As the Opel Zafira pulls out of the foyer at Hamburg university it leaves a long trail behind it. Water is dripping out of the exhaust pipe. Not a great deal. About as much as would go in a shot glass.

Bob Lutz, boss of GM Europe, who is cautiously manouevering the hydrogen Zafira out of the glass hall, does not notice a university employee wiping up the puddles left by the prototype. Because there is a big blue card stuck on the rear screen of the HydroGen3. The map shows our route from Hammerfest to Lisbon.

Today the Zafira is driving 520 kilometres from Hamburg to Amsterdam. Bob Lutz parks the HydroGen3 in front of the university before handing me the ignition key. This American manager loves sports cars. He loves speed and he loves jet fighters. But what about this eco-car, this Zafira with the cleanest engine in the world? With its modest 82 bhp? That isn’t quite in the same league. Not really.

"I like the sound of the engine. The whistling reminds me of a jet engine," says 72-year-old Bob Lutz. The GM manager likes to trust his gut instincts. "My strong point", as he asserted in an interview. This time his gut feeling is that hydrogen is the fuel of the future. "There is no alternative." He also thinks that hybrids have great promise, in other words cars with two types of engine; one electric and one conventional combustion engine. But his gut feeling is also that there will be more demand for these cars in America than in Europe.

Wonder what that guy in the tuned Vectra thinks about the car of the future? On the A1 highway to Bremen an Opel with a "bye-bye" sticker overtakes us. The crew-cut driver gawps at us as if we were moving backwards. What’s he thinking right now? Perhaps: "Do they do tuning on hydrogen cars?" Of course not. Not yet. Although the HydroGen3 has brakes from the OPC range, the nimble, sporty Opel models. And this Zafira has pretty taut suspension. But couldn’t the engine do with a bit more zing? Perhaps, with the next generation of hydrogen cars, a buffer battery will give some added power when the driver asks for it.

We are happy with the car’s performance on the stage ending in the Netherlands. Three refuelling stops, no breakdowns. Just once, negotiating a Dutch roundabout, the red warning light came on. But HydroGen3 started up again without the GM team having to do anything. So far, the engine of the future would seem to be "Opel the reliable."
 

Hamburg-Brussels
By Cornelis Kit 

It was spring 2000 when I drove the predecessor of the HydroGen3, the HydroGen1. It was a very short experience on a closed part of an old airport near Brussels (now our goal for today!). That car four years ago was a rolling laboratory and nothing else. The characteristics I remember were more like those of an electric delivery lorry than a comfortable passenger car. What I wanted to know was the progress the GM people made during the last years. A good reason not to hesitate when I was asked to join the Fuel Cell Marathon?

Today we (an American colleague, a GM-press officer, a GM-engineer and I) drove the shortest stage of the marathon, only 160 km from Delft to Brussels. The sun was shining bright; a display showed a temperature of 20 °C and there were no traffic jams forecasted on our route, so we could be early in Brussels to enjoy a fresh Belgian beer under the blue sky.

While seated behind the steering wheel everything looked similar to the ordinary Opel Zafira, except a couple of buttons that replaced the gearlever. Oh and to monitor the e-motor the rev-meter was replaced by a kW-counter. Those were the first big differences. Other differences were presented to us during the drive on the road like less noise and no vibrations from the drive train. The only sound we could hear was the ‘zoom’ of the e-motor and with good ears we could hear the hydrogen pump when we accelerated.

The engineer gave me some little instructions. I had to forget some old fashioned words: throttle pedal and ignition key. There is no throttle valve in the system of this car and there are no spark plugs to ignite any air petrol-mixture. After this brief driving-a-hydrogen-car-lesson I switched the stick formally know as the ignition key. Nothing happened. When I pressed the pedal there was a little sound of the e-motor and the car moved forwards. Yes! We were on our way to Brussels, leaving the students of the Technical University, the gathered press and other interested people in Delft.

Driving this fuel cell-car was just as easy as driving a Zafira equipped with an automatic transmission: two pedals, one for the brakes and one to accelerate. In city traffic the e-motor delivered enough torque to the front wheels, no problem to go with the flow. And cruising 120 km/h on the motorway went also without any problem. Only on steep ramps (on bridges and out of tunnels) the e-motor showed different torque characteristics compared to an internal combustion-engine. But realising that we were driving 2015 technology in 2004 we could forgive this car.

We took a short break at a filling station near the Dutch-Belgian-border to give the photographer a chance to make some pictures of the car in an area where the car could only be filled up with screen wash and nothing else.

Although, the manager of this station came out of his office to take a look on what we are doing and offered us free coffee. Why? We didn’t know. He couldn’t sell us anything, neither today nor the next years. Possibly he saw it as an investment for the future. Well, when he will sell hydrogen in the year 2015 I come back to fill up my fuel cell-car at his station.

When driving a car with such a futuristic system like the fuel cell under the hood, it is hard to accept there are still traffic jams, but after the photo shoot and coffee break we unfortunately got into a not forecasted queue caused by an accident on the motorway. It is still 2004. The speed was zero for a quarter of an hour and the bright shining sun tried to warm up the Opel interior. But the air conditioning cooled it down successfully.

At that moment a display on the dashboard showed us the fuel cell-stack was producing 4,5 kW, not for moving the car but just for additional systems. After opening the windows and pushing a button to switch off the air conditioning the power output went immediately to 2,3 kW. If the HydroGen3 would have a battery the air conditioning-pump could use electricity regenerated during braking. Possibly in the next generation Hydrogen? Because the e-motor didn’t generate electricity the car decelerated only a little bit when I took my foot from the right pedal. Now I had to use the brakes more often than normal. Minor details, we arrived in Brussels without any problem or refuelling.

In the past years the GM people made a big leap. Now the drive-ability of the HydroGen3 is much more closer to what we are familiar with in an internal combustion-engine equipped Zafira. O.K., the car is not on the same level of the petrol or diesel Zafiras yet but the gap is not that big as it was four years ago.