Burns broke it all down, and talked about
the real reason GM is involved in the technology:


“First of all, we want to accelerate industry growth, for business
reasons. In fact, if I was up here telling you we were doing it for
reasons other than business reasons, you shouldn’t take me sincerely.”


So, what are those business reasons?


For Larry Burns it starts with the fact that today only 12 percent of
people worldwide own a car. To get the other 88 percent, Burns says
future vehicles need to be cheap and clean.


Some will debate whether hydrogen vehicles would truly be clean. They
say, at best, hydrogen just shifts the pollution upstream to the power
plant.


As for the cheap part, that’s also a problem. Right now, prototype fuel
cell cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. But fuel cells
have a few things going for them on the cost front. Take Ford’s new
HySeries Drive Hybrid Edge prototype.


Engineer Mujeeb Ijaz looks under the hood:


“So I guess the first thing you’ll notice when you look under the hood
of the Edge is it doesn’t have a lot of equipment here. In fact, it’s
quite empty.”


It’s empty because all the important stuff, including the fuel cell, is
tucked in a sleek package hidden underneath the vehicle.


The fuel cell itself is only about six inches high, and about as big
around as a coffee table. That’s an incredibly simple design compared
to today’s complicated and clunky internal combustion engines:


“There’s a lot of technology that goes into it, but from a fundamental
standpoint, when you lay out a fuel cell and you lay out an engine,
we’re not dealing with a lot of unique parts.”


So, unlike an engine that has to be machined and assembled in different
ways for most vehicles around the world, a fuel cell only has a few
parts that get stacked together the same way every time. That means
once they ramp up to mass production, fuel cells could save automakers
a lot of, well…


(Sound of music…”money, it’s a gas”)


But before automakers can save all that fuel cell money, they still
have to answer all the questions about where the hydrogen itself comes
from, how to get it into gas stations, and how to store it in the
vehicle.


Automakers say they can make it work. But not everyone agrees. Joseph
Romm is an expert on energy issues, and he says, a lot of the problems
with hydrogen fuel cells might be out of automakers’ hands:


“Each of them probably requires a major technology breakthrough, and
you just don’t know. You might see a breakthrough in five years, you
might not see a breakthrough for fifty years.”


Romm wrote a book called The Hype About Hydrogen. He says fuel
cells have long been thought to be just over the horizon:


“Fuel cells are always just 10 or 20 years away, and so it allows the
car company to seem like they’re doing something for the environment,
without actually having to do anything.”


Romm says he’d bet on better battery technology and biofuels to cut
down on gas use.


Regardless of who’s right, what’s clear is that the auto industry could
be on the verge of a revolutionary change, one that could be good news
for the environment: the end of the internal combustion engine.


It won’t happen just to make people feel good, or to save the
environment.


It’ll happen for a reason you can bank on.


(Music)


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

Related Links

‘Greener’ Cars Won’t Save Us From Sprawl

Many feel that cars powered by fuel cells will save us from a future of pollution and rising oil prices. But Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator James Howard Kunstler says there’s more to think about… he says it’s time to reconsider not just WHAT we drive but HOW we live:

Transcript

Many feel that cars powered by fuel cells will save us from a future of pollution and rising oil
prices. But Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator James Howard Kunstler says there’s
more to think about and that it’s time to reconsider not just what we drive but how we live:


For quite a while now it’s been fashionable among the environmentally-minded to decry the
ownership of SUVs. This says a lot about what’s wrong with the conventional thinking of the
progressive / green crowd.


Would the everyday environment in America be any better if it were full of compact cars instead
of giant gas-guzzling Chevy Denalis and Ford Expeditions? I don’t think it would make a bit of
difference, really. We’d still be a car-dependent society stuck in a national automobile slum. The
problem with America is not big cars, it’s the fact that cars of all sizes have such an
overwhelming presence in our lives, and that driving is virtually mandatory for the ordinary
business of daily life.


Many in the anti-SUV crowd assume that we will solve our car problem with new technology,
like hydrogen fuel cells. Or that low-emission, environmentally-friendly hybrid cars will help to
usher in a sustainable way of life in America.


In fact, cleaner-running, higher mileage cars would do nothing to mitigate the degraded public
realm of a nation that has become a strip mall from sea to shining sea. They would not lessen
commuting distances or times. They would not reduce the number of car trips per day per
household. If anything, they would only promote the idea that we should continue living this way
– that suburban sprawl is normal and desirable, instead of what it is: the most destructive
development pattern the world has ever seen, and a living arrangement with poor prospects for
the future.


Why do we believe that better-running cars will save us? Because environmentalists are stuck in
a culture of quantification, just like their corporate bean-counter adversaries. It’s easy to count up
the number of carbon dioxide molecules in a cubic foot of air, and reduce the whole car issue to
good air or bad air. But air pollution or miles-per-gallon are hardly the only problems with car
dependency. The degradation of the everyday environment in general and of public space in
particular is at least as important, and is not subject to statistical analysis. It’s a question of
quality, not numbers.


In the age of austerity and global strife that is coming down the pike at us, we are going to need
walkable neighborhoods, towns and villages and public transit systems that are a pleasure to use.
Many of us pay premium prices to vacation in European cities precisely because they offer this
way of living, with great railroad and streetcar systems. Europeans still have cars, but they’re not
sentenced to own one per family member or spend two or three hours every day in them. It
would be nice to have these options here in the USA.


In the meantime, I really don’t care whether Americans drive Humvees or Toyota Priuses. Both
big and small cars are cluttering up our everyday world and wasting our lives.


James Howard Kunstler is the author of ‘The City in Mind: Notes on the Urban Condition’ and
other books. He comes to us by way of the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.