The hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain that GM promises to have on sale in the UK and Europe in 2015-16 built, built here into a Chevy Equinox, and driven for the first time on British roads.
It is telling that car companies are starting to talk about fuel cells as electric cars. And it makes sense: drive comes from a 94kW electric motor fed by the fuel cell ‘stack’, which extracts electrons from hydrogen gas stored in boot-mounted tanks.
OK, we’ve been promised many times before that fuel cells will be on sale soon, but this time the chances genuinely look more realistic. At the Frankfurt Show in 2009, major car-makers signed an agreement that fuel cell cars would be on sale in 2015.
And to make that happen, the British government has just got the companies — plus hydrogen-makers and other interested parties — to sign a new memorandum of understanding to get the project moving in the UK. By the end of this year, a government ‘road map’ to put fuel cell cars on the roads by the end of 2015, should be agreed.
The experience is just like an electric car, so there’s a virtually silent motor and no gears to interrupt progress, just smooth, linear performance as the gas pedal is eased into the footwell.
Fuel cell ancillaries, however, do create a little noise, so there’s a very slight background hum from the air compressor, which forces air into the stack. But the vacuum pump that feeds the brake servo is silent.
