21 Nov 06
Except underlying even these chicken-and-egg issues lies a deeper, more fundamental problem. Hydrogen and oxygen may be environmentally blameless fuels once they're in the fuel cell, but how do they get there to begin with?
Oxygen is easy because it's in the air we breathe: hydrogen is considerably more difficult. You can steam it out of natural gas easily enough (which is what happens at present) but that means nasty emissions and a depletion of a fossil fuel. Or you can extract it from water using renewable energy sources - wave, wind, solar, you name it - and keep your conscience clear and your bank account empty. The fact is, getting hydrogen this way is economically unviable at the moment and no-one is going to say when that situation is likely to change. It could be decades.
Honda, however, is pressing on regardless. It knows that a fuel cell car is responsible for less than half the emissions of a conventional car, even if its hydrogen does come from natural gas. Better still, and unlike petrol or diesel, a sizeable proportion of homes are already connected to a gas supply so, instead of popping down the road to your local petrol station, you simply plug your car into a small box in your garage that will not only fill your car with hydrogen, it will also provide your heating and hot water. It is a revolutionary idea and, while not without its problems - like what you do if you run low on hydrogen when you're nowhere near home - it has the potential at the very least to fill in until the energy companies get their corporate backsides in gear.
But the real revolution is before your very eyes. Fuel cell cars have been around for a decade or so but none, believe me, has ever looked or driven like this. The FCX is not some futuristic vision of a fuel cell car destined to go on sale sometime near the next Liberal general election victory or hell freezing over, it's going into production the year after next. Which means that once it's been crash tested, certified and developed, a small but significant number of people, in the US and Japan at first, will use one as their everyday car.
