‘Economic incentives needed’ to bump-start cars of the future

By Karen Carstens

Date: 12/02/04

THE technology is there, so all that is needed to get fuel-cell cars to hit the road en masse are the right economic incentives and an appropriate infrastructure overhaul.

So says Byron McCormick, the Detroit-based executive director of General Motors' Fuel Cell Activities group, who spoke to this paper on a recent stopover in Brussels.

"Although we're not ready to say we've solved all of the issues, we're pretty damn close. We're getting confident enough now to say 'it's doable'," he declared.

McCormick, who was working on fuel-cell research as far back as the mid-1980s, said GM has devoted half of its annual R&D budget to developing fuel-cell vehicles since 1996 and at least $1 billion (800 million euro) since then.

The US carmaker, which operates out of Mainz-Kastel in Germany, has decided to skip hybrids (see article, right) and focus on developing 100% fuel-cell vehicles.

Concerns about Europe lagging behind the US and Japan are overblown, according to McCormick. As the world's second largest petroleum user and second largest car market, "Europe's got a lot of potential", he said, adding that it's anyone's guess where fuel-cell cars will take off first.

That depends on where they get the most support in the difficult initial phase before companies can turn a profit by getting thousands of cars to market, he explained. "The faster we can make the transition, the more likely we are to choose somewhere to sell our cars."

Governments should offer tax breaks as an incentive and adopt internationally agreed codes and standards as soon as possible, he suggested. McCormick believes fuel-cell cars will really take off in ten to 20 years, "so you've got to start to put the infrastructure in place now".

Europe could get an edge by hammering out details of how hydrogen will be taxed as a fuel in the EU - a factor that was left out of a recently adopted framework for energy taxation - and by examining how to create a full-coverage network of hydrogen fuel stations.

The EU aims to replace 20% of conventional transport fuels with alternative fuels by 2020, when it predicts up to 5% of vehicles will be hydrogen-powered. But McCormick said that if the EU set itself a more ambitious target, and created the right conditions, carmakers would be more likely to mass market their fuel-cell vehicles here. If not, they may hit the highways in Japan and the US first.

"We will leave a very changed world - one that's a lot cleaner - for our children and grandchildren," he predicted.

http://ec.europa.eu/comm/research/energy/nn/nn_rt_htp1_en.html http://ec.europa.eu/comm/research/energy/nn/nn_rt_htp1_en.html

---