ALTERNATIVE PROPULSION
Fuel cells and hybrids – what does the future hold for them?
ve just dug out from my hard drive a feature written by the young (own hair and teeth!) Paul Horrell in 1996. It’s about going to Berlin to drive the Mercedes-Benz NECAR 2. A fuel-cell car. Well, a fuel-cell V-Class minibus actually, because they couldn’t ft the gubbins into a car. And it was rocking the rucksack aesthetic of a camper van, because the hydrogen tanks had to be mounted in a glass-fbre blister on the roof. But
Mercedes people were confdent they could shrink the system (and they did, ftting it into an A-Class the following year) and shrink its cost too. Which they needed to because, at the time, the system was 500 times as dear as a petrol engine.
The then-boss of Mercedes told me that fuel-cell cars would be common within about 15 years. Well, 2011 came and went, and I think we can all agree his prediction was hopelessly optimistic. Point of fact, most years since then, I’ve had a go in yet another fuel-cell prototype from GM or Honda or Toyota, and each time been told mass production is “about 15 years away”. Which, right now, would put this receding mirage at 2030.
I say all this because I don’t want to be seen as a sucker. But, even so, I’m going to declare 2015 as the year of alternative powertrain, with fuel cells in the running at last. Toyota is introducing its Mirai, an all-new fuel-cell car, in Japan this year and Europe next. Honda will launch an all-new rival, the FCEV. I drove its predecessor, the FCX Clarity: it wasn’t a concept but a production car, fully homologated for road use. Yet despite the ringing endorsement of my friend and colleague James May on the telly, Honda built fewer than 100 examples. Which makes it four times as rare as a Ferrari Enzo. Small wonder, then, that Hyundai, the third manufacturer of a 2015 production fuel-cell car, has taken the cheaper way out and based its iX35 Hydrogen on a normal car from its range. You can guess which.
Talking of small numbers, over the past year in Britain about 12,000 electric cars were sold, both plug-in hybrids and pure EVs – less than 0.05 per cent of total cars sold here. This year it’s likely to be more, although the most compelling reason to own one isn’t saving the world, but saving tax. The VW Group is in the vanguard, with the plug-in hybrid VW Golf GTE, Audi A3 e-tron, Porsche Cayenne PHEV and more. BMW, having proved the tech with the i8, will have the X5 eDrive to rival that Cayenne, and a 3-Series to follow. Volvo will do the same with its new XC90, but it’ll be positing that as a performancebooster as well as an economy measure – despite having a four-cylinder engine, the badge says T8.
If all that sounds a bit complicated, try to wrap your mind around the idea of an SUV with seven seats, and a 0–60 time under fve seconds, which happens to have full-electric drive and, er, gullwing rear doors. Obviously the product of a primary-school homework project, a Swiss tuner’s motorshow headline-grab or just a chemically induced hallucination. None of the above. It’s the Tesla Model X, and given that frm’s record, it’s clearly going to happen. I do sometimes wonder why no start-up company hasn’t magically appeared with a fuel-cell car and shown the existing global industry what a bunch of foot-draggers they are, in the way Tesla did for electric cars. Actually, I’d have been perfectly happy with a new entrant that was as transformative with petrol engines.
Confused by all this propulsion jiggery-pokery? To take us through it, many thanks to a recent announcement from Mercedes. It’s not just renaming most of its cars (SLK becomes SLC, ML becomes GLE, etc) but also the drivetrain sufxes. BlueTEC HYBRID becomes merely h, and PLUG-IN HYBRID contracts to e. Probably for environmental reasons: the old boot badges were causing catastrophic vehicle weight increases and dangerously depleting the planet’s reserves of chromium.