Reality Check: The Car Of The Future?

(CBS)  General Motors' Sequel may look like mom's minivan, but the automaker says it's the car of the future. As CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports, it runs on clean, plentiful hydrogen.

Is this going to take the place of the internal combustion car?

GM put it on the road this week, and Whitaker was among the first to take a drive.

"When the automobile was first invented, the DNA was petroleum," says Larry Burns, who heads GM's hydrogen project. "The DNA of the future automobile will be hydrogen instead of petroleum."

GM and Ford - in a slump and laying off thousands - are in a race to that future. Major carmakers are spending billions on hydrogen. Los Angeles has four Honda hydrogen cars in its fleet.

"I really love the car. I can't think of anything negative about it," says Detrich Allen of the Los Angeles Environmental Affairs Department.

Neither can President Bush, who's pledged $1.2 billion for hydrogen research.

"The idea of having a hydrogen-powered automobile is not a foolish dream. It's a reality that is going to come to be," the president has said.

What's the fuss about? While oil is a finite resource, hydrogen is infinite. It's in water, it's everyhere ... the most abundant element in the universe. And it burns absolutely cleanly, promising to take us back to the future.

The car is cool, clean and cutting edge, but a lot has to happen before you'll see many of them on the highways.

Why? Money. Hydrogen technology is expensive. Each prototype costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, on top of the billions more in costs for new hydrogen gas stations. To top it off, most hydrogen is extracted from fossil fuels.

"You can only make hydrogen one way, and that's expensive," says Dan Neil, an auto critic for the Los Angeles Times.

Neil says carmakers are spinning their wheels chasing hydrogen dreams when cheaper, superior technology already exists: electric batteries. To the outrage of fans, GM pulled the plug on its electric car, the EV1, in 2003, in part, because the batteries were inadequate. But Neil says that since then, "battery technology has progressed by leaps and bounds."

For example, the new Tesla electric from Silicon Valley, not Detroit, gets 250 miles per charge. Plug-in hybrids use batteries and gas to squeeze 140 miles out of each gallon.

"I think hydrogen is deader than disco, and all it needs to do now is lay down," Neil says.

GM, however, stands by its hydrogen car.

"The hydrogen economy is coming," Burns says.

The question is whether there is a real future for the car of the future.

[apdepetris]

Oh, and the reason that hybrids were introduced years ago but still only comprise a small fraction of the cars out there is that most of them cost more than their gasoline counterparts and it takes several years (I belive I read 5-7 but I may wrong) to recoup just the price difference let alone end up in the black. And in that amount of time many people are trading up for new models anyway. So the main problem is making whatever technology is used not only cheap enough so that most people can afford them but that it's financially worth it (instead of only breaking even). It's just like with any other electronic device that comes out - CD and DVD players, for example, were all really expensive when they first came out until they found a way to make them cheaper. Now just about everyone has one.

[apdepetris]

Alternative fuel cars would be great but I think it will take a while to get there. I think many people's arguments is that while hydrogen is a great idea, it's going to take an entire infrastructure change to get the refueling stations established, etc. In the meantime, there are lots of other technologies out there that could be more easily implemented. I think people believe that Bush and other politicians support hydrogen cars because they are so far the future that they don't have to address the issue right now. But I don't care what kind of fuel they find for cars. My guess is that someone will find a way to charge you an arm and a leg for it so they can make a hefty profit. Filling your car from a garden hose is a nice idea but then they would just probably raise the rates on your water bill. Soemone always has to make out and it's never us Average Joes just trying to go from point A to point B.

[beacheshuman]

Why does everyone play checkers instead of chess? So what if it takes 20 - 30 years to get off the oil nipple? We have to start sometime! We have to insure the future for our kids. We have to somehow insure the future of our planet. And one point to the Einstein who thinks you can fill 'er up at the garden hose, how do you get the steam generated, genius? Heat, lots of it. A fairly inefficient wat to motor around.

[pleiades77]

As the example of hybrid electric cars show, the market share of vehicles with radical new technologies increases only slowly, and it can take years before the new technology starts to appear in more than one vehicle in a manufacturer's fleet. Hybrids were first introduced, in the United States, in 1999, and still only account for about one percent of vehicle sales. MIT researchers estimate that, even after a competitive hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle is available, it will take roughly 25 years for these vehicles to make up 35 percent of new car and light-truck sales. And it will be an additional 20 years or so before these cars replace 35 percent of traditional vehicles on the road. The so-called hydrogen future is a pipe dream.

[rasuth]

You are all missing the big picture (as is the so-called 'expert' on hydrogen availability)..

The push to 'divorce' ourselves from petroleum points toward Nuclear. The new generation of nuclear reactors moving toward certification have the ability to either directly (thermal) or indirectly (electrical) generate hydrogen!

Given a choice between 'global warming' and 'nuclear' what will be the choice? Twenty percent of US electrical production is nuclear now! Why not more?

Anything that generates electricity can crack water to get hydrogen. The fact that most of US electrical generating plants are oil based is tangent to the topic.

[mjv2944]

Big oil & politicians WILL NOT let this get off the ground, remember PROFITS, PROFITS PROFITS. We live in the land of the free and the screwed. The fat cats will not allow alternative fuels to EVER get a real foothold this this country. Man I would LOVE to fill up with my garden hose!!!

[ndg1979]

Another article that clearly demonstrates the lack of intelligence and vision by our auto manufacturers and our government. If they want a clean car, they need to look all the way back to the industrial revolution and to the car called the Stanley Steamer, or Steemer I don't remember which (no morons, it is not the carpet cleaning service). This car ran on the most abundant resource on the planet - WATER! And what you ask did this car spew out of its exhaust pipe? You guessed it - WATER VAPOR! So you CAN be taught.

O.K. now auto engineer geniuses, can you say "STEAM POWERED CARS". Great, I knew you could. How would you the public like to pay less than $1 per gallon to fill your tanks up with plain old water? Or better yet, fill it up at home with a garden hose for a lot less. Now someone just needs to make the idea viable for the market. Hey, if it could be done 100 years ago, why not today?

[nuclearnorm]

hydrogen is highly flammable- hate to see the after effect of an automobile. remember the Hindenberg! also do we replace CO2 with H2O and with what result?

[maurmike]

Your article on the hydrogen car was right on the mark. Hydrogen is only currently obtained from petroleum. Getting it from water requires electricity which we get mostly from fossil fuels. Similarly electric cars are dependent on electricity generated using fossil fuels, primarily coal (50%). Another thing about hydrogen it is very hard to prevent leaks of it into the atmosphere because it's a very small molecule. Massive use of hydrogen in vehicles has the potential to leak it into the atmosphere. Hydrogen is a potent destroyer of ozone in the upper atmosphere.

Mike McHenry retired BP R&D manager