Think a Bugatti Veyron is pretty exclusive, what with its million dollar plus price tag? Maybe you think the new Rolls Drophead Coupe is a rare bird? In reality, all you need to roll down the street in one of these dream whips is money. Green Car Congress reports that only 200 drivers will "win" the right to lease a hydrogen fuel cell-powered FCX Clarity over the next three years. Oh wait, Honda's splitting the number between Japan and Southern California. So far, over 50k Californians have applied for a hydrogen-powered "it"-mobile. O.K., yes they'll need some money; $600 per month. The first cut will reduce the list to approximately 500 people who live near designated (if unbuilt) hydrogen fueling stations in Santa Monica, Torrance and Irvine. The chosen ones will receive an e-mail prompting them to take a customer selection survey. The Zero Emission [at least at the tailpipe] Powers That Be will chose the final 100 lessees based on driving patterns, vehicle needs, vehicle storage and– OK, again– financial criteria. Oh, that's after "an interview with Honda America." Yeesh. Maybe if they find out that you also own a Toyota, they'll vote you off "Clarity Island."
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What a BS plan these always turn out to be. A token effort to greenwash their image. I REALLY like Honda and Honda’s products. We’ve owned 7 Hondas and one was new.
The fuel cell thing is just a delay tactic to raise their “green cred” I fear. I doubt that they will put fuel cells on the road for the average person anytime soon.
Why not put fuel cells in their most expensive vehicles and let the tech trickle down to the masses? Why not put the tech into commerical fleet vehicle first?
I fear that this is like the EV1 from GM – a way to say “see what we are doing” when in fact they know that this tech will not reach the common man anytime soon – if ever.
Driving this will make you look like a God, especially around SoCal. I wish I had one… I’d have so many new friends!
Busbodger – I don’t think this is “greenwashing”. I’m not sure how you think this is only a stunt to get awareness rather than development. Reason I’m saying is this car is a 2nd generation Fuel Cell and Honda’s come a very long way in increasing the power, driveability, economy, etc. in the new car. Remember they only leased 10 of the 1st generation FCX and the 2nd Gen will have over 100 deliveries. No other MFGR has a program like this or is this far along as Honda has gotten. The BMW / Ford hydrogen cars use ICE engines that burn Hydrogen – not fuel cells. Fuel Cell technology was developed by the NASA program to power the modules in flight – there money was no object. But now Honda has gotten much further along than any other MFGR and they get labeled as simple “greenwashing”.
Even Toyota can’t be called greenwashing b/c the Prius is an actual vehicle and a pioneer like Honda in Hybrid technology (even though they Sell the Sequoia).
Greenwashing is empty promises just to tout credit where it’s not due – or simply by not deliverying on all the hype. If anyone is ripe for this bashing it’s GM’s belt driven hybrids (the half baked / half assed approach to get green creds when trucks where the image). Or Ford & GM’s claims in 1999 (you know when Honda & Toyota introduced their first hybrids) – to be the leader in green / efficient cars by 2005 (only to fail very badly with nothing in the works).
Why not put fuel cells in their most expensive vehicles and let the tech trickle down to the masses?
Nonsense, you can’t just stick a hydrogen-powered fuel cell in an Acura RL and wait for the technology to trickle down. This is obviously very tricky, finicky stuff. There is approximately no one anywhere qualified to do maintenance on a Fuel Cell vehicle, so Honda’s going to have to control the geographical distribution tightly to match a targeted training and support program. Your local gas station does not sell hydrogen gas, so that has to be well planned and coordinated on a small scale.
Owning a hydrogen-fueled car would obviously be a disaster for anyone who doesn’t have a religious fervor to be part of an early-phase experimental trial. I give Honda a lot of credit for getting this far … which is further than anyone else I’m aware of.
Gee, i can’t wait to find out who the “lucky” few will be that get to own a vehicle that practicaly no one can repair and can’t be driven outside a small area because you only have one place that you can refuel the vehicle on the entire continent. At least in the early days of cars, fuel was available just not everywhere
How can you blame Honda for screening applicants in a country where people (successfully) sue McDonalds for serving HOT coffee?
I am not at all interested in one of these, but if they were serious, they would choose a different test market. Their choice shows their intentions. If you want marketing zing, do it on the coast. If you want to know if it will work, do it in the middle.
I like what appears to be the current Honda “buckshot” approach to finding the best production solution to fueling cars:
Hybrid Civic
LNG Civic
Diesel Civic
FCX
The only way to truly find out what the customer wants is to offer it for sale. If they flock to it (Prius) you’ve given them what they were looking for. If they don’t (Insight) you haven’t.
The two main sources of commercial hydrogen are from electrolysis of water and from reforming natural gas. You need electricity for electrolysis and that electricity mainly comes from burning natural gas in a generation plant. Then, you need electricity to compress and/or cool the hydrogen for [somewhat] compact storage.
Any [reasonable] way you slice it, hydrogen powered cars indirectly consume loads of natural gas. So, how does this compare with the Honda Civic GX, which runs on fuel taken directly from a home’s natural gas system?
Landcrusher :
I am not at all interested in one of these, but if they were serious, they would choose a different test market. Their choice shows their intentions. If you want marketing zing, do it on the coast. If you want to know if it will work, do it in the middle.
Or maybe they chose the test market based on where they can give the best support to users:
The first cut will reduce the list to approximately 500 people who live near designated (if unbuilt) hydrogen fueling stations in Santa Monica, Torrance and Irvine within spitting distance of the American Honda HQ in Torrance.
z31,
What benefit do they get from doing the test near the Torrance HQ? Are the experts really there? Does it really save them money? If so, then I will change my mind on that, but I am always suspicious of anyone using Cali for a market test.
The electricity to produce hydrogen can also be supplied from solar arrays – as Honda has at their HQ in Torrance and they have set up test solar powered hydrogen fueling stations in the surrounding areas.
Honda better own a lot of land if they think they are going to generate enough hydrogen with pv cells. And money, at $2.00 per watt.
Why do all these cars look like ass? Can’t they make a regular car that isn’t from Robocop?
So what happens when the lease ends and Honda takes the cars back? Will we see a documentary titled, “Who Killed the Hydrogen Car?”
Why not just go the direct route, and tank the vehicles up with natural gas which can be stripped down to hydrogen and used in fuel cells right on the vehicle?
Seems to make more sense. I recall about 5 years ago, an abortive attempt by Chrysler (!) to have reformulators right in the fuel cell car, which would be fuelled by unleaded gasoline!
But then again, isn’t the whole idea to get us away from the hydrocarbon?
Honda seems to be pointing the way with their solar array hydrogen splitting. But the thing is, it won’t work except in California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Texas.
So what happens when (or more likely, if) our automotive types divides up by regions? Uncle Frank from Texas comes up to Michigan for a family get-together, and can’t find hydrogen fuelling stations for his Honda FCX?! Aunt Josephine goes to visit her brother Frank in Texas, and can’t buy Ethanol for her E100 Mazda?
I realize that there is not going to be ONE replacement fuel for gasoline, and I’ve said that for ages.
But we have to be able to have sufficiently broad infrastructure to make these replacement fuels practical.
Then again, just about everywhere I go, there seems to be electricity to plug in cars….
I wonder if any celebrities will get one? Hmmmmm.
I think it's brilliant. The people who are interested in paying the lease are probably people like me who have more than one car so they can take one of the others if they need to go visit Aunt Josphine in Wyoming, and will only use the car locally. They are probably interested in trying something that is completely different and have faith that Honda will supply and maintain a fairly well thought out product (based on Honda's track record) and realize that there are likely to be some problems along the way but are wiling to put up with that with the tradeoff being that they get to drive something fairly unique that is not available to just anyone. The publicity that Honda is getting is priceless. About 10 years ago I took part in a pilot study with Honda and UC Davis wherein they supplied a fleet of the first NGV Civic's and left them at my local SF-area BART station. For $200/month including insurance and all the miles I wanted I was able to get into and use any of the cars in the evening and weekends while taking BART (subway) into the city instead of commuting in a car. The flipside was that people coming out of the city to work at Lawrence Livermore labs got to take the same cars from the station to work. They had to be back by 5:30 which is when most of us got back home. In 6 months I A) never was without a car to drive B) Never had to put gas in it (the LL people did that on the LL campus) and C) got to participate in a study that I thought was interesting. Was it a good deal? Don't know, but it certainly wasn't a bad deal. Am I an ecofreak? No, but I did recently retire my perfectly capable Mercedes 400E in favor of a new Civic EX. Was the switch the best choice economically? No, but I am happy to not be buying as much gas, not buying premium anymore, and just using less resources on a day-to-day basis. I know it is better to continue to use the old car instead of buying a new one as far as a carbon footprint goes, but buying and using cars is as much about emotion as it is about purely financial matters. I like cars, and I like an efficient, practical car as much as I like whatever the newest roadrocket is, in totally different ways.
To Busbodger and quasimondo
1. The FCX clarify represents Honda’s second generation in fuel cell cars being leased to consumers in the United States. Nobody wrote blogs about killing the hydrogen dream when the first generation lease ended.
2. Honda doesn’t need more greenwashing. It’s already one of America’s greenest car companies.
3. Honda investigates synergistic technologies (see other comments regarding solar power). So they aren’t abandoning this fuel cell thing anytime soon.
To Landcrusher
1. The National Hydrogen Association (NHA) lists 13 operational hydrogen fueling stations open to the public in the United States. 5 of them are in California.
2. The NHA lists 7 planned hydrogen fueling stations to be open to the public in the United States. 5 are them are planned for Southern California.
3. The NHA only lists 5 public, operational fueling stations not on either coast. 3 in the Midwest and the Plain States: 2 in Michigan and 1 in Illinois. Two are in the Southwest: 1 in Arizona, 1 in Nevada.
4. Isn’t it a bit sophomoric to suggest that Honda run this program anywhere but in Southern California?
To SunnyvaleCA and menno
1. Using solar power to generation hydrogen doesn’t have to be restricted to individual fueling stations or residential fueling stations.
2. Honda has also done work in the use of hydroelectric and geothermal power generation for creating hydrogen.
To Mr. Niedermeyer
1. USA Today estimates that the FCX Clarity would cost Honda $300,000 per car manufactured in this pilot program. If Bugatti or Rolls Royce were to lease one of their cars to 100 customers at $600 a month, they’d probably complete a very extensive screening process also.
2. I’m doing the math on $600 a month versus $300,000 per unit (you know, just in my head), and I’m thinking no reality show producer would go for this deal.
3. If I were to be a skeptic about the FCX Clarity it would be this: Honda is losing money on this venture, there must be something in it for them right? This whole operation seems to me a fleecing of the lessees by Honda: tricking people into paying it $600 a month to test drive cars for its research. I would think that each of the lessees would be carefully screened to give a broad spectrum of driving behaviors that will be inevitably black-boxed, number crunched, and then line graphed to death. Plus, it’s likely that the Southern California region is being targeted so that Honda engineers can ask their lessees to drop by every 3,000 miles for a “check up”. Now that sounds sinister to me.
This is a customer beta-test phase of an whole new way of doing things and Honda is going to be heavily subsidizing the effort. I don’t have any problem with how they are going about this. If Honda proposed to unleash tens of thousands of these things without going through an extensive real world test phase then you would have something to complain about.
For the critics I have a question: How would you allocate the two hundred FCX vehicles from this phase if you were in charge?
@ jaje:
Ford has been driving hydrogen fuel cell Focii around for at least the last 8 years, as I’m sure the other major OEMs have.
I hope part of Honda’s screening process is to filter out those who will make the “Who killed the hydrogen car” movie. I just can’t wrap my head around the concept of using all that electricity (regardless of source) to extract hydrogen, cool it, and compress it just to turn it back into electricity. It seems much less efficient than just charging a battery with the same energy. The only advantage is the instant recharge, but there are ways around this with battery technology, such as swapping discharged batteries with charged batteries at “gas” stations.
$600 per month lease? for that?
WTF???
I guess I could have been a little more clear. Yes most MFGRs have a one off Fuel Cell vehicle they take to press stints or release PRs about them – but nothing more. Honda is the only company with a production capable fuel cell car to consumers and is about to release its 2nd generation. BMW and Ford only have production capable ICE hydrogen powered cars.
If anyone wants to make a “greenwashing” claim it should be against the E85 push. E85 cars get 25%+ worse gas mileage than gasoline. MFGRs only sell them (D2.8) b/c of corrupt CAFE rules that allow them to be calculated ironically at a higher mpg for the ratings. So in essence a Tahoe gets 14mpg under CAFE and 14mpg in real life. An E85 Tahoe gets 9mpg in real life but gets 24mpg in CAFE!!! The D2.8 tout they have the E85 fleets but not for environmental purposes (fuel economy is actually much worse off) – only to save them money from selling gas guzzlers through the loopholes. That’s the definition of greenwashing.
jaje,
I disagree, the E85 thing is not greenwashing, that’s what the guys advertising cars not available for purchase are dong.
The E85 thing is worse. It’s political manipulation, unethical business practices, and typical big government – big corporation callusion against the rest of us.