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Fuel Cells Could Power Your Car by 2004
In March, 1999, DaimlerChrysler unveiled their newest prototype car powered by a fuel cell, a vehicle that looks and performs like a standard compact car.
Start Date: 3/25/99
On March 17, 1999, DaimlerChrysler AG unveiled the latest version of its experimental fuel cell-powered car, the Necar 4. Unlike previous versions, this electric vehicle looks and performs like a standard compact car, with space for five people, a range of 280 miles between fuel stops and a top speed of 90 miles per hour.
The vehicle is powered by a fuel cell that combines hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity. The only exhaust is non-polluting water vapor.
There are drawbacks to this process. Liquid hydrogen fuel is expensive and very difficult to store. Creating a mass distribution system for hydrogen fuel would be enormously costly. And, at present, the fuel cell itself is prohibitively expensive -- about $30,000 for the cell alone, compared with an average cost of about $3,000 for an internal combustion engine.
But DaimlerChrysler engineers believe they can get the price of the fuel cells down to a commercially feasible level by 2004. Ford, Toyota and General Motors are also working toward introduction of fuel cell-powered vehicles by that year.
As for the problems with hydrogen, there are several alternative solutions. Most involve creating hydrogen as needed from other, less volatile substances such as methanol, ethanol or even gasoline, in an on-board device called a reformer. Of these, reformulated gasoline would be the easiest to distribute through existing facilities. However, all these sources of hydrogen would also create carbon dioxide as an exhaust by-product, though in lesser amounts than would be created by a standard engine.
In the long run, hydrogen fuel cells offer the promise of high efficiency, very low-polluting cars. By one industry estimate, an ethanol-powered fuel cell could produce 80 miles to the gallon with negligible emissions. Such cars will be very expensive at first, but their cost could come down enough to make them common on the road before 2010.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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