Clarity powered by hydrogen

Honda’s battery EV and fuel cell EV practically twins, writes David Booth.

Honda’s Clarity is a typical, if uncommonly sophisticated, EV. Whisper quiet even at full throttle, supremely torquey off the line and, of course, completely emissions-free, it is the quintessential electric vehicle.

Except that, although the Clarity is available — at least in the United States — as a batterypowered EV, the one I’m driving is not an electric vehicle.

This Clarity FCEV is fuelled by hydrogen. Yes, a fuel cell. Or, as Elon Musk and his acolytes like to call them, “fool cells.”

But here’s the thing: it’s still an electric car. Confused? You’re not alone. I hadn’t realized the sheer power of Lord Elon’s denigrations until I recently gave a speech to a group of Calgary entrepreneurs — a shout-out here to Paul Valentine and Valentine Volvo — on the wonders of zero emissions vehicles. Peppered by dozens of questions about an emissions-free future, the most surprising inference I drew from their manifold queries was how few people — even those as smart and as electrically engaged as those in the audience — realize that electric vehicles and their fuel-celled cousins are truly twins separated at birth.

So, let’s make this perfectly clear: Other than their source of electrons — a battery, typically lithium-ion, for electric vehicles and a tank/fuel “stack” for fuel cells — hydrogen and batterypowered cars are all but identical.

Both are powered by electricity, both require inverters to convert DC current to AC and both are powered by electric motors.

In fact, Honda’s Clarity, available, as I mentioned, in outwardly identical fuel cell and batterypowered variants, uses the exact same electric motor, the same inverter and the same gearbox in both its BEV and FCEV versions.

At the risk of repeating myself, fuel cell and battery-powered cars are virtually identical save for their source of electrons.

While the disadvantages of EVs and fuel cells are well documented — charging times for battery-powered cars, costly infrastructure and running costs for FCEVs — much less discussed is how complementary their attributes are. Combined, virtually every one of the weaknesses of one is offset by the strength of the other.

As Motor Mouth has so often discussed, BEVs take far too long to charge for convenient longdistance motoring. FCEVs, on the other hand, can be refuelled in roughly the same three to four minutes that make gasoline-powered vehicles so convenient.

On the other hand, no matter how efficient we might become at producing hydrogen in the future, nothing beats the convenience of simply plugging your BEV into your home charger.

In other words, for those looking for the electrically driven, zero-emissions vehicle appealing enough to finally wean mass-market consumers away from piston power, look no further than the battery/fuel-cell hybrid.

Imagine, the advantages of two Claritys in one. The BEV version’s under-seat 25.5 kilowatt hour battery easily provides 140 or so kilometres of cheaply recharged battery powered range, triple the 40 km daily commute typical of North American consumers.

The FCEV’s trunk-mounted 5.5-kilogram Kevlar and steel hydrogen tank, meanwhile, is good for some 500 km of emissions-free — and quickly recharged — highway motoring.

Twenty or so kilowatt-hours of on-board battery would seem sufficient to eliminate the need for inner-city refuelling stations — a boon for city planners.

Certainly, the cost to consumers would be dramatically reduced. Driving a pure FCEV at current prices is positively scandalous — about US40 cents a mile compared with just US8 cents per mile for gasoline cars, says The Economist.

But, if the cost of hydrogen drops to 12 cents a mile, and it’s limited to long-distance highway use, a BEV/FCEV hybrid could prove almost as cheap to run as a home-charged battery-powered EV. The future may indeed be electric. But nobody said it had to be battery powered.