Passenger cars with fuel cells internal combustion engines

Fig. 13.3 Costs of hydrogen at the filling station, expanded from [19]. Values are based on the data in Table 13.1 for natural gas reforming, wind power electrolysis, and biomass gasificatirai with the addition of infrastructure costs taken from [7] (shaded areas) supplementary data from [5, 7, 13, 15, 16, 20] (see symbols in figure) for further explanations, see text. Note Since the fuel consumption (MJ/lOO km) of passenger cars with fuel cells is better by a factor of 2 than that of cars with internal combustion engines, the pathways considered here with FCVs meant that competitive costs were derived per kilometer driven...

Even these ideas (which have been in the open literature since 1993) did not tempt U.S. automotive makers to switch to fuel cells as the power source for electric cars. The lead was finally taken by Daimler-Benz, in Germany, the first manufacturers of passenger automobiles with internal combustion engines in the world. In 1996 this company demonstrated fuel cell-driven passenger cars with methanol as the originating liquid to be taken on board and re-formed to hydrogen. This fuel is then used in fuel cells to power the cars electric motors.14... 

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