Washington Auto Show video: GM hands over Project Driveway fuel cell test vehicle keys
Tom Albert of Alexandria, VA, and Nick Williams of Washington, DC. will test drive fuel cell Equinoxes for the next few months. GM North America Sales VP Mark LaNeve handed over the keys to Tom and Nick at the 2008 Washington Auto Show this week. In the video above, Tom and Nick talk about how they came to be a part of the Project Driveway program. Tom says his wife, Heather, is expecting a baby in two weeks and Nick could not top that explaining he learned about Project Driveway on the internet. If you can't make it to the show but want to know more about GM's fuel cell vehicles, post a question in comments and I will ask on your behalf. The Washington Auto Show is over in just two days, so post your question quickly.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mike 5:31PM (1/25/2008)
Still wasting time and money on Hydrogen Hype? As battery tech improves this become less and less realistic. As a tax payer you're not going to get me to pay for the unnecessary hydro conversion.
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Jordan 5:48PM (1/25/2008)
Hype? While I agree its a ways off from everyone using this technology, I do not believe this is hype. The hydrogen fuel cell is amazing technology that, when combined with a clean production method of hydrogen, produces a vehicle with literally 0 emissions. Some may say that the hydrogen is mainly sourced from natural gas now, but what do you think is providing your electricity to charge your electric car? When the 2 technologies are combined, we arrive at a vehicle with 0 direct emissions (0 total emissions if electricity is generated in a clean manner) and incredible range. To pin our hopes solely on electric cars ignores the needs of the entire transportation industry.
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Jordan 5:51PM (1/25/2008)
Btw, I am a member of Project Driveway and have seen this car closeup. While this vehicle will never be sold in its current form, it is a great test platform for future vehicles
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Chris M 2:58AM (1/26/2008)
Congradulations, Jordan, there aren't very many people that manage to score a free 3 month car lease with free insurance and free fuel as well.
But be honest - would you have been interested if you had to pay 16 cents per mile for H2 fuel, and had the lease or purchase price of a half million dollar car?
BTW, the "fuel" cost of driving electric is 1 to 3 cents a mile.
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Jordan 9:43AM (1/26/2008)
I don't think the comparison is quite fair. Far more electric vehicle components exist than fuel cell components. We see that kid that converted his mazda pickup truck himself and that's a great example of how common the parts are. If anyone were to try to do the same thing with a fuel cell they would fall far short of being able to complete it.
While electric vehicle technology does exist right now, fuel cell will be here within the next 5-10 years. The potential for hydrogen to change our energy world is great and there are a lot of people working on it. The cars will not always be $500,000 (each one is custom built, no surprise on the cost), and the driving cost will be lower as the price for hydrogen. Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely challenges that we face before we arrive at a transportation scheme that works. Just don't look at what we have today at discount it saying it won't work without considering what will happen in the future. Its thinking like that that led to comments in the 70s and 80s that the average person had no need for a computer.
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Derek 7:19AM (2/07/2008)
Jordan, your point about electricity coming (in part) from natural gas is quite valid. However, you are overlooking one big problem. Converting natural gas to electricity to power elctrolysis and generate hydrogen involves three energy conversions. Four if you count the onboard conversion of H2 back to electricity. No matter how well we get these processes working, each conversion will always lose energy, so the further up the chain to using the raw source the better.
Put simply, if we use the electricity directly in an EV, there is more energy available per pound of natural gas than there is in the H2 that would be generated.
Of course, I feel that we should go back one more step and simply run the vehicle on the natural gas! Any modern engine can be made to run on natural gas pretty simply and Honda even has a CNG Civic on the market already. Many of us even have the stuff already piped to our houses for easy filling without having to mess with traffic in and out of a public filling station.
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