Toyota FCHV

Toyota's FCHV, as in Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicle, has been setting records here as well as in Japan. In September, Japanese engineers piloted a pair of these innovative cars from Osaka to Tokyo, some 350 miles, without refueling. The cars were said to finish the trip with hydrogen to spare.

What's more, announced today, Wednesday, November 14, at the Los Angeles Auto Show, also in September another Toyota FCHV had a trek of more than 2300 miles, from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Vancouver, British Columbia. This adventure, undertaken exclusively with Road & Track magazine's Engineering Editor Dennis Simanaitis, included 1422 miles of the fabled Alaska Highway, from Delta Junction, Alaska, across Yukon Territory, to Dawson Creek, British Columbia, plus an additional 900 miles. Addressed in this R&D effort were questions of fuel-cell durability, operation in harsh conditions and even exposure to sub-freezing temperatures.

"The FCHV," reports Simanaitis in the January Road & Track, on sale Dec. 1, "ran like trees lodgepole pines."

Hydrogen and air combine within the fuel-cell stack to produce electricity supplying the FCHV's front-drive motor. The car, based on Toyota Highlander architecture, is a midsize SUV weighing about the same as its gasoline-powered all-wheel-drive counterpart. Hydrogen is stored onboard at 10,000 psi within four cylindrical tanks residing in place of a standard gasoline tank. Space for passengers and cargo is essentially unaffected.

The hydrogen highway is still to come. Hydrogen for the trek depended on a mobile fuel rig devised by Powertech, a Canadian company.

One R&D aspect left untried in the Fairbanks-Vancouver trip was running the FCHV utterly to empty. This came a week later when a similar Toyota FCHV traveled from Las Vegas, Nevada, to San Diego, California, and then some, with no mobile-rig backup. Unlike the northern trip, nor were any bison, caribou or bears sighted, and yucca plants replaced the lodgepole pines.

When the car silently rolled to a stop on a Coronado Island sidestreet, it had traveled 436 miles on its single fill of hydrogen - a new record, at least for the moment.

Don't expect your local dealers to have fuel-cell cars for sale any time soon. These are still research & development projects, with powertrains costing orders of magnitude more than conventional technology. But costs are coming down. Durability targets are higher and higher. And fuel-cell projects are involving more of us.