Hi Martin,
Quote:
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Originally Posted by martinjlm
Fact of the matter is, GM is probably a little further along on fuel cells than Toyota is and knows what it takes to go it alone. . . . Re-fueling infrastracture, hydrogen storage, and $ / kw are the biggest obstacles to deployment.
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You are hitting around several of the major H(2) problems:
- low energy density
- cost of H(2) production
- no practical regeneration
- fuel cell aging and narrow operational range
Worse, GM has little or no practical experience with hybrid vehicles except for a hundred or so buses. Dating serious hybrid-electric from 1997 when Toyota introduced the NHW10 in Japan, GM has been all but 'marking time.' GM doesn't have a fleet approaching 1,000,000 vehicles to draw operational experience. Heck, if it weren't for the Freedom Car initiative, we'd be all but ignorant of how these vehicle work in the real world.
Ford started catching up in 2004 with their Escape. Curiously, when Ford was doing their 2005 'employee pricing' sale, the Escape hybrid was excluded. Ford was suffering the same problem Toyota continues to suffer from: customer demand far outstriping supply.
BTW, one of the last documents from Al Gore's "high mileage vehicle" program was a GM proposal to use hydrolic motors and a nitrogen charged, pressure vessel to handle regenerative braking. I thought, still think, this is an interesting idea that scales well for larger vehicles and utility size trucks. But that GM proposal died with the H(2) fraud.
I have nothing against GM employees, engineers or anyone else. But I can't buy inefficient vehicles and GM has not figured that out. You'd have thought they would have tracked the size of the lines at the Toyota dealers since 2001 and gotten a clue but . . .
Bob Wilson