MTO: Super-clean cars may be just down the road

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Super-clean cars may be just down the road

By Seth Borenstein
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Super-clean cars, neither belching smog nor dependent on foreign oil, are just around the corner.

Even though automotive engineers have been making similar promises for nearly three decades, this time the experts swear it's true: In the next few years, your commute to work can be powered by some form of electric batteries or by methanol-consuming fuel cells.

   - Pollution levels threatens federal transportation funding
   - EPA seeks to change pollution standards for cars
   - Activists: EPA's smog standard means fewer people will be alerted when air goes bad

This automotive revolution is coming not just because government regulators are cracking down on car emissions. Now it's the money men who are working to bring "green" cars closer to reality.

"We will have green cars," DaimlerChrysler Senior Vice President Ferdinand Panik said. "It's a business-driven decision at the moment, not a legislative one."

Firoz Rasul, president of Ballard Power Systems, a Canadian company working with five automakers to develop fuel cell cars, said the push for green cars "was done by government before. Now it's driven by industry. That's the big difference."

Joint ventures are being announced and new ultra-clean cars are being designed and unveiled nearly weekly. Even the head of Ford drives an electric Ranger and said fuel-cell cars are next. General Motors' boss vows to match Ford.

No company wants to be left out when cars start switching to cleaner fuels, not with the Environmental Protection Agency tightening auto emissions and California requiring a certain percentage of cars having no emissions, industry officials and environmental activists agree.

Especially not with new technologies hinting - but not proving - that non-gasoline-powered engines may have all sorts of advantages over the tried-and-true internal-combustion engine.

"We're having very exciting technological developments and we've had a whole series of them in the past year," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, ticking off the companies designing near-zero emission cars. "We're going to have a roster of vehicles, I think sooner than people thought, that are going to be very green in reality - not just in advertisements. It's very exciting. It can only mean positive things for the environment."

Three main technologies are being touted to various degrees:

All-electric cars are the most noticeable. They're already on the road, in small numbers, driven by celebrities such as Jack Nicholson and Ed Begley Jr.

Experts say the shortcomings of all-electric vehicles are leading the emphasis on hybrid battery vehicles. These combine smaller internal combustion engines with electric batteries.

But the real future may be in the fuel cell. It's a 160-year-old technology - used on the space shuttle - that makes electricity from combining hydrogen and oxygen to produce water. In the short-term, methanol would power these fuel cells, but in the longer future, gaseous hydrogen would be the fuel.

The biggest problem is price.

"We've shown the performance of the fuel cell," Ballard's Rasul said. "Performance isn't the issue. The issue is: Can we deliver at a (competitive) cost?"

All these alternative vehicles still cost more than the internal combustion engine. And there's a Catch-22, Rasul said. What the fuel cell needs most is economies of scale from large-volume production. But large-volume production can't come until the price of vehicles drops.

To get around that, the green-car movement needs a combination of capital investment (and Ballard, DaimlerChrysler and Ford are spending $1 billion together on a joint fuel-cell program), government incentives and consumer interest, Ballard said.

That's why all of the six big car companies have some sort of green vehicle out or about to be coming out. And that's just the beginning, experts say.

"It's a completely new ball game," Rasul said. "It's new technologies. It's consolidations. It's economies of scale. It's more power."