Honda FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell vehicle visit to campus

I was really impressed by the Honda Clarity FCX hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. The MIT Energy Club arranged to host the car and a couple knowledgeable Honda engineers, Ryan and David, from CA to MIT this Friday as part of MIT Energy Night's events. (I setup the MIT side of this as part of my role as Lecture Chair in the club.) A visiting researcher at MIT's Sloan Automotive Lab just went back to Honda to work on this project and enabled this visit - our hats off to Dr. Wataru Nakata! The car was displayed at night and earlier in the day, they let some of us drive or ride. I was lucky enough to drive it and it was genuinely impressive. Very much a well behaved and well sorted out production level vehicle in all the respects I could see. They're even leasing a limited number in SoCal.

Here's pic's of an SDM friend of mine, Rob, and myself before we drove the car.
Here's a pic of Ryan and David, the two Honda engineers who came to tell us all about it. (Thanks guys!)


The fuel cell power source aspect itself was somewhat anti-climatic, it just behaved like one might expect an electric car programmed to emulate the creep and drag in an automatic transmission. Felt like average to good power (compared to a regular Accord) in full acceleration from about 15 mph, very quiet (though you could hear the blowers for the stack and a bit of a whine from the motor under high load), and very spacious in the passenger compartment and the trunk even though it was small on the outside. They packaged it quite cleverly by putting the fuel cell stack where the tranny tunnel usually is and making a custom rear suspension to fit the hydrogen tank very snug into the car.

The coolest feature for me was the dashboard. As Honda seems to like to do, they spent a lot of time thinking about the gauge layout and came up with something very clever, attractive and usable. Here's a link:

http://automobiles.honda.com/fcx-clarity/interior.aspx

Instead of a tach, they have a power output gauge in kW, that has two different color bars of LED's which together indicate the power charge or discharge off the fuel cell and lithium ion battery.

I'm still concerned about all the things that will have to happen to make a hydrogen fuel cell car a common item, but it is encouraging to see Honda putting the time into making this a very workable car. Now if only they could produce the car for cheap, build some hydrogen infrastructure, figure out higher density hydrogen storage and undo the Hindenburg PR disaster, they will be rocking it. At least they're taking some strong first steps...

It is interesting to note that the fuel cell they are using is developed and produced in house at Honda. They haven't used a Ballard stack since 2003. This appears to be a core competancy play that Honda is executing. They are currently great at designing and building small gas engines and they have used this skill to become a strong player in a number of gas engine markets like cars, motorcycles, watercraft, lawn equipment, etc. It appears they are intending to continue this dominance into the next era of power generation. I am a bit concerned for them that this "own the engine/fuel cell" strategy may make them less focused on other workable alternatives that are closer to market (BEV/PHEV and biofuel). They are well hedged, though, to take the technology from the FCX Clarity and make a BEV out of it though, since they are largely the same drivetrain with differnt energy storage.

Looking forward to driving the new Insight!