Although buying a car is not on my horizon this great new vehicle is on lease in California. It’s called the Clarity and it is made by Honda. It is entirely driven by by a hydrogen fuel cell that uses electricity. This from the Honda website;
Honda has led the way in developing and improving fuel cell vehicle performance. The FCX Clarity was designed from the ground up to be a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle that runs on electricity, and emits only water vapor and heat into the air. In other words, the fuel cell technology was developed by Honda for the FCX Clarity, and was not retrofitted to an existing model. Instead, our engineers cleared away all preconceived notions of automobile design, challenging themselves to discover the new possibilities that can only be realized with the fuel cell vehicle.
The only emissions are heat and water (it qualifies as a ZEV – zero emission vehicle). The further question is how much energy does it take to put the hydrogen into a form that is usable for the car?
Also of interest is where can you fill up? At the moment only in California is the infrastructure ready to fill up these cars.
James May from Top Gear reckons it is the most important car since we started driving them.
Always with hydrogen (since the Hindenberg disaster) the most important question that is asked is ‘is it safe?’ I guess this is yet to be seen, but if it is then maybe James May will be right.
