Excerpts:
- Nissan became the latest last week to say it is ready to mass-produce cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Honda, Toyota and Hyundai say they will have fuel-cell cars — which create electricity on board to power the car — ready to go on sale by 2015.
- Automakers have been finding ways to cut fuel-cell costs and to make longer-range hydrogen tanks, and as they have, along came another unexpected boost: America's huge supply of natural gas. At present, almost all hydrogen used in cars is made by separating molecules in natural gas, and the shale boom has created huge reserves in the U.S.
- Nissan executive Andy Palmer noted that fuel-cell costs are now a sixth of the predecessor concept and that automakers now can mass-produce them "whenever hydrogen becomes widely available" for consumers. It's not, at least in the U.S.
- Honda has already been letting consumers test its fleet of FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel-cell cars for a couple of years.
- Trying to make hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles affordable remains "a very challenging business case going forward," says Charlie Freese, director of GM's global fuel-cell efforts.
I checked out fuel cell prices at this website. A 5 kw fuel cell system, apparently without a hydrogen tank, costs 22k bucks. You would need 5 of these to power a car down the road at highway speed. I figured that if you put these on a trailer and used an existing electric vehicle, you could expand its range.
As I mentioned earlier, a time share set up could allow for a way to make these more affordable. Let's say you rented the trailer for a week each year. That's approximately 110k divided by 52 weeks which equals approximately 2k. Over the lifetime of the fuel cell and car, assuming a lifetime of 5 years, that's 400 bucks additional cost for this feature. Would it be worth it?
The cost of a battery powered Nissan Leaf is as low as 28K bucks according to the Nissan website.
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