Humming with hydrogen on a Russian highway
VELIKY NOVGOROD, RUSSIA — The people in the square knew there was something different about our little green car, but they weren't sure what.
The answer was written on its side, but the words were as strange to them as their Cyrillic letters were to us.
“F-cell world drive,” it said. “Zero emission.”
Which explains why we needed to persuade a police officer to escort us through the pedestrian square for a photograph under a statue of Lenin — the car was completely silent, an electric Mercedes powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.
You can bet these Russians had never seen a car like this before. They shrugged and got on with their day.
This is exactly the reaction that Mercedes wants: the F-cell cars should be seen as regular vehicles, no different from the cars we've grown used to with no compromises in space or comfort, but with a future-friendly drivetrain that uses no gasoline and emits only water.
No difference in driving range, either, unlike most plug-in electric cars that are limited to less than 200 km, and half that at most in cold weather. These F-cells power their electric motors with hydrogen, so they can drive up to 400 km or so before the tanks need to be refilled.
So to prove their abilities, and to show that the future is now, these little green cars left Stuttgart, Germany, at the end of January for a drive around the world. Now, 112 days later in this Russian square and 27,000 km into the 32,000 km journey, the cars are close to proving their point.
The F-Cell World Drive is no small undertaking. Three hydrogen-powered Mercedes-Benz B200 cars, with a support team of dozens of staff in 17 chase vehicles and even a rented Boeing 747 to fly the convoy over the oceans, are taking 125 days to drive across Europe, North America, Australia and Asia.
Timing is everything: this is the 125th anniversary of Carl Benz patenting the first car, a three-wheeled “vehicle with gas engine operation.” In the late 19th Century, “range anxiety” was a big deal for the car. Gasoline was sold in bottles by pharmacists, to be turned into kerosene and burned in lamps. The first service station didn't appear until 1905, in St. Louis.
These days, there are only 200 public hydrogen filling stations in the world; the sole station in Canada is in Vancouver. There's just no profitable call for them, and plenty of challenges.
Unless an infrastructure is created that makes hydrogen filling stations as commonplace as today's service centres, and until fuel cell construction is affordable, and unless hydrogen can be created affordably and sustainably, then the technology will go nowhere.
“We know that electricity is a solution to replace gasoline, but we also clearly know that we're struggling with the (limited) range issue, and that will always be a problem,” says Jorg Prigl, the Mercedes-Benz vice-president responsible for all its A-Class and B-Class vehicles.
“Powering the motor with hydrogen can be a sustainable solution for extending the range, but the unanswered question is the infrastructure.”
In Germany, Mercedes is part of a consortium of companies created to provide hydrogen filling stations in urban centres, so that it can build fleets of F-Cell vehicles that can be easily refuelled. So far, California is the only other place that's actively working to prepare a hydrogen highway.
The current F-Cells are the second generation of the powertrain and still considered experimental; the third generation is expected in two or three years and Prigl says it may then be sold in limited numbers to the general public, as the electric Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf are now. The fourth generation is planned for production before the end of the decade.
“By 2014 or 2015, I think we will at least be ready to go with production in four digit numbers” — in the thousands — says Prigl. “In the long-run, it could be that the price of a fuel-cell car will be the same as a diesel hybrid.
“If there's a break with just one of the challenges we need to overcome, then we'll get the momentum that's needed to make this all work.”
Mercedes is not alone among carmakers in pursuing hydrogen technology. BMW shelved its hydrogen project last year, but it used the compressed gas to power a regular internal combustion engine. Honda, Toyota and Audi have all built fuel-cell vehicles and are watching each other with great interest.
But it will surely be a very long time before another fuel-cell car is driven around the world. For us, we're being tailed by a tractor-trailer loaded with hydrogen canisters, and a converted Sprinter that acts as a mobile fuelling station.
Mercedes invited media from around the world to drive the three cars on various legs of the long journey. I joined the World Drive in Moscow to take the car for about 800 km to St. Petersburg.
We were told all about the vehicles beforehand, but when it came time to actually see them and drive them away, nobody bothered to explain all the intricacies of the controls. That's because there really weren't any. You adjust the seat and the mirrors, turn the key, put it in Drive and hum away.
Apart from the silent ride, which was quickly forgotten, the only noticeable difference between the F-Cell and the regular B200 is that — like any electric car — it has maximum torque right from the get-go. But this, too, is quickly forgotten.
It's not geared for speed like a Tesla Roadster or a Mini E, but for functionality, with a motor that makes the equivalent of 136 hp, similar to a 2-litre gas-powered car.
The B-Class chassis lends itself to the hydrogen setup because, unique among production cars, it has a sandwich floor underneath the cabin that contains some of the engine and transmission. In the F-Cell, that space is used for the fuel cell and the hydrogen tanks, with its lithium-ion battery stored under the trunk and the main electric motor up front under the hood, directly driving the front wheels.
Bouncing over the potholes of the Moscow-St. Petersburg highway, dodging huge trucks and whipping past wheezing Ladas, I tried not to think about the 10,000 pounds per square inch of compression in the hydrogen tanks under my butt. The engineers assured me that they could not blow. They've tested the tanks by shooting bullets into them and dropping massive weights onto them from great heights, with no ruptures.
And after 10 minutes of driving, I quite forgot that the little car was any different from any other B200 on the road.
Of course, my mind was elsewhere. It was concentrating on the lane system, mostly three lanes total, with the centre overtaking lane swapping to the other direction every couple of kilometres.
I was thinking about the appalling potholes, which would appear with very little warning after a stretch of smooth road.
And I was puzzling over the road signs, written mostly in the Cyrillic alphabet, completely unfathomable to non-Russian speakers.
I drove for a while with a Russian journalist, Yuri Vetrov, who explained the signs and the road system. It helped, too, that he'd fixed his Whistler radar detector to the F-Cell's windshield. There were numerous underpaid police lying in wait along the highway, anxious for “a discussion” with drivers who exceeded the often ridiculous speed limits.
“Here's a typical Russian situation,” said Yuri, when the potholes ended for a while and the road widened to four lanes.
“Smooth highway, good road, and a 40 km/h speed limit.”
Such stretches were uncommon, though, on Russia's main commercial road between its two largest cities, filled with trucks in both directions.
Despite its importance, it's not a ramp-access road like the 401 but a highway with houses built close alongside, often ramshackle and just a few metres from the trucks thundering by.
At one point, it goes right through the town of Vyshny Volochek, with a lengthy traffic jam all day long slowed by traffic lights.
On the outskirts of one small town, we saw a woman standing by the road with her arm extended. “We should give her a ride,” I suggested to Yuri, but he shook his head.
“Did you see the hand gesture she gave the truck driver in front of us?” he said. “She was telling him her price, and she's not a hitchhiker.”
The F-Cells have experienced all kinds of conditions on their journey so far. They're winter ready and drove through snow and ice in Europe, though not so cold as the minus-25 C they're rated for. They've stuck to the relative safety of the main road, but the highway in Kazakhstan is remembered as barely deserving of the description, filled with enormous holes and ruts.
One of the three cars survived a collision with a Kazakh car that bashed in its rear passenger door and bent its rear axle, needing a major overnight repair using parts freighted in from Germany. Its interior — and those hydrogen tanks — was unscathed.
And here in Veliky Novgorod, where we're staying the night just 150 km short of St. Petersburg, we were given the cars to drive around town for a couple of hours, free to go anywhere we liked while the rest of the team kicked back at the hotel.
Yuri and I drove to the square in front of its kremlin and sweet-talked the cop into letting us stage a photo, but a German journalist decided to drive down to the river. He soon found himself stuck on a narrow dirt track that became impassable with deep ruts.
When he tried to escape it in the swampy grass to the side, a hidden rock scraped away at the bottom of the car; when he backed up, it ripped a hole in the floor.
This could be serious. He drove slowly back to the hotel, where engineers crawled underneath to inspect the damage. Much German was spoken, and finally, a solution found: it was patched with duct tape and deemed roadworthy again.
Just like a regular car. Which is the whole point — the only point — of this huge undertaking.
When you read this, the three cars will be in Sweden, after crossing through Finland. They're expected back in Stuttgart on June 1, and there's no longer a reason to believe they won't make it.
Whether they'll find a welcome home outside of Germany and California is up to the world's politicians, and infrastructure companies with deep pockets.
Will the momentum build? Mercedes, for one, is betting heavily on it.
Mark
Richardson
is the editor
of Wheels.
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