Fuel Cell Highlights from the Los Angeles Show

Hot Wheels 10 Car Pack (Styles May Vary)

Honda unveiled a fuel cell concept sports car, the FC Sport, at its press event, and had the FCX Clarity in the “Green Car” ride-and-drive held in conjunction with the Green Car of the Year program.

Volkswagen held a media event prior to the show at which it offered drives in three different fuel cell vehicles: the Touran minivan, Tiguan SUV and Passat Lingyu, a sedan developed in China. VW also detailed its advances in high-temperature fuel cells, a breakthrough it claims will allow simpler and cheaper fuel cell stack configuration because it will require less complicated cooling than other versions.

Kia unveiled its second-generation fuel cell vehicle, the Borrego FCEV at its press conference. This vehicle has a power stack that is almost 50 percent more powerful than the previous generation and uses a supercapacitor for energy storage, but also delivers an impressive 54 miles to the gallon.

Nissan had its fuel cell vehicle, the X-Trail FCV, in the ride-and-drive. The new fuel cell stack in the Nissan doubles the power density of the previous generation stack and also achieves a 35 percent cost reduction mainly due to using half the platinum of earlier versions.

General Motors also had its Chevy Equinox FCV in the ride-and-drive program, one of 100 being used in its Project Driveway program that has thousands of regular citizens as well as key influencers evaluating daily life with a fuel cell vehicle.

Fuel cell vehicles certainly face challenges before becoming a mainstream product, but many in the industry and government still see them as the “holy grail,” capable of delivering all of the convenience and performance of an internal combustion engine without the pollution and greenhouse gases, or dependence on fossil fuel.