2009 Honda FCX Clarity Preview

The road to the future, or a technological cul-de-sac?

Mac Demere / autoMedia.com

The 2009 Honda FCX Clarity doesn’t have an engine. It doesn’t use gasoline, diesel or biofuel. Its emission are only water vapor and oxygen. It gets the equivalent of about 80 miles per gallon gasoline and is almost completely silent.

No, you can’t have one. At least not yet.

Named World Green Car of the Year at the 2009 New York International Auto Show, the FCX Clarity uses a hydrogen-fed fuel cell to create electricity. Lithium-ion batteries store the energy. Three electric motors use that energy to move it down the road. Fuel range is 280 miles: That’s a service range of no more than 140 miles from the nearest hydrogen filling station.

Over the next few years, 200 carefully chosen people in the U.S. and Japan will be allowed to lease a Honda FCX Clarity for three years at $600 per month. Since each FCX Clarity probably costs more than $1 million to build, Honda’s main return will be in real-world test results and a reputation for innovative technology.

Many say hydrogen-fed fuel cells may be one answer to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, as well as eliminating air pollution. Others think hydrogen-fueled vehicles will be nothing more than an interesting technological cul-de-sec. One reason cited by pessimists: Currently, a lot of energy and fossil fuel—mainly natural gas—is required to produce hydrogen. Today, energy from coal-fired, nuclear, and hydro-electric powerplants are used to make most hydrogen. That’s not exactly the best way to reduce C02 emissions or global warming. Also, currently, fuel cells require pure hydrogen, so backyard chemists and biofuel powerplants need not apply, especially since they have a chance of blowing up the entire neighborhood.

Optimists say that in the future, it will be possible to use solar or wind energy to pull hydrogen out of water. They say you might even have a miniature solar-powered hydrogen-generating plant at your house. But that won’t be any time soon. Some of us can’t wait that long.

A far from insurmountable problem is that there are but a handful of places where a FCX Clarity can be filled with hydrogen. Currently, all of these are in Southern California, though others will be built in the Northeast U.S. and Japan. If the Clarity is successful, tens of thousands of hydrogen-fueling stations will have to be built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of hydrogen-fueled cars.

Fuel cells are not new technology. They have been used to power spacecraft, as supplementary power sources for hospitals and as powerplants in wilderness areas.