Bill White
What the heck is a Driver Relationship Manager?
The answer to that question and a lot of others tells us something interesting about whether General Motors and other automobile companies feel there’s a practical future for hydrogen fuel cell electric cars.
I wrote last time about my trip in Air Products’ Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell car, which is on the local company’s campus as part of General Motors’ Project Driveway program. I drove it almost 100 miles and was very impressed by its performance.
This car uses no petroleum products; has no spark plugs, pistons or transmission; has 90 percent fewer moving parts than an internal combustion engine; and emits only water vapor from the vents in the back. The fuel cell under the hood converts hydrogen and oxygen into electricity.
One of the people I was referred to was Chris Colquitt, driver relationship manager for GM’s fuel cell program and Project Driveway. What does that title mean, exactly?
Colquitt says he functions as kind of a “personal OnStar representative” for everyone driving the 100 Equinox fuel cell cars, managing every aspect of their driving experience and troubleshooting for problems, 24/7 if necessary.
This program is designed to get as many of these cars on the road as possible, monitor the experiences of their real-world drivers and show everyone how far this technology has come. Air Products, which has made its car available to employees who want to try it, is part of that effort.
GM’s goal, Colquitt told me, is to make these cars affordable, durable and practical enough to be commercially viable by 2015. Nick Mittica, Air Products commercial manager for hydrogen energy systems, said other car manufacturers worldwide have set the same target year as they refine their hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.
Clearly, there are challenges. Hydrogen fuel cell technology already is making commercial inroads for powering fork lifts and pallet trucks — at a Wegmans warehouse in Pottsville, for example — but cars are another matter. Colquitt said GM wants to produce a fuel cell that will last for 150,000 miles of driving without a major overhaul, and it’s fine-tuning the fuel cells and software to address issues such as slow startup in cold weather and extending the cars’ range.
He explained, “As we go toward real production, we want a minimum of 300 miles between fill-ups.”
Mittica said as more car manufacturers design and build separate platforms for the hydrogen cars — GM retrofitted an existing car in the Equinox — it’ll help them fine-tune weight and tank capacity to increase range.
The biggest challenge is cost. Mass-producing the cars instead of just building demonstration models certainly will help, but there are other issues. One of them, Colquitt explained, is greatly reducing the amount of platinum in the fuel cell needed to produce the necessary chemical reaction between the oxygen and hydrogen. GM researchers hope to find ways to cut that eventually to the same amount of precious metal used in your conventional car’s catalytic converter.
The aim is to make these cars competitive in cost with other advanced-technology, low-greenhouse-gas vehicles, such as hybrids.
Fueling the cars is another big issue. There are clusters of hydrogen fueling stations in some parts of the country, but many more would have to be built. Mittica said the current distribution of such stations ensures that the rollout of these cars will begin in places such as New York, Washington, D.C., and particularly southern California, where stations already are in place. Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea and Japan are countries with the infrastructure for early introduction of these cars.
The Lehigh Valley, not so much.
But it’ll get there. Mittica pointed out that it’s the same way with any new technology. Spare parts have to be manufactured and distributed. Repairpersons have to be trained to work on the cars. Dealerships need to understand how to market and service the new product. None of this will happen overnight.
The Obama administration, focused on green technologies that will yield faster results, has tried to cut funding for hydrogen fuel cell research, but Congress restored it for 2010, and Mittica said it is likely to do it again in 2011. Either way, most car manufacturers, sold on this technology’s long-term potential, are plowing ahead.
Colquitt said the Project Driveway participants he talks to have been enthusiastic. “One of the bigger comments I’ve heard is: ‘If you guys could sell me one of these affordably today, and I could find place to fuel it, I would buy it in a second.’”
