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There are myriad voices in the debate about our dependence on fossil fuels, but on one score, everyone agrees. We must reduce the amount we use, and we must find alternative sources of power. Encouragingly, that process is well underway on a variety of fronts, but what is the long-term solution?
The most likely answer is that we'll be driving cars powered in one way or another by hydrogen. And while the technology is tantalisingly advanced - I've driven an experimental hydrogen fuel cell-powered Vauxhall Zafira and found it responsive and unbelievably refined - we are a lot further from that solution than the hydro-evangelists would have you believe.
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| Opel's Zafira, implanted with an eco-friendly hydrogen fuel cell |
There is, for example, no infrastructure to dispense hydrogen - imagine having to reconfigure every petrol station on the planet and you'll get some idea of the scale of the challenge. And that's not even taking into account the massive problem of transporting hydrogen, which needs to be either cooled to a couple of hundred degrees Celcius below zero, or stored under monumental pressure. There is even less consensus about how to produce hydrogen. Here, there are echoes of the debate over all-electric vehicles, a debate that has ended with abandonment of the concept. Sure, electric vehicles produce no emissions, but that certainly isn't true of the fossil-fuel burning powerplants that develop the electricity to feed them. Same argument holds for hydrogen.
At the moment, though, hydrogen is the only long-term solution on the cards. And there isn't likely to be a hydrogen-powered car on your local dealer's forecourt for at least a decade. So what do we do in the interim? Well, forward-looking manufacturers such as Ford and Toyota are already producing cars such as the Escape Hybrid SUV and celebrity-friendly Prius, both petrol-electric hybrids. Basically, these are dual-power cars, with a conventional petrol engine being helped out by electric motors, which can take over entirely at low speeds. The result is a much more efficient powertrain without a large performance penalty. In the case of the Escape, Ford is claiming that SUV fans can have their cake and eat it - a great big box of a truck with the fuel consumption of a car half the size. And Toyota will soon launch the RX400h, a hybrid version of the upmarket Lexus off-roader.
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