From a technical standpoint, the big problems with fuel cell
vehicles have always been the weight and bulk of the units, the difficulty in
storing and dispensing pure hydrogen safely, and the cost of making the cells
in the first place. From a business standpoint, the much larger issue has
always been that no company with the resources to mass-produce such a vehicle
has ever been interested in making one, which means there has also never been a
financial incentive for anyone to produce service stations capable of refueling
one. Tesla Motors has experienced some of the same issues with its electric
cars; while they are still developing a network of charging stations, unless
there are enough customers to keep such stations in business, no one is going
to operate one. So far, there are only a handful of stations that can provide
hydrogen for fuel-cell vehicles, all of them in California – but that could be
about to change…
A story last week in the Washington Post describes a new offering
from Toyota called the Mirai, which is being described as the first production
car to use a fuel-cell power plant. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, in
that the Mirai is only going to be produced in limited numbers (700 this year
and 2,000 next year), but the same Post story mentions that Hyundai has already
started producing a fuel-cell version of the Tucson-class SUV, and Honda’s
first fuel-cell type will be available next year. If these vehicles perform as
well in a business sense as they perform in the physical sense it seems likely
that we will gradually see production increase, as it did in the case of the
Prius-class hybrid and as it is starting to with the Tesla electric products.
And there is reason to believe that these vehicles will take off and sell,
given their advantages over all previous technologies…
Some of the advantages are practical, of course. A fuel-cell
type like the Mirai will have significantly greater range than the Tesla
electric cars, and will require three minutes to recharge, rather than the 30
to 60 needed by an electric vehicle. Toyota is also pricing them at about 70%
of what the primary Tesla car is selling for. But the big difference should
come in terms of industrial base and infrastructure. I will yield to no one in
my respect for Elon Musk and the folks at Tesla Motors, but for all of their
technical and financial brilliance, they do not begin to have the industrial
resources of Toyota, let alone the Honda and Hyundai corporations, and who’s
even mentioned access to capital or distribution channels yet? Toyota has the
ability to build up the number of fuel-cell vehicles gradually over time,
exporting them to more and more states as the fueling stations to support them
come on line. If two or three major competitors are also dumping
hydrogen-powered vehicles into the US market, it will very rapidly become
economically viable to support and fuel these cars, and the whole cycle will
begin to pick up speed…
There are still problems to work out, of course. It remains
to be seen if the oil companies will pick up on the opportunity to sell
hydrogen through their existing infrastructure (at the moment, most of the
hydrogen is being delivered in various hydrocarbon storage media, and could be
distributed through slightly-modified gas stations), or how long it will take
to educate the public about the potential of hydrogen-powered vehicles. But if
production volume starts to rise, and the price continues to drop, fuel cell
vehicles might take off in exactly the same way gasoline-powered cars did a
century earlier, and for almost exactly the same reasons…
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