DETROIT MOTOR SHOW: Hydrogen Benz next year

Mercedes-Benz will put hydrogen fuel-cell power inside its GLC SUV as early as next year, according to the company’s Research and Development director.

In an interview at the Detroit motor show, Dr Thomas Weber insisted the world’s oldest car maker would deliver a production version of the zero-emission hydrogen fuel-cell car towards the middle of 2017.

“We will launch a full electric fuel-cell SUV next year,” the German engineer insisted.

“We decided to do a fuel cell powered vehicle and based it on the GLC.

“The GLC is a global car. That’s a good place to start and we are in the middle of the car’s roll-out phase right now.”

Weber hinted it was likely the fuel-cell car, whose only tailpipe emissions would be water vapour, would use existing GLC bodywork and underbody architecture, and sources say it will be named the GLC F-Cell.

Dr Weber also confirmed the GLC F-Cell wouldn’t be the only new zero-emission model in the Mercedes-Benz armoury, with an all-new battery electric car also in the works.

“We also decided to develop a pure battery-powered electric vehicle with 400-500km of range as a platform for the future,” Dr Weber said.

“It will be a full-sized model, that’s all I’ll tell you. We believe in electric mobility with BEV and FC.

“We believe that Mercedes-Benz will need such a platform and we will do at least one vehicle.”

He hinted that the battery-electric and fuel-cell-electric cars would eventually share the same architectures, though the hydrogen fuel cell would reach the market a year before the battery-electric car.

While the GLC-based fuel-cell will be shown at this year’s Paris motor show in October, the battery-electric car won’t be seen officially until the 2017 Frankfurt Show.

The delay in delivering a fuel-cell production car has been long, especially considering Mercedes-Benz allowed outsiders to drive its fuel-cell prototypes as long ago as the early 1990s.

“There is a lengthy decision about a tipping point (to high-volume electric cars) and based on such a platform as this more than one car might be needed for us, depending on the timing of the tipping point.

“On the component side, there are synergies between the fuel-cell and battery electric cars with batteries and electric motors. The components can be used with more than one vehicle.

“We prepared the company for the upcoming future at the tipping point, but it needs to be cost effective and the market needs to be there before we build it.”

Fuel cell cars and battery-electric cars can share the same drive systems, both running as pure electric cars with their wheels turned by electric motors. But where battery electric cars take energy from a power point and carry it with them, hydrogen fuel cell cars generate it on demand along the way and also use smaller battery packs for lag coverage along the way.

A fuel-cell-powered car pumps hydrogen from pressurised tanks onto an anode, where individual hydrogen atoms are broken into protons and electrons. The protons are essentially the waste product and migrate through polymer cell membranes to reach the positively charged cathode, where they react with oxygen (forced as air into the stack by an electric turbocharger) to create water vapour, which is pushed out of the car via a lightweight, plastic exhaust pipe.

The separated electrons, meanwhile, supply the car’s electricity, delivering between 0.6 and 0.8 Volts per cell, so to create more power, car makers just add more cells into the fuel-cell stacks.

The GLC F-Cell won’t be the first production hydrogen fuel-cell car in production, though, with both the Toyota Mirai and the Honda FCV Clarity already on sale in several significant markets.

“We are quite happy that there are now a few others helping us to push infrastructure of Hydrogen,” Dr Weber said.

“Especially with Toyota coming to market with the Mirai to establish infrastructure. That’s always been the issue.

“There are seven hydrogen refuelling stations only in Germany. Seven. That’s why we haven’t build a production fuel-cell car before.”

Daimler has signed agreements with the German Government to push that figure up to 400 by 2023 (coincidentally the earliest start-date for BMW’s own hydrogen fuel-cell car), and Dr Weber believes Japan will use this year’s Olympics to boost its own hydrogen infrastructure.