With GM’s “Project Driveway” giving more than 100 families and individuals in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington the opportunity to test fuel-cell vehicles over the next year, there’s new talk of ramping up the program to include an entire city. Of course, these hopes are a bit of a pipe dream at the moment — but it wasn’t too long ago that the thought of 100 fuel cell cars on the road was left to the imagination as well. Here’s how Larry Burns, the top scientist at General Motors envisions the experiment working:
“It would have to be a huge commuting metropolis such as New York, Detroit or Los Angeles — would agree to have dozens of hydrogen-fuel filling stations built throughout its region. The upcoming experiments with small groups of customers clustered around single fuelling stations isn’t sufficiently “real world,” he says. “What we need to have happen is for some city or metropolitan area to step up and say we’ll put 50 to 80 stations in place. We’ll locate them intelligently so our citizens are no farther than a couple of miles away from these places. “Once we have a commitment like that I think the auto industry would be capable of targeting its first real, true first-generation vehicles.”
Larry isn’t leaving out the idea that U.S. policy or red tape might cause GM to choose another city somewhere in the world for the experiment; like Shanghai. One thing is for sure: Without a sufficient infrastructure in place, no real commercial tests of next-generation hydrogen vehicles can take place. Burns admits that Project Driveway is lacking in this area. “It’s been engineered to commercial specifications but we’re only doing 100″ hand-built units. “The next step is to do 1,000 of something.”
One thing is for sure: This will not happen without government support — so don’t expect anything till at least 2010. We’ve got a long way to go before fuel-cell vehicles make any type of impression on the automotive industry; not to mention the cost issues. Still, it would be cool to see an entire city participate in a hydrogen experiment across many different automotive brands. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.
via the province
2 Comments
why not do it near detroit? if there are problems with the prototypes.. participants are within miles of the factories…
Sounds like GM is competing against Handa in the Fuel Cell race. Hopefully this will help kick things up a notch.