Fuel cell vehicles vehicle cost

The costs of a PEMFC stack are composed of the costs of the membrane, electrode, bipolar plates, platinum catalysts, peripheral materials and the costs of assembly. For the fuel-cell vehicle, the costs of the electric drive (converter, electric motor, inverter, hydrogen and air pressurisation, control electronics, cooling systems, etc.) and the hydrogen storage system have to be added. Current costs of PEM fuel-cell stacks are around 2000/kW, largely dominated by the costs of the bipolar plates and... 

Transition modelling estimating the investments required to bring hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles to cost competitiveness... 

Pt is, however, an expensive and limited resource. For a 60 kW fuel cell vehicle, the cost of Pt would be over 2,400 at current cost and loading of Pt. Even worse, replacing combustion engines in all existing vehicles by fuel cell drive systems at no penalty in power would exceed the known reserves of Pt. Catalyst layer design, therefore, strives to reduce the Pt loading markedly at no penalty in the fuel cell voltage. 

One of the most promising enei sources for the future will be hydrogen. The hydrogen fuel cell vehicles fece cost and technical challenges, especially the fuel cell stack and onboard hydrogen ston e. 

The problem is that hydrogen, even at 10,000 psi (or 690 bar), requires five to ten times the volume of today s gasoline tank, depending on the fuel cell vehicle s real world efficiency. Packaging volume is compromised even further because pressurized tanks require thick carbon fiber walls and are, therefore, nonconformable. Moreover, they may cost several thousand dollars more than a conventional gasoline tank. 

Based on input assumptions to be described below, these two models are used to calculate the costs of fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen infrastructure and estimate the benefits in terms of reductions in C02 emissions and oil consumption. 

Table 15.5 lists our cost and performance assumptions for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) and a gasoline internal combustion engine reference vehicle. FCV... 

Initially, only a few thousand fuel-cell vehicles are manufactured each year, and the cost is high (> 100000 per vehicle). As more vehicles are produced, the cost comes... 

To study this buy-down process for hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles, the Simplified Transition Model (STM) was used to aggregate costs over the entire fleet, based on the fuel-cell vehicle and hydrogen infrastructure costs previously described ... 

To estimate the overall transition cost, the STM tracks the incremental costs of the hydrogen and fuel-cell vehicles sold in the market relative to the same number of gasoline vehicles. Two components of this transition cost are estimated over time. First is the incremental price of buying hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles each year,... 

Figure 15.13. Cash flows for introduction of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. Positive cash-flow values indicate that the cost of H2 vehicles and/or fuel is lower than the cost of gasoline vehicles or fuel.

Today, the power train costs of fuel-cell vehicles are still far from being competitive. They have the largest influence on the economic efficiency of hydrogen use in the transport sector and the greatest challenge is to drastically reduce fuel-cell costs from currently more than 2000/kW to less than 100/kW for passenger cars. On the other hand, fuel-cell drive systems offer totally new design opportunities for... 

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