Honda FCX Clarity – as ‘Green’ as it gets?

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By Anthony Crawford | May 17th, 2011

Southern California, for all it’s smog (and trust me it still hangs in the San Fernando ‘Valley’ twenty-four seven) it still regarded as the automotive ‘Green’ capital of the world, when it comes to big cities.

There are also thousands of Toyota Prius’ within the California state lines and while they are certainly classified as ‘environmentally friendly’ the ‘Green’ star must surely go to Honda’s FCX Clarity.

Launched in 2008, the Clarity is a proper fuel cell electric vehicle with zero emissions and in some cases, offers 5 minute refuelling times. The other more important news is that the 26 lucky Honda Clarity customers, who lease the car for a grand total of US$600 per month, never have to worry about the price of petrol, regardless of what happens in the Middle East. You see – hydrogen is free. At least, for the time being it is.

FCX Clarity drivers now have access to seven ‘fast-fill’ hydrogen refuelling stations throughout Southern California and last Friday, the world’s first station supplied by an existing hydrogen pipeline opened across the street from Toyota’s Motor Corp’s sales division.

The new Royal Dutch Shell hydrogen station will mainly service test fleets from the likes of Toyota (who incidentally lease the land to Shell), Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Co and General Motors and of course, those fortunate Honda Clarity drivers.

Honda hopes to have at least 200 FCX Clarity cars on the road within a few years. In traffic congested place like Los Angeles, there is an even greater benefit to driving this ultra green Honda. The deal is that fuel cell vehicles get an automatic ‘white sticker’, which qualifies them to travel in the transit lanes (high occupancy lanes) and that goes for a single driver with no passengers.

It’s a great deal if you can get it, but if it’s that good, why aren’t there thousands of them on the road all over the world?

It’s a question of dollars – they cost plenty to build and it’s likely that Honda looses money on each and every Clarity they make.

Five years ago, Ford said that their fuel cell Focus cost $1 million to build although, Toyota said this year, that the actual costs have come down by 90 percent, which would mean US$100,000, but that’s still way out of the ball park for average consumers.

That said Toyota says that they also plan to release their own fuel cell model by 2015 at a cost of around US$50,000. It makes huge sense when you weigh up the benefits. Hydrogen can be made from natural gas or water, you can refill your car in minutes with a range of several hundred kilometres or more and the clincher, and there are no exhaust emissions.

Whichever way you cut it, the only sustainable fuel model for the global automotive industry is hydrogen fuel cells. The Hybrids and electric plug-in vehicles are simply stop/gap solutions while the collective technology partners work it all out on the fuel cell front.

andrew

about time this vehicle was showcased. seen it on top gear a year or so ago and wondered why it hadn’t received much attention.
MatthewM

“Whichever way you cut it, the only sustainable fuel model for the global automotive industry is hydrogen fuel cells.”

I really think this is a gross mis-/overstatement. It would reflect reality far better if you had said:

Whichever way you cut it, there is currently no sustainable fuel model for the global automotive industry.

There is NO way the current production and storage of hydrogen can be scaled up to support the global automotive industry in a sustainable fashion. It is totally impossible. Why? Where does the hydrogen come from? To produce hydrogen in the most effective means possible, as used in these cars, a natural-gas processing system is used. If you are going to be using natural gas anyway, why go through the inefficient process of turning it into hydrogen? Just burn the gas!

I’m not a doom-and-gloomer here, between gas reserves, coal processing, shale gas processing and other technologies, we will have enough cheap usable energy to take us far enough into the future that hopefully other technological solutions can take over the reigns from hydrocarbon based internal combustion engines for transport, but we are not there yet, and any claims to the contrary are folly.

http://www.caradvice.com.au Anthony Crawford

You need to re-read the article chap and the part about the fact that these cars are filling up from a Hydrogen pipeline and how Hydrogen is made. It might make things clearer for you. The only thing holding more cars back from the likes of you and I, are the price of these cars, NOT any lack of Hydrogen.

MatthewM

I think you need to re-read my comment chap, I never claimed there was a lack of hydrogen. I claimed that hydrogen production is no more sustainable than the fossil fuels it is replacing.

Carnie

Agreed MatthewM, This car and the concept of using hydrogen to fuel transport is great. But only if Hydrogen can be produced effectively.

At the moment hydrogen is produced in three ways.

1. As a by product of the production of petroleum or from fossil fuels. From fossil fuels through the fractional distillation process hydrogen is a by product. Alternative method is from natural gas (CH4) ripping the carbon off CH4 and that itself requires a lot of energy because it gets heated to approximately 1100 degrees with steam in the process losing 20% of the energy originally put into CH4 to produce the hydrogen. Therefore why not just pipe the methane and burn that. its much more efficient overall.

2. Electrosis of water, but again this requires electricity and for water to instantly separate into hydrogen and oxygen it must be heated to 2500 degrees. That itself needs some special equipment and that requires energy. If we make a nuclear powerplant dedicated to bubbling water that’d be good. But then why not just use the electricity?

3. Biohydrogen, using bacteria to break down organic stuff to produce hydrogen from organic acids. This is possibly the most efficient method of producing H2 if we use light (but where will the energy come from to produce that)

It is a far cry from high school chemistry of dunking a piece of magnesium in hydrochloric acid then popping a balloon with a candle. It requires more energy to produce hydrogen than just using the original source of that energy. Until we find more efficient method to produce hydrogen, running cars on H2 is like putting the world on a downward spiral of energy production, using more energy to produce less energy is BAD.

Tom

You are completely correct Carnie. I would also add that electrolysis isn’t a very efficient process.

As a fuel cell is basically a battery using hydrogen as a fuel, the concept of the fuel cell introduces several sources of inefficiency over and above an electric car. As the energy is used to drive an electric motor to drive the car, it is just as inefficient as an electric car from that perspective, and as electrolysis requires electricity, you still have the efficiency losses from the original power generation and power grid that you get with an electric car. Secondly, you have the inefficiency of producing the hydrogen, along with its transport and storage. Also, the fuel cell itself isn’t 100% efficient.

All of this begs the question as to why you wouldn’t just use the energy to charge a battery, thus cutting out several sources of inefficiency. There are already electric cars with ~300km range such as the Tesla, and one can imagine this will increase rapidly with widespread investment and development of the concept. Also swappable batteries and fast charging could emerge. I would be interested to see how the biohydrogen industry develops, but extracting it from methane is patently absurd. At present, I think we are far closer to having a viable electric car than a viable hydrogen car.
scottjames_12

I guess there are 2 things to draw from this.

Using electricity directly, instead of converting it into hydrogen and then back into electricity, is more efficient. However, you have all the drawbacks of current battery technology (materials used to build them, charge times, weight, decreasing performance over time, decreasing performance at temperatures, etc.)

Hydrogen, if we can find better, safer ways to store it, and more efficient ways to produce it, may prove to be a better way to store energy for a car than a battery.
Lazybones

Fuelcells have the same issues,

1) they still have Li-ion battery packs,
2) they still need rare earth metals to make them,
3) they don’t last as long as batteries
4) They can suffer from contamination if the H2 supply is not perfectly pure
5) They still emit water vapour which is classed as a GHG!

The big kicker for me is look at who supplies the H2, Shell (the oil company) has its logo in almost all the above pictures. So what do you think shell will do to the price of H2 once were all hooked on it???
Tom

Scottjames, Lazybones did a pretty good job addressing your points, but I would also add that fuel cells contain platinum, which is obviously extremely rare and expensive, so that also counts as a significant disadvantage. There have been already proposals for swappable modular batteries, and besides, the vast majority of journeys are easily within the range of quite rudimentary electric cars – which will only get better when more charging stations arise so you can charge while at work etc. The most important point to note is that the electric car is still an extremely immature technology – and of course they will improve very quickly with more widespread investment.

The problem with hydrogen is that every way of extracting it requires significant amounts of energy, and this cannot be overcome.

http://www.renewableopportunitiesinc.com Seth

There are approx. 8 BILLION tons of Industrial and Municipal solid waste produced each year in the US. If you use our gasification process to destroy 10% of these wastes, there would be more than enough Hydrogen produced to not only begin the transport transition, but to also implement a stationary power transition as well. Produced in a closed loop green manufacturing process, the cost of producing this fuel would be less than $2.00/gal. gasoline equivalent, and use no fossil fuel to produce. This IS sustainable, and will have a positive effect on not only our energy problems, but make significant strides in cleaning the environment of hazardous wastes polluting our planet. The cost of the vehicles are also becomoing drastically cheaper as the technologies progress.

Shak

I think a lot of people on CA would agree, that Hydrogen is our future. If they could sell me an FCX clarity for less then 60K, then i would definitely buy one.

I know a lot of people say that creating Hydrogen is an extremely energy intensive process, and that it just transfers the emissions from the tailpipe to the Power station, but i would rather we dont have two stages of emissions in the production of our vehicular fuels. Remember, refining oil to produce diesel petrol etc also uses lots of energy. AT least when we make Hydrogen, it is unlimited and produces no emissions when consumed.

MF

i dont usually agree with your comments Shak, but i like this one!
Robert

i’m sure the majority of people would consider price a factor more than emissions. To sum that up, if both processes equal the same emissions [tailpipe vs powerstation] i’m sure people will go with the lower price

Yonny

“….with a range of several hundred kilometres or more….”.

Anthony, is it possible to be more precise about the range of the Clarity? Or is the achievable range a highly variable thing?
http://www.caradvice.com.au Anthony Crawford

Range is estimated to be 380kms
Pauly

Also keep in mind that the FCX Clarity is about 4 years old now, and by the time they stop making that model and move onto the next, the fuel range will have increased again.

I wish I could ask Honda, Toyota, GM and Merc what their opinions are on when Hydrogen cars will have the same range as a diesel car. (1000km+)???
Alexander

@Shak, you have a valid point, but it doesn’t make sense to use huge amounts of (coal or renewably sourced) electricity to produce hydrogen, you gain less energy from it than it takes to produce it, it’s simply easier to put that energy straight into a battery pack. Developing an infrastucture of quick charging stations for electric cars would be far easier than hydrogen infrastructure, and electric charge stations can be put pretty much anywhere there’s a power plug, you could also technically charge it off your own solar array at home and not pay a cent for it – hydrogen won’t stay free forever. Over all it’s simply easier to switch to electric propulsion than it is to hydrogen (not counting the range issue)

Despite this, I ultimately think that in 10-15 years electric and hydrogen cars will co-exist like petrol and diesel cars do today.

MF

I think the only problem with EVs is that they take too long to recharge. If the charging time is reduced to less than 10 mins, i dont think hydrogen cars stand a chance.

Alexander

currently you can fast charge a Leaf in 30 minutes to 80%, but it’s truly a matter of battery preservation, if you through enough voltage at the battery it will charge quickly, but it will shorten the lifecycle of the battery at the same time. I think it’s just a matter of giving manufacturers time to further develop the technology.

Jon Leong

… meanwhile here is Australia, some People still think that “Diesel” as the alternative fuel that all car manufacture should bring across all their models…

Thumbs up to Honda for not offering soon to be obsolete Diesel here in Australia and pioneering in Hydrogen fuel cell.

Matt man

Great point. I am in LA a lot for work, and always notice how progressive they are there. I was commenting on this with a mate, and he said, “nah we have the right idea, switching to diesel, it’s the way of the future”…
Alexander

It’s laughable how people think that their diesel cars are environmentally friendly and superior hybrids etc (from an environmental point of view). Diesel cars emmit far more harmful emissions than a engine, they output more c02 per litre than petrol and contribute heavily to poor air quality in cities. The only thing green about diesel cars is that they burn less fossil fuel than a petrol car.

F1UCHZX

The Japanese know what they’re doing, they have skipped this whole ‘diesel’ fad and continued to work, improve and make hydrogen, electric and Hybrid cars..

Diesel is a joke being mass marketed by a joke brand such as Volkswagen..

And Australians make a fool of them selves by paying big money on car like Volkswagen, VW has fooled Australians really..

QAZ

Even those Euro brands are bringing out EV/hybrid models. Clearly they have finally learnt that diesel is not “the future”!

You can call they Americans fat, but when it comes to new technology they certainly dont hold back and are almost always the fastest in adapting them!
Alexander

I agree 100%, there’s NO point switching from a petrol car to a diesel car in the hope of being ‘green’

http://aisicar.com/ aisicar

how many hourly average speed of the Honda FCX Clarity ?
nickdl

Well we can thank the Governator for this. He did a terrific job of putting California forward from an environmental perspective. Let’s just hope that it takes off all over the world and soon. This is the way forward for smaller cars. Vehicles of heavier duty should be moving to LPG, especially here in Australia where we have massive reserves of the stuff.

As good as it would be to see the government roll out infrastructure to support Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, it better not be the current Labor government. If they can’t get the price right on a $40 set top box, or a $100,000 school canteen, what hope do we have of getting cost-effective hydrogen technology to Australia??
bangel

In south australia most cars run on HYDRO .
Senna “S’s”

There’s a country called Iceland,which has plentiful supply of natural energy mostly geothermal 66% consumption. viability of hydrogen as a fuel source is perfect since it is a small country of only 300,000 people, with over 60% living in the capital Reykjavík
So why aren’t we all taking Iceland as an example, because most countries are resource poor be that natural, oil or gas.Europe probably the most resource poor continent, Japan doesn’t have energy resources it can draw on even worse now,Africa not
Senna “S’s”

So lets take this for what is, car companies carrying out research and development with the added bonus of looking green getting free publicity not to mention subsidies from the Worlds biggest consumer of natural resources.
Locky

This is how I see it into the near future and probably beyond.
Main Family Car – HOLDEN VOLT
Just need Holden to do the smart thing with Orbital Engines and convert it to run on CNG (preferably) filled up from home or LPG, instead of Petrol. This will give the family car the same range as solely ICE vehicles but the ability to run purely on battery when only driving around the ‘burbs’ and to work each day which is usually less than the 35 mile range limit of this vehicle.
Second “Mum’s Taxi” Car – ANY PURE ELECTRIC
Why, because that is enough for putting around the local district dropping of kids to school, shopping, lunching and general just ginning around as Mum’s do during the day. Plus!! great car to loan the teenage kids as they have near zero servicing costs, are cheap to run and have a lot less to break when thrashed by these lovely kids.
Both of these cars can be charged by home generated solar power if the correct system is installed for $15K – $20K with the bonus of cheap power at home as well.

Sorry, but I am not going to buy into the whole fuel source supplied and distributed by the oil companies and Woolworths/Coles, they can stick that!! The above scenario allows you to be far more independent from governments and more importantly the mentioned corporations and the technology is available now.

WAKE UP EVERYONE!! Hydrogen is just the best method for corporations around the world, NOT us the people. By the way, I am not a greenie….just a realist who is feed up with governments and corporations always leading down the path to debt and reliance on them….

Shak

What you have just proposed seems like a brilliant idea, and would go a long way to reducing our reliance on dirty coal powered electricity. But i see one fatal flaw in your plan. You have proposed an outlay of over 100K. The Volt when released will most likely cost north of 60K, the Leaf (only pure electric coming here in the short term) will most likely fall into the 40K bracket, and then the Solar array could jump even further in price when the generous subsidies run out. For most families living in the suburbs with the obligatory 2.5 kids and the mortgage, that is simply too much to justify ‘sticking it to the oil corporations’.