The motor industry knows full well there are plenty of obstacles on the road ahead. Although the most conservative projections suggest there'll be 1.4 billion cars in the world by 2030 (up from 760 million in the year 2000), these will mostly be made up of ultra-low-cost people's cars built in their millions for developing markets. In other words, a gigantic environmental step backwards. Step forward Honda, world leaders in fuel cell technology. Other companies are also working on hydrogen fuel cells (BMW in particular), but few have honed the technology quite so finely as Honda.
The FCX Concept has been doing the rounds for a year or so, a rolling test bed that offers an insight into what the hydrogen drive of tomorrow will actually feel like; a true zero emission car. The answer? Remarkably smooth, as the fuel cell uses compressed hydrogen to generate the electricity that drives the car round the sweeping curves of Sweden's Gotland Ring. In this landscape of pine trees and wind turbines, the FCX Concept felt swift and futuristic, a low whine accompanying the instant power delivery.
Unlike earlier FCX cars, which traded style for technology, the Concept is elegantly proportioned, making the most of the compact fuel cell to make a car that's genuinely unlike anything else on the road. Nonetheless, it's still relatively early days for the technology. In the absence of any kind of hydrogen infrastructure - or a reliable, clean means of creating the fuel in the first place - the fuel cell is not an instant solution. But Honda hopes that with a little helping hand from legislation, plus their ongoing experiments into a viable 'Home Energy Station', the FCX Concept will finally make it to the American and Japanese markets - albeit in a heavily subsided, quasi-experimental form - in 2008.
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