Ford's Focus on the Fuel cell

The company's Aachen research center for advanced powertrain and environmental technologies provided the backdrop for a first drive of its latest fuel-cell prototype.

Automotive design and engineering will always be about options and evolution. There have been periods when it seemed that revolution rather than evolution might bring radical changes, but late 1940's projections about nuclear-powered cars remained comic book fiction. Even the gas turbine, which certainly brought revolution to the aerospace industry, was, after a brief dalliance, dismissed by the automotive industry as theoretically viable but, in fact, hopelessly impractical and inappropriate for cars.

All of this is why the industry is being cautious about the prospect of fuel-cell technology. It would be absurd at present to regard it as the panacea for the energy and environmental challenges that the automotive industry faces. The future of fuel-cell technology is a long way into the future-perhaps 15 to 25 years in terms of really becoming a wholly viable and accepted alternative to the internal-combustion engine, with infrastructure (or rather the lack of it) possibly the biggest hurdle to overcome. So in the meantime, automotive companies must have a portfolio of technologies to broaden the scope of the internal-combustion engine as we know it-just in case fuel cells simply do not pan out.