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Toyota Beats Honda to Market, Will be First to Sell Fuel Cell Vehicle
(7/22/2002)July 22, 2002–- The race is on and Toyota has fired the first shot by beating Honda to market. After satisfactory testing on American and Japanese roads, the automaker will begin selling its line of FCHV 4x4 fuel cell vehicles to the general public.
Toyota has already leased about 20 of the vehicles government bodies, research institutions and energy companies in Japan and America with access to the compressed hydrogen gas.
With more than 68,000 miles under their belt the vehicles, based on the Kluger-V off- roader, will have a 107bhp electric motor powered by a 90kW polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell, which is fuelled on gaseous hydrogen.
Toyota claims full scale commercialization of its passenger fuel-cell vehicles will begin in 2010 at the earliest.
The news comes at a time when DaimlerChrysler has released a new method of storing and delivering hydrogen to fuel-cell passenger vehicles; sodium borohydride, also known as borax or, more commonly soap.
Although the solution has more chemicals in it to maintain stability, DaimlerChrysler engineers maintain that the excess heat from both the fuel cell and the borax catalyst could be used to reduce the fuel back to a dry powder.
In overall efficiency, using borax as a carrier fuel like this is less effective than using gaseous hydrogen and the full environmental impact of the slurry recycling (or rehydrogenisation) process has yet to be fully worked through.
Demonstration drives of the new system, which is mounted in a Chrysler minivan known as the Natrium, was performed last weekend at a Spanish test track. The four-ton vehicle catalyses hydrogen on demand from the 53 gallon fuel tank giving it a range of 300 miles, a top speed of 80mph, 0-60mph acceleration in 16sec and an equivalent fuel economy of 30mpg using a lithium-iron battery pack as an energy buffer to store the electricity created by overrun braking.
