German auto club gets HydroGen4 from GM for roadside assistance
One of General Motors' HydroGen4 (aka fuel cell Equinox) vehicles is now prowling the streets in Berlin and Brandenberg, Germany offering up roadside assistance. The German auto club ADAC is operating one of the fuel cell-powered crossovers as part of GM's Project Driveway. Just as AAA crews do here in the U.S., ADAC (the "Yellow Angels") come to the rescue of motorists with flat tires, empty fuel tanks or otherwise inoperative vehicles. This will be a particularly demanding assignment for the fuel cell vehicle since it will be operating most of the day, every day. Unlike most of the other Equinoxes being driven by ordinary people in daily use, the ADAC car is equipped with telemetry equipment to transmit data back to the Opel engineers overseeing the European segment of the program. Following ADAC, several other corporate partners are also getting these vehicles for testing.
Related:
Gallery: 2008 Chevrolet Equinox Fuel Cell
[Source: General Motors]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
gorr 2:11PM (2/05/2009)
Nice big powerful truck.
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Carney 4:55PM (2/05/2009)
They can't solve the problem of various substances in the atmosphere being catalyst "poisons" that eventually ruin the fuel cell.
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noz 6:00PM (2/05/2009)
They can't solve the problems of biofuels still emitting carcinogens into the atmosphere either.
Chris M 7:51PM (2/05/2009)
It isn't just the potential damage to the catalyst that the engineers must worry about, they also have to worry about the erosion and eventual leakage of the proton exchange membrane that this fuel cell uses. Membrane erosion is the major factor limiting the lifespan of PEM fuel cells.
noz 9:23PM (2/05/2009)
Indeed those problems exist. And always have existed in many disciplines for hundreds of years. Thankfully, we have advances in material science that have overcome many of the storage issues we have faced in the past. And I'm sure we'll solve these problems too.
But burning a carbon-based fuel will not solve the emissions problem. Unless...UNLESS...there happens to be a fuel where the majority of energy does not come from carbon...but if some of it does, it's small enough where when multiplied by millions of cars, aircraft, and ships, somehow the output is less than what the natural environment can absorb to sustain a good quality of life. As it stands, no such fuel exists that contains carbon.
Carney 3:01PM (2/06/2009)
"They can't solve the problems of biofuels still emitting carcinogens into the atmosphere either."
What carcinogens? Alcohols aren't carcinogenic, or mutagenic either.
They completely lack the benzene, toluene, xylene, ethyl benzene, and n-hexane, etc. etc. that gasoline has.
Incomplete combustion, leaks/spills, and fumes from refueling operations cause these carcinogens to leak into the atmosphere.
None of that happens with alcohols.
Chris M 8:04PM (2/05/2009)
As part of Project Driveway, subsidized by the Government, the Auto Club will certainly appreciate getting the free fuel and free use of the vehicle. If they had to pay the full costs, or even just the fuel costs, they'd politely decline and choose a better cheaper option.
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gorr 11:47AM (2/06/2009)
I heard that they can use hydrogen gas for powering actuals ice too.
Carney 3:09PM (2/06/2009)
noz said, "But burning a carbon-based fuel will not solve the emissions problem. Unless...UNLESS...there happens to be a fuel where the majority of energy does not come from carbon...but if some of it does, it's small enough where when multiplied by millions of cars, aircraft, and ships, somehow the output is less than what the natural environment can absorb to sustain a good quality of life. As it stands, no such fuel exists that contains carbon."
Firstly, there are other pressing issues too. Don't get swept up in carbon monomania. Even just considering the environment there are many other matters, many more timely and needed in the short run, that we should address as long as we don't make the long term carbon situation worse. Including smog/soot/particulate matter (which cause 40,000 deaths per year in the US alone), ozone smog, acid rain, groundwater poisoning, oil spills, sulfur emissions, carcinogens and mutagens and on and on.
Secondly, as I've explained in the past, at worst alcohol makes the carbon situation no worse than if we kept using gasoline, while offering a huge improvement in many other environmental areas. (Thus buying us time to get to electric cars powered by fusion reactors feeding the grid). And in fact that worst consists of using methanol only from natural gas that would not otherwise have been flared, or coal.
But methanol can also be made from any biomass without exception, and ethanol is only made from a variety of crops and plants. All of which are already part of the carbon cycle, in contrast to fossil fuels that had sequestered their carbon deep underground forever in human lifetime terms. And growing those plants has a global cooling effect as well due to the surface area of leaves etc. - that's why a lawn is cooler to stand on than a street, and the air above cities is warmer than above farmland.
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