Top Gear LOVES Honda's Hydrogen Car, But...

Hydrogen is so frustrating. So close,but so far...

In the same episode they test drove the Tesla Roadster and they flat out lied about the car.

Lie 1: They ran out of charge at one point and there was a short scene of some people pushing the car to an outlet.

Tesla's tech who was there overseeing the testdrive/show taping said they never drained the batteries. They got down as low as 20% but never 0%.

Lie 2: The car's brakes failed in the middle of a lap and they had to use the second car.

The brakes didn't fail. The fuse for the brake fluid pump blew but there would still be enough pressure to stop the car. And replacing a fuse is not even a 1 minute repair.

Lie 3: It can take 16 hours to recharge the car from totally dead.

With a 220V outlet it should take only 3.5 hrs from 0 to full charge. On a 110V it should be about double or 7 to 7.5 hrs.

Lie 4: The car runs on LRR tires which are not good for handling.

It comes with Yokohama Neovo Advan AD07's which are high performance summer tires.

What's the point of all this? Take anything Top Gear says with a massive grain of salt. Including this FCX Clarity review.

Kudos.

Hydrogen has gotten way more attention than it deserves. Detailed analysis weakens it's case, again and again.

When it comes to distractions from the real solutions to perpetual energy/industry and climate change, It's like clean-coal's (that is, carbon sequestration's) little brother.

RE. Top Gears lies.

Top Gear is an entertainment show, stop taking things so seriously. Yes some of its altered for entertainment that's what makes it entertaining.

Any inclusion of clean energy vehicles on a show with as many global viewers as Top Gear is a plus for electric and fuel cell vehicles. Poking fun at an electric car won't stop their deployment into the market. Lighten up!

With regards to the drawbacks of the FCX Clarity and where to get the hydrogen from, its not that difficult any more. MIT themselves have recently developed a catalyst for splitting water at room temperature and it uses less current than other more expensive catalysts. It was mentioned on a previous Treehugger post, I'm surprised more people didn't see it. It highlights just how close we are to producing and using hydrogen on a massive scale within our transport industry.

"Hydrogen, so close but so far"? Not as far as you think.

There is a tremendous amount of pro-plug-in battery bias in this article.

The are very good reasons why extremely smart companies like Honda and Toyota are aggressively pursuing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Honda has even completely rejected plug-in battery technology!

For those who want to learn the facts about hydrogen, I would highly recommend reading the following article which is titled "Frequently asked questions about hydrogen fuel cell cars:"

http://hydrogendiscoveries.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/frequently-asked-questions-about-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars/

If you want to hear the truth about plug-in battery vehicles, click on the answer to question #16 in the link above which will take you to an article which is titled the "Top 25 quotes from Toyota and Honda executives criticizing plug-in battery technology."

Hydrogen fuel cell cars that are powered by hydrogen produced by solar and wind power are the solution to the oil crisis.

And hydrogen fueling station cooperatives are a way to build the hydrogen fueling infrastructure without the oil companies or the federal government (and without subsidies).

Greg Blencoe
Chief Executive Officer
Hydrogen Discoveries, Inc.

"There is a tremendous amount of pro-plug-in battery bias in this article."

But we shouldn't expect bias from the CEO of "Hydrogen Discoveries Inc", right?

While I love Top Gear, you do have to realize that it has become more of a mainstream show for Britons. It used to be very much a gearhead show that focused primarily on testing supercars. There will be a lot of things omitted or exaggerated to make the show a bit more interesting/funny/watchable to the general audience.

>>Top Gear is an entertainment show, stop taking things so seriously. Yes some of its altered for entertainment that's what makes it entertaining.

There's a difference between a little exaggeration for humorous effect and completely altering the truth. I don't see how outright lies are entertaining.

"There's a difference between a little exaggeration for humorous effect and completely altering the truth. I don't see how outright lies are entertaining."

Exactly. Especially if they're not obvious lies.

If Tesla hadn't pointed out that some fact were inaccurate, nobody would've known.

Are James May and Jay Leno actually on Honda's payroll? How could two car enthusiasts agree that driving a boring hydrogen family car all week and then a gasoline sports car on the weekend is the future of motoring?

If you love to drive but hate emissions, buy a Tesla and commute in that. You'll use less energy than a hydrogen car and you'll actually enjoy yourself. Then for fun on the weekends, drive the Tesla some more! If you need to take a road trip, rent a gasoline car.

Why would Top Gear lie? Tesla has a vested interest in people not faulting their vehicles. Top Gear calls out shitty vehicles no matter who makes them. Jeremy Clarkson seemed very impressed with the straight line performance, but if you actually watch the episode you can see the obvious faults in performance (i.e. handling).

If Honda or Toyota want to spend money on trying to develop hydrogen transport, I'm not sure why you're so determined to oppose and undermine them.

Yes there's a not an endless amount of money to be spent, and yes we don't want to waste huge amounts on useless things, but this problem is ALSO huge (as I'm sure you know), and we also can't afford to put all of our eggs in the battery EV basket.

I think it's narrow minded to totally close the door on hydrogen and say never never never, just because we can't get it right YET. It'll only take a couple of breakthroughs to be able to roll out hydrogen on the sort of scale needed.

Yes lithum ion is going well, but that's also not perfect and is waiting for its own couple of breakthroughs, like weight, recharge times, etc.

I personally think the next-gen car that replaces the carbon offset LPG that I currently drive will be some kind of plug-in hybrid. But I also wish Honda (and anyone else trying to develop hydrogen) all the best in seeing what can be achieved with hydrogen and fuel cells.

Peter, I don't think that anyone here has said "never, ever" or that hydrogen shouldn't be researched. In fact, TH has been pretty supportive of it many times.

The point is that you can't just hand wave the problem of where to get the hydrogen.

Anonymous (not sure why people can't use their real names...), I didn't suggest the hydrogen creation/storage/distribution problems can be solved with the wave of a hand. They're all very big problems.

But equally so are the huge infrastructure problems with shifting our centraliased electricity production from our current means (dirty CO2 loaded coal), to renewables of a large enough scale enough and with enough baseload to power our lives/industry.

The point I'm tryig to make is that there's many things we need to do to get to the environmentally sustainable civilisation that we need to be. There's many problems that we need to research and overcome to get there.

And just like the renewables capacity-baseload are problem that are worth spending time and money overcoming, so too are other options and technologies like hydrogen.

As Henry Ford once said - "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, I'd be making faster horses."

Let's not get caught in a trap of thinking that just because something doesn't work YET, doesn't mean it can't work.

As for if TH are supportive of hydrogen in the past or not doesn't mean anything in relation to this story, where virtually everything is negative towards hydrogen, such as

"For a long time the auto industry and anti-green elements in various governments have actually slowed down progress in green transportation by fixating on hydrogen as a silver bullet, ignoring other more realistic technologies (I bet GM now wishes it had kept working on the EV1 for all those years, or had started making hybrids at the same time as Toyota)."

That to me says hydrogen is part of an anti-green agenda, and that we need to ignore it/them so that we can get to truly green (lithium ion battery) transport. Seems pretty never ever hydrogen to me.

"That to me says hydrogen is part of an anti-green agenda, and that we need to ignore it/them so that we can get to truly green (lithium ion battery) transport. Seems pretty never ever hydrogen to me. "

I'm afraid you misunderstood what I meant. Sorry if I wasn't as clear as I should have.

What you quoted was meant as: hydrogen has been used as an excuse to drop other technologies (like california's experiment with electric cars -- see movie Who Killed the Electric Car). The best approach is to work on lots of different things to see what works, and often the glorious vision of a hydrogen future has been used as an excuse not to work on hybrid/plug-in hybrids/battery EVs/compress natural gas cars/etc while many of those were more realistic in the short-term than fuel cells. That's all I meant.

"When the Clarity runs out of juice, you just pull into a hydrogen filling station!"

Hahahhahahah

Yea, there are a total of 18 in the entire country.

"In America, Hydrogen costs roughly the same as petrol."

Um, Liquid Hydrogen goes for about $18 a liter, if it wasn't subsudized.

Sorry. But I'm way more likely to find an outlet than a Hydrogen filling station.
So rip out the stupid hydrogen tank, and fuel cell, and you have a regular EV. Put in more batteries, and it still won't cost $1,000,000.
If the car companies had spent as much time and money developing batteries as they did with Hydrogen, we'd all be driving electric vehicles NOW. (Well, I already am, but I mean the rest of you).

Top Gear is an entertainment show but its head honcho is just doing what the main redneck sheep audience want to hear. The whole thing getting quite long in the tooth.
When he added the coal burning electricity plant in the mix it just shows how little he knows about reality. A big yawn for the development of mass human evolution and intelligence.
As for fool cells well they are just that. We might as well wait for Fusion to power everything.

You totally failed to do your research on this one, bub. A quick visit to the Honda website for this car will show you Honda's Hydrogen Home plan in which hydrogen for the car is produced and compressed using solar panels.

Hydrogen is made by electrolysis, as you said. So how does hydrogen power make a car any different from an all electric? They're the same, only the storage medium is different.

Another little fact you failed to note: hydrogen is a much better energy storage medium than any battery made today. If you think of hydrogen as a battery to store power rather than as just another "fuel," then hydrogen suddenly becomes what the guy said: "the most important car for the last 100 years."

Of course, all of this requires that you step away from a dream world in which electricity comes only from renewable sources, batteries for vehicles are totally non-polluting (sorry, but batteries pollute--ESPECIALLY li-ion), and everyone in the world thinks that bicycles are the greatest invention of all time.

Since that's not gonna happen, you're going to have to realize that not everyone in the world thinks like Treehugger.com. I love your website, but you definitely have some bias that is giving your reporting some blinders.

I'd like to just point out how unbalanced this segment was compared to the Tesla segment so I'm glad you pointed the faults out.

Here are a few things:
-Pointed out the Tesla costs 3x an Elise, didn't point out Clarity costs 5-10x the Tesla.

-Showed "long tailpipe" for Tesla, didn't show "long tailpipe" for Clarity using the LA electrolysis hydrogen station.

-Questioned BEV viability with long charge time, didn't question Hydrogen viability with limited fueling infrastructure.

The Clarity piece itself would serve as good PR for the pro-hydrogen crowd, but it's hardly balanced.

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for writing. More below..

"You totally failed to do your research on this one, bub. A quick visit to the Honda website for this car will show you Honda's Hydrogen Home plan in which hydrogen for the car is produced and compressed using solar panels.

Hydrogen is made by electrolysis, as you said. So how does hydrogen power make a car any different from an all electric? They're the same, only the storage medium is different."

I never said that it was bad, couldn't work, etc. Just said that it was farther off (more expensive) and more complex because of lack of infrastructure (home refueling stations don't appear magically).

The solar panels are great, but it's just another thing that keeps fuel cells from being affordable soon. A million dollar car with $15-20k of solar panels makes the Tesla look downright cheap.

As for electrolysis, the problem is that a fair chunk of energy is lost during the conversion, and some more is then lost compressing the hydrogen. It might not matter depending on what specific case you are looking at, but if we're thinking about deployment on a scale large enough to make a big difference, we have to look at the opportunity cost and see if that energy wouldn't be better used to charge batteries directly (there are losses there too, of course, but everything else being the same, they are generally smaller afaik).

"Another little fact you failed to note: hydrogen is a much better energy storage medium than any battery made today. If you think of hydrogen as a battery to store power rather than as just another "fuel," then hydrogen suddenly becomes what the guy said: "the most important car for the last 100 years.""

Yes and no. It has advantages, such as the high efficiency of the fuel cell itself, and the density that can be stored in the new high tech tanks. But it has disadvantages too, such as being hard to transport in high quantities (it's a lot easier and cheaper to have a few tens of thousands of refueling stations than hundreds of millions of home stations, even if those sound really cool in theory).

"Of course, all of this requires that you step away from a dream world in which electricity comes only from renewable sources, batteries for vehicles are totally non-polluting (sorry, but batteries pollute--ESPECIALLY li-ion)"

Please cite your sources on li-ion batteries.

From what I know, they are a big step forward compared to NiHM; they are recyclable and mostly non-toxic. See:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/03/tesla-electric-car-batteries-non-toxic-recycled.php

The main benefit of plug-in hybrids and battery EVs is that the whole electronic industry is working on improving batteries (phones, laptops, etc), and now automakers have also stepped up R&D. So even if the increase in storage capacity is only 8% a year, it still means these vehicles are closer to mainstream market than hydrogen fuel cell cars.

I personally support EV battery and plug-in technology, but just a question about Hydrogen electrolysis. I recently heard of a study from MIT where they figured out how to convert energy from photovoltaic cells straight into the electrolysis process. Is there any word on whether or not this could ever be done on a mass scale?

I'm not sure why you want to make light of all the trouble large scale hybrid deployment has.

Barring some technological solution not yet available, we just can't do it. There are too little resources and they are too expensive. There's also something slightly obscene about depleting a substance in order to save on another substance.

Hydrogen suffers from the same sort of problems, but the only resource we need is water, which we have in abundance.

The advantage of hydrogen over battery power is quite clear, the near instant "recharging" of the vehicle. Something that topgear itself points out. Hydrogen production while being not brilliantly energy efficient is a fairly new game on the scale we will require. There is a lot of research yet to be done. Battery electric cars are doomed to failure in my opinion due to their far less convenient nature.

well, in any case, it doesn't really matter who comes up on top - fuel cells ore batteries, point is that the engine itself is electric and that means death to the iCE.
So, if tyou get an electric car, You can always upgrade to whatever tech suits you or your wallet the best. Start out with a batterypack and an onboard generator and maybe in the future, if the infrastructure is in place - switch to hydrogen. Or the other way around.
Anyway, I think this is good news, because Top Gear has always had a very negative attitude towards eco-friendly cars and the fact they actually had some praise for them is a very significant development. And for many viewers maybe even a first glimpse into the real possibilities of electric cars.
Anyway, funny thing about the show, when they said that while Tesla runs clean, electricity has to come from somewhere and then showed a quick clip of a nuclear powerplant... umm, point would have been far better, if they showed some old coal fired plant, but using nukes to charge a car is almost like an ideal solution (well, apart from doing the same from renewables) So, they kinda failed at making a point there...

"The advantage of hydrogen over battery power is quite clear, the near instant "recharging" of the vehicle. Something that topgear itself points out. Hydrogen production while being not brilliantly energy efficient is a fairly new game on the scale we will require. There is a lot of research yet to be done. Battery electric cars are doomed to failure in my opinion due to their far less convenient nature."

Even that is not set in stone. Hypercapacitors are getting better, and they can be recharged as fast as you can pump juice in them. Fast recharge stations could "fill up" your EV in seconds.

Even batteries are getting better. A few companies (Toshiba, among them, iirc) have batteries that can be charged to 80% in a very short period of time at fast recharge stations.

Say you have an EV with a range of 250 miles. It would be easy to just top it off at a fast charge station during the day and do the full charge at night when you have a few hours.

Besides, most cars are parked most of the time, and it's easier to install electrical outlets in parking garages than hydrogen stations.

Is anyone working on using microwaves to separate water for hydrogen uptake?

i was wondering lately about the fact that the only emissions from a hydrogen car is water. what if having so many H-cars on roads in cities leads to humidity rise in cities? then that would again leads to modifications in local weather. i was watching a video of a nasa experiment where they fired up a rocket booster, burning hydrogen and oxygen. within minutes, there was rain......is that the fate of our cities in future? or is there a way out?

Fast charge batteries already exist, Altairnano and A123, so fast "fillups" are not an issue. Hydrogen holds no advantage at all. It will be much easier to build high power fast charge stations than a hydrogen transport and filling infrastructure, not to mention all the inefficiencies of said system. Hydrogen=fail.

HELLO!!!
You are from a website called treehugger.com!
Why are you so narrow minded!

Yes, top gear dont give to a preicise stat list comparison of the cars, thats because they are entertainers, not engineers. They gave some pros and cons of both and made their own PERSONAL preference. I wouldnt know about either car if it wasnt for the show.

No, hydrogen is not perfect, but tones of batteries aint to good either, why so much bias?

And why so many wild facts, figures and emotive language thats all unsupported? I wouldnt mind at least one referance to a source other than another one of you own articles.

Finally, and most importantly, why so negitive?? All electric cars are brilliant pieces of technology, why spend so much time fighting over which is best when we could just develop them both collaborively for specific jobs (like petrol and diesel).
We should support and spread the word about true electric cars, rather than just bickering about technicalities

I couldn't read all the posts, just not enough time at work. But I wanted to comment on the transporting of hydrogen to the refueling stations. I guess it's more of a question. Why?
If the grid is in place and the water availible, why not produce on demand. Maybe it's too costly but it may be something that will get cheaper with time. In europe they have had some success with this idea. Or if that's not good enough, what about municipal hydrogen utilities, much like natural gas or water. My english is not so good please forgive the spelling.

James May (Top Gear host in the video) said "in America, hydrogen costs the same as petrol" and showed him driving to a Shell Hydrogen station in California. There are Hydrogen stations in Europe too.

So why is your article complaning about how difficult it is to obtain hydrogen? Petrol price will keep rising once this global recession is over in 2011. Hydrogen prices wont.

Also, we are not only running out of oil, but running out of lithium (the lightweight metal in laptop/mobile phone/electric car batteries). We have only got 130 years of it left at CURRENT production rates.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. It is used to power the space shuttle. We can also use it to power jet aircraft. Can we use electric batteries to power jets? No!

Maneesh, do you work for some pro-hydrogen lobby?