3 Days With Honda's Clarity Helps Bring Hydrogen Debate Into Focus

3 Days With Honda's Clarity Helps Bring Hydrogen Debate Into Focus

By John O'Dell September 5, 2009

Extreme cab-forward design of Honda FXC Clarity is possible because there's no engine to stuff under the hood. 

By John O'Dell, Senior Editor

It felt like I was driving the future, but it seems that I was only driving toward it.

That elusive future was wrapped in a deep burgundy paint job and hummed along on electric power supplied by a suitcase-sized hydrogen fuel cell mounted in what would have been the transmission hump on a standard gasoline or diesel car.

Honda Motor Co. calls the color "star garnet metallic" and the car the FCX Clarity.

The Secretary of Energy, a Nobel laureate with a background in alternative fuels, calls it too much, too soon.  

Foes and Pros

Some of the most vociferous proponents of battery-electric cars call fuel cell vehicles like the Clarity a pipe-dream, less efficient and more costly than "pure" electric vehicles and a technology that is simply not worth pursuing when all that research money could be going to perfecting plug-in hybrids and the electric vehicle battery.

Hydrogen proponents say the battery folks forget that you've got to measure energy efficiency over its entire life cycle - from well to the wheels - and not just compare snapshots of how efficiently it is transformed into motive power in the vehicle.

From their perspective, hydrogen is a more efficient fuel than electricity from the grid because the process of turning natural gas (the basic feedstock for hydrogen as well as for nearly a quarter of the electricity generated in the U.S.) to hydrogen is far more efficient than using it to generate electricity; an efficiency that more than makes up, they say, for battery-electric cars' more-efficient use of energy from battery to wheels.

Beyond the energy efficiency argument, hydrogen backers point to the Clarity and to General Motors' real-world testing of fuel cell-electric Equinox SUVs, as clear proof that it is a technology ready for commercialization.

Vehicles like the Clarity, they maintain, lack only a refueling infrastructure and mass adoption of environmentally friendly methods of producing hydrogen - from wind and hydro power, for example - to take their place atop the pyramid of alternatively fueled vehicles that will help free us from our dependence on oil.

(They also need a lot of cost reduction - each of the 20 Clarity's that have been produced is carrying probably $1 million worth of hand-made, high-tech parts. Prices won't fall unless there's sufficient demand to foster a competitive supplier base making and selling the components to automakers.)

I Like It

I come down just off-center in the argument, leaning toward the pro-hydrogen side. I believe in battery-electric cars, but I believe that fuel-cell electric vehicles dependent on hydrogen also have a necessary place in the national transportation pantheon.

I wish Honda and GM, so far the leading developers of hydrogen fuel cell vehicle prototypes, could make enough to let everybody try them.

Because when you are behind the wheel of a car like the FCX Clarity, you can't help but believe.

I've driven the Clarity before and wrote one of the early 'first drive' reports on the car. I loved it then but had only a limited time in time driver's seat.

So when Honda finally got a Clarity in its West Coast press fleet this summer and offered to let me take it home for a few days, I jumped all over the opportunity.

It wasn't the typical "hands off" press loan, where they give you the car and go away.

It isn't that the Clarity is an expensive bundle of technology and Honda's loathe to let them out of sight - the company wants people to be able to drive 'em like they owned 'em.

That's how useful data on durability, reliability, comfort and cost-of-operation is collected.

Fuel Follies

No, it's that there isn't much out there in the way of hydrogen refueling, so the Clarity is tethered to a pair of local hydrogen filling stations located about 55 miles apart, in the Southern California communities of Irvine and West Los Angeles.

With a battery electric car, it is possible to use a commercial recharging station (there are a few around and the numbers are growing) or a home-installed 220-volt system for a reasonably time-efficient battery charge - 4 to 6 hours in most cases. Even without 220 current at home you can at least top up a little with a trickle charge via a standard 110-volt cable (it can take 20 hours or more to fully charge an EV battery via 110-current, but it can be done).

There's aren't any home-hydrogen stations yet (that we know of) and except for a handful of locations in California and a few other states - the official total is 60 nationally - no public facilities for pulling-in to top up the Clarity's tank when the fuel gauge is blinking its low-fuel warning at you.

So the first thing the guys at American Honda did was book me appointments at the two hydrogen stations - each has its own system and lessons are required of first-time users.

They dropped the car off on late in the morning on a Monday and, because I have to sit in front of a computer and write stuff if I want to make the house payment, it pretty much sat there all day except for a short evening drive to reacquaint myself - and introduce my wife - to the Clarity's features.

Those included enough pulsing lights and glowing gauges to make a space shuttle pilot feel right at home, all ensconced in an interior swathed in bio-materials - upholstery made from corn, plastics free from petroleum, and a real walnut trim strip just to say hey, this isn't your father's Honda.

On the Road

We'll do all the driving impressions here, before we get into fueling and other stuff some of you might not care about.

The Honda FCX Clarity drives like - well, like a nicely balanced Honda Accord with 25 percent more interior space (thanks to a design that maximizes space gained from the absence of engine and transmission) and  bit more power on take-off.

It's steady and on-center at freeway speeds, not too soft nor too rigid on rough pavement and with a slightly nose-heavy weight distribution, pulls itself nicely through twisties unless you push too hard. In that case, expect a bit of understeer complicated by the Clarity's relatively gripless low-rolling-resistance tires.

Honda says the Clarity's electric drive system (that's right, fuel-cell cars are electric cars, just without the larger battery packs required to haul all the electrons around), fed by electricity flowing from the fuel cell stack (right) to and through the 288-volt, lithium-ion battery pack, will pull the car from a dead stop to 60 mpg in 9.2 seconds.

 We think it's closer to 8.9 seconds, based on repeated runs with a hand-held stopwatch. A good driver could probably get it down into the mid 8's.

Top speed is 100 mph.

But racing wasn't the reason we wanted the Clarity. Boring old daily driving was the goal - to see how a car we loved on a fun mountain course 18 months earlier would do with the excitement of a first meeting long gone, the makeup off and a workaday housedress replacing the glittery ball gown we first saw her in.

She did well.

Voice of Experience

Ron Yerxa, the movie producer ("Little Miss Sunshine") who got the first Honda Clarity lease last year and who has discussed with us his evolving relationship with the car, says that what he likes most about it is that he can drive it every day.

After 3,500 miles, he said in an early spring interview, he'd gotten "to that sweet spot where I just drive it in a totally regular way.

His criticisms are few: the instrument panel is a little "too Buck Rogers," he said; the horn's high pitch is "silly" and there's a small blind spot in the rear-view.

There's also still a little bit of range anxiety - Yerxa doesn't try  to explore the limits of the Clarity's fuel tanks and finds himself at the pumps more often than he would with a regular car.  "Where I live and work there's really only one pump available."

Otherwise, he said, "everything about it has just gotten better."

All About Fueling

Tuesday morning, with a nearly full tank of hydrogen, I hit the road early for a meeting in the office, a 54-mile one-way trip I try not to make too often.

When I arrived, the gauge told me I had about two-thirds of tank remaining. That's around 2.5 kilograms of hydrogen compressed at 5,000 psi, or 350 bar. The Clarity's fuel gauge doesn't  read-out in metrics, so I'm doing the conversions into kilograms - the hydrogen equivalent of a gallon of gasoline - because 'half full' or 'nearly empty' doesn't mean much without knowing the tank's capacity.

My first stop after the meeting was the West L.A. hydrogen station - part of a Shell station located a few miles from Edmund's offices in Santa Monica.

I'd already been trained on filling with that system (courtesy of GM and its Project Driveway test of the fuel-cell Equinox), so all I needed was a PIN from Honda and I was set to go.

Except the PIN they gave me didn't work so the pump wouldn't unlock.

Fortunately, my Honda contact was in his office and a quick cell phone call - I walked well away form the station to make it, honest - got me a working number and in short order, a full tank of fuel.

Filling up isn't that much different from filling a gas tank - except the hose nozzle has to lock securely to a special filler nipple (left) that replaces the gaping open mouth of a filler pipe in a standard petrol-burning car.

Unless you are a Luddite of the first order, or were born and raised off-world, learning to use the hose with its special fittings takes about a minute, although mastering the locking mechanism so you can click it on and off with the grace of a natural takes a few attempts.  (Come to think of it, if you were born and raised off-world, you'd probably already know how to use hydrogen.)

Kilograms, Not Gallons

In any event, topping off the nearly 4-kilogram tank took about 3 minutes. There's no real 'market' price for hydrogen fuel, so Honda arbitrarily assigns a price of $5 per liter just so the pump dial will show something. It showed $7.15 when the pump clicked off, meaning the tank took 1.43 kg.

That's the energy equivalent of 1.4 gallons of gasoline and it means that with its 240-mile range and nearly 4 kg. fuel tank, the Clarity gets the equivalent of 60 mpg.

The fuel economy claim was 68 mpg when the car's stats were first released back in November '07, but the federal EPA has recalibrated the way it calculates energy efficiency in hydrogen fuel-cells, so now its officially 60 miles a gallon - city, highway and combined.

The rest of the day passed unremarkably as I alternated writing chores with giving test rides to a few of the people in the office who hadn't experienced the Clarity yet (the general reaction was 'nice car but where do you get fuel and how come it doesn't do burnouts?').

Then I hit the rush-hour freeway for my homeward commute and experienced another of the Clarity's benefits - as a zero emissions vehicle, it qualifies in states that have 'em for a single-occupant HOV lane sticker. I got to drive home in the car-pool lane, sometimes zipping and sometimes crawling but almost always passing other solo motorists sitting in traffic.

Wednesday morning was eaten up with a drive over to the hydrogen station operated by the University of California, Irvine, for a lesson on how to use that system - and to top up the tank which was down about 1.5 kg. by then.

The difference between the Shell and UCI hydrogen stations is mainly that UCI has dual pumps for cars with 5,000 or 10,000 psi tanks (you can fill a 10,000 psi, 700 bar tank from a 5,000 psi hose, but not vice-versa) and the University, always wary of liability issues, wanted to make sure I wasn't the first to blow myself to kingdom come doing something stupid.

Station director Lorin Humphries joined me and went through the 10-page brochure filled with goodies like "immediately leave the area if you suspect a hydrogen leak, fire or dangerous condition."

Really.

Then she watched as I expertly fitted nozzle to nipple, flipped the locking switch and stood by while the pump did its thing.

It's quite a thing - the university gets liquid hydrogen in an insulated tanker that delivers it at -423-degrees Fahrenheit; it is gasified as it is pumped out of the truck and then compressed and stored in a trio of 15.5-kilogram tubes, which deliver it to the fuel pump, and then into the car, on demand.

By contrast, the Shell station has a hydrogen reformer on its roof and makes it hydrogen on-site by electrolyzing water, using 'green' electricity purchased from the LA Department of Water and Power.

Ordinary Day

My last day with the Clarity was spent doing chores - taking the wife to lunch, a doctor's appointment, car wash, and a stop at a popular drive-in fast-food place in my neighborhood to see if anyone would notice the car.

Ingress and egress for my 6'-2", 235-lb frame was easy, the seats were supportive, the car acted as well at slow city street speeds as on the highway, and the quietly humming compressor (for the air that's forced into the fuel cell stack to mix with the hydrogen) wasn't bothersome and didn't interfere with the stereo or the Bluetooth cell-phone reception - all in all a perfectly ordinary day driving around town.

In fact, if there's one unusual takeaway from my 84 hours with the Clarity, it is that  everyone treated it pretty much as if it were a regular, normal, everyday car.

A few asked it it was the new Honda Insight (which hadn't debuted at the time) and several women - and one man - commented positively on its styling and unusual color, but no one ran me off the road trying to get a closer look; no one even asked if it was a hybrid or electric a car or what the hydrogen label on the rear fascia was all about.

That might be a good thing - at least the car isn't a freak in my section of Southern California. Maybe it means alt fuels, even hydrogen, no longer scare people.

Why Hydrogen

Perhaps someday that will be the case everywhere.

Energy secretaries can pronounce that hydrogen won't be a viable transportation fuel for decades yet, and battery backers can debate energy efficiency numbers, but we ought not be so quick to label hydrogen fuel cell cars interesting-but-dumb and toss them on the scrap heap.

Battery electric cars are great for most commuting and for short trips, but problems start when you think about the charging time you'd have to build into a family or business trip from California to Indiana, or New York to Florida.

Gas-electric cars are easy on fuel and, as plug-in hybrids and extended-range EVs with grid-rechargeable battery packs, can go anywhere because they can run on their gas- or diesel-fueled engines and generators when the battery is discharged.

But someday there won't be much gas or diesel available for personal transportation.

Hydrogen still seems to be our best hope for a widely available fuel that can provide for energy-efficient long-distance personal travel - if we can understand that the need for hydrogen fuel stations is just as great as the need for public battery charging facilities.

Sure, reinforced pressurized tanks for hydrogen are bigger than gas tanks, but cars and trucks designed to use fuel cells could be designed around tanks good for 400-500 miles of range.

But install 500 miles worth of batteries, even the lightest lithium-ion batteries, and the extra weight would turn cars into tanks and cannibalize much of the energy they stored just to get things rolling.

Technology breakthroughs can come - in battery and hydrogen technology - and as a nation we'd be smart to keep working on both.

And lobby the heck out of Honda, GM, Toyota and the six other major car makers that continue to work on fuel cell and hydrogen fuel development to get more of the cars on the road.

If there was one drawback to my Clarity drive, it was that for once it wasn't fun to be the only one out there. I wanted to see more cars like mine.

John O'Dell:  is an AutoObserver Senior Editor. Follow @AutoObserver on Twitter.