RUNNING AUTOMOBILES ON FUEL CELLS

The battery-run electric car may be looking better and better¾but it still looks very poor. Range on one charge rarely reaches 150 miles, charging time is many hours, and acceleration is 0 to 60 in an eternity.

No wonder, then, that the fuel cell is being looked into as an alternative. A workshop sponsored by the DoE in Los Alamos, N.M., in 1977 found the alternative feasible and worthy of investigation for practically any kind of automobile¾trucks, buses, delivery vans, and passenger cars. A small car, for example, needs no more than about 16 HP for cruising, and a fuel cell can supply that. For the roughly 50 HP needed in acceleration, such a car could have batteries, which would also be used for the 15-minute warm-up of the fuel cell before starting it, and which could be recharged by the fuel cell when the automobile is cruising. (The 300 HP cars of the late 1950's needed their power only to impress the impressionable; a bulldozer has only about 120 HP.)

Like the battery-driven car, the fuel-cell powered car is very low in noise and pollution, and its energy¾whether from the electric power net or from hydrogen¾could be derived from non-petroleum sources. But unlike the battery-driven car, it can be refueled immediately instead of being recharged for many hours¾if the fuels are available where and when they are needed. But the fuel-cell car also still has many problems, chief of which is its economics. It is doubtlessly worth investigating, but the outcome of the investigation is still very uncertain.