Yet there are also two big pluses: Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles can be refueled
in as few as three minutes, then travel for 250 or 300 miles straight.
Electrified cars, on the other hand, require about eight hours for complete
recharging. Depending on the vehicle, they can go only 40 to 100 miles on pure
battery, creating the dreaded “range anxiety.”
When the first cars come out, they will cost more than electrics, whose price
tag is currently substantially greater than gasoline-fueled engines. To help
give consumers the confidence to take the hydrogen plunge, there will have to be
a coordinated rollout of refueling stations, said Charles Freese, who runs the
Detroit-based fuel-cell unit for General Motors. That is where public policy
comes in: Government, fuel providers, infrastructure contractors, and the
carmakers will have to work together to get the stations up and running. The
cost of operating each station drops with every car it services. But there’s a
“chicken or the egg dilemma," he says. "You need to have a number of stations in
place so the customers have easy access to the fuel and have to have a minimum
number of vehicles that start to deploy in [the] same time window so [you] can
keep the throughput of fuel up at the station."
Fuel-cell vehicles will start out not with mass deployment, but in targeted
regions—especially islands. The first places in the United States will be Los
Angeles and Hawaii, Freese thinks—Los Angeles because there are high population
concentrations that can be served by just 50 or 55 refueling stations; Hawaii
because driving patterns are predictable: along set coastal routes and around
self-contained islands, so drivers can’t go too far afield and find themselves
stranded without fuel. GM and the U.S. Army launched a test fleet of 16 hydrogen
fuel-cell cars in Hawaii earlier this year.
City of Randwick, Australia,
Portugal Lisbon
Afghanistan, Kabul
Kalgoorlie, Victoria,
Tampa, Florida
Columbus, Georgia
Samoa, Apia,
Baltimore, Maryland
Tajikistan Dushanbe
Hervey Bay, Queensland