BMW hydrogen fuel-cell EV by 2025

BMW’s 20-year journey into hydrogen technology will finally result in a fuel-cell electric vehicle (FCEV) production car in 2025.

The German premium car-maker’s chief engineer has confirmed that its multi-generational hydrogen development program will lead to the availability of a production car within six years.

Klaus Frölich insisted the company’s long technological tie-up with Toyota was only about half a generation from fruition.

That will be the end of one chapter of a long story for BMW and hydrogen, which even saw the company dabble in directly burning liquefied hydrogen in the heavily insulated cylinders of some internal-combustion BMW engines in 2006.

There was even talk that the third generation of the BMW i sub-brand would be led by an FCEV due in production two years ago.

Yet BMW has been beaten to the punch by Mercedes-Benz with its GLC F-Cell, but also Toyota, Honda and even Hyundai. Audi has also dabbled heavily in FCEV technology, offering test drives of production-ready A7 h-trons at the Los Angeles motor show two years ago.

“In the early ‘20s there will be a small series of X5 hydrogen cars and by 2025 there will be a mass producible hydrogen car available, with Toyota,” Frölich said at a BMW tech workshop last week.

“They [Toyota] make the standard performance stack and we make the high performance stack.”

The early series of X5 FCEVs will be very expensive, low-volume models and there’s no word of whether BMW will lease or retail the SUVs and what countries they would be sold in.

A full series-production FCEV model in 2025 would help with both range and with BMW’s CO2-reduction commitments as well.

There’s a reason why the fuel-cell BMW – which is likely to be an i-branded stand-alone model – won’t be ready until 2025, though: the cost of the fuel-cell stacks.

“It doesn’t make sense to scale the fuel-cell [X5] when the stack is 80,000 euros,” Frölich said.

“It makes sense to scale when it’s 10,000 euros.”

Hydrogen fuel-cells combine oxygen coming into the car with on-board hydrogen to generate electricity, leaving nothing but heat and water vapour. Effectively, they are an electric car with the hydrogen fuel-cell behaving like an active battery.

A push on the accelerator pedal tells the fuel-cell stack to force hydrogen from the tank onto an anode plate, where each hydrogen atom is broken into protons and electrons.

The protons migrate through polymer cell membranes to reach the positively charged cathode at the other end. There they react with oxygen (fan forced from the atmosphere into the stack), creating water vapour. The separated electrons, meanwhile, supply the car’s electricity.