Hyundai to launch fuel-cell electric vehicles

After lagging behind its rivals in the battery-powered electric car segment, Hyundai Motor Company will launch what it calls the world’s first production fuel-cell electric vehicles. The South Korean automaker is confident that fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) will be a more realistic future auto technology than pure battery electric cars such as Nissan Motor’s Leaf. Those pure battery electric models have failed to win over drivers as the batteries are expensive, take hours to recharge and can only drive short distances.
Hyundai explains that a fuel-cell converts hydrogen and oxygen into water and generating power to drive an electric motor. Fuel-cell vehicles can run five times longer than battery electric cars on a single power-up, and it takes just minutes to fill the tank with hydrogen, compared with 8 hours or so to recharge a battery. The company plans to offer just 1,000 FCEVs, based on its Tucson crossover, from December through 2015 in Europe, while it finds ways to lower production cost by half.
“We aim to reduce prices of fuel-cell vehicles to match battery cars by 2020-25,” Lim Tae-won, the director in charge of fuel-cell research at Hyundai and its affiliate Kia Motors, told Reuters. He said fuel-cell cars would overcome the “range anxiety,” or fear of running out of power far from a charging point, if the refueling issue was resolved.
Trade media have put the initial sticker price of a fuel-cell car at around US$88,000, a hefty price tag for a brand that made its name with cheaper, feature-filled models. While fuel-cell electric cars may go further, manufacturers still have to wrestle with the high cost of production, double or triple that of battery-powered electric vehicles (BEVs), and a lack of refueling infrastructure. (September 25, 2012)