Ford's Edge HySeries offers glimpse of future
— -- En route to its unveiling at the Washington, D.C., auto show in late January, Ford's provocative Edge HySeries fuel-cell plug-in hybrid detoured to USA TODAY, where it got some serious hammering for part of a day.
The worst thing about the car is that Ford Motor F has no plans to put it into production. The prototype tested is the first of just two that Ford plans to build.
Still, it's useful to wheel about in the Edge HySeries to sample the state-of-the-art in alternative-fuel vehicles. The marquee features are:
• It uses no petroleum-fueled power, so is pollution-free.
• It can be plugged into an ordinary household outlet to recharge. Generating that electricity creates some pollution, but less than a gasoline-power vehicle would, Ford says.
• Its on-board hydrogen fuel cell only recharges the battery pack. It doesn't drive the vehicle. The benefit is that the expensive and cumbersome fuel cell can be made less costly and tidier to package. The trade-off: The expensive lithium-ion battery pack has to be larger. But there's a net savings in weight and complexity, Ford says.
PHOTOS/AUDIO:Ford HySeries with Healey's comments
The HySeries prototype felt almost like a production machine behind the wheel — smooth, tight, quiet and well-finished.
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Steering was unusually agreeable for a vehicle using electric-power steering, which is hard to tune just right.
Brakes were anywhere from ordinary to nose-dive sudden, depending on how high the regenerative braking was set. That's the system that taps the force of the brakes to recharge the battery. When it's on high, you hardly have to touch the brakes to slow.
The only gripe about function: The vehicle was sluggish. That's a result of two decisions:
• Allowing the prototype to lard on the pounds, including a second electric motor for all-wheel drive and various cosmetic items for the auto show.
• Tapping slightly less than two-thirds of the battery pack's power during this shakedown stage of testing.
The next version will shed weight by going to front-drive only, eliminating the second electric motor, and losing some extras. Ford also will dip deeper into the capabilities of the battery pack to boost power.
Even so, it probably will take a purpose-built vehicle, not a modification of an in-production model, to maximize the powertrain, says Mujeeb Ijaz, Ford's manager of fuel-cell vehicle engineering. Such a vehicle will need exceptionally low wind resistance, as little weight as possible and minimal friction, none of which is possible in a conventional production vehicle.
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Edge HySeries will go 25 miles on a full charge of its batteries, which takes three to eight hours plugged into a home outlet. It will go another 200 miles on the hydrogen stored in a high-pressure tank.
Ford says studies show that more than half the cars on the road travel less than 30 miles a day, and 60% of commutes are 40 miles or shorter.
Many people should be able to handle their daily driving using the battery pack only, seldom needing to tap the hydrogen fuel to keep the battery pack full.
If people rarely need a hydrogen fueling station, they might be willing to go out of their way to find one, Ijaz reasons. That would minimize the need for a ubiquitous hydrogen infrastructure to match the gasoline distribution network.
In the test vehicle, there was no noticeable change between running just on the battery and running on the battery being recharged by the fuel cell.
A lighter version with more battery development work should use energy at a pace equivalent to a gasoline engine getting 41 miles per gallon, Ijaz says. That's twice as fuel efficient as the gasoline Edge.
The trip computer in the test vehicle, recalibrated for the experimental powertrain, showed an equivalent of about 23 mpg for about 35 miles of heavy-footed highballing around the suburbs.
Without a gasoline or diesel engine, the vehicle was remarkably silent, a benefit that many would appreciate. The only sound was a whine from the relatively inexpensive gears used to save money.
Sounds great, you might say. But at what price? Ijaz wouldn't say just what it would cost to put the Edge HySeries into regular production. Other makers have intimated that the price of anything with a fuel cell on board would be $100,000-plus.
What is the state of the art?
Technologically terrific. Not perfected, but clearly good enough to satisfy most users. Not noisy, inconvenient or cumbersome.
Financially, not so good. The thinking is that further research and development will make the important hardware smaller, cheaper and stronger.
A skeptic might say that's the very thing that automakers said about electric cars during a spurt of interest in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Those failed for lack of battery technology that would make them affordable and give them an attractive driving range.
The industry's and government's target date of 2010 for practical, affordable fuel-cell machines seems, at best, optimistic.
Ford Edge HySeries prototype
•What is it? Experimental electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion battery pack that can be recharged overnight via regular household current and can be recharged on the go via onboard hydrogen fuel cell.
•How soon? The first was completed Dec. 8. One more is planned, to see how much weight can be cut, but that's it. Ford has no plans to produce it.
•What's the point? To move closer to the goal of a practical electric vehicle, which doesn't pollute or use petroleum fuel. Edge HySeries uses its hydrogen fuel cell just to recharge the lithium-ion battery pack, not to directly drive the vehicle's electric motors. Thus, the fuel cell can be smaller and cheaper and uses less hard-to-find hydrogen fuel.
•What's the powertrain? 130 kilowatt lithium-ion battery pack powering front and rear electric motors rated a combined 174 horsepower, 336 pounds-feet of torque; one-speed transmission.
•How thirsty? Rated to use energy at a rate that's equivalent to 41 miles per gallon in a gasoline vehicle. Trip computer in tested prototype, recalibrated for the battery/hydrogen powertrain, showed 22.7 mpg equivalent in lead-foot suburban driving.
•Overall:Sluggish, largely because of excess weight, but otherwise a beaut. If the auto industry ever could produce such vehicles affordably, the petroleum and biofuels industries would be in tough times.