Go Go Green Cars

South Korea has very high aspirations when it comes to being a player in the green car manufacturing space – they intend being one of the top four hybrid/fuel efficient car manufacturers in the world and they are investing billions in this.

Except they may have hit a snag in the fuel cell system they have been preferring to power their view of the future green automobile.

Fuel cells are very efficient at producing mileage – in fact they are about 3 to 4 times more efficient than a regular gas powered car engine – or put this another way, if we all switched to fuel cell powered cars we would drop carbon emissions by 70% overnight. Or in another way – we solve the carbon pollution crisis in one fell swoop.

The problem is that fuel cells use hydrogen as their energy source and this produces ultra low emissions such as water (created by burning the hydrogen with readily available oxygen in the air – H2O) – but where do you get all the hydrogen you are going to need, and we are going to need a lot!

The immediate answer is you get hydrogen from … oil and gas!

Hang on a sec – to power a car cleanly we still have to drill for oil and process it (producing carbon emissions in the process) to get the hydrogen which will then fuel a car that costs me more money to buy?

Why not simply drill the oil, take that and power the regular gas mobile I own and buy now?

The problem is neither approach will work – we are using finite natural resources which will be exhausted and as the supply dwindles, higher and higher gas prices will be the result until the only people who can afford to drive a gas powered car will be the super rich with an antique car collection.

The environment will not wait that long either.

The challenge the South Koreans are now trying to address, along with the rest of the green car R&D world is how to source cheap, clean hydrogen.

Both Toyota and Honda are assaulting the green car market in 2009 with major launches this summer in Japan – “Japan!” I hear you say, “What has that got to do with me in the US?”

The answer is simple – Japan is leading the advance into green car development and the chances are you and me are going to be driving Japanese (and possibly Korean) green cars in 10 years time unless something very radical is done with our markets and most of all, our car makers and even more than them, the political will to effect change.

In Japan, Honda launched the hybrid Insight in February and it has become the first hybrid car to lead new car sales in that country – that is some impact to make in one of the leading car making and car using economies in the world. Meanwhile, Toyota is moving forward with developments and refinements to its best seller, the Prius and this is due to be launched there now (May) – it has 40,000 advance orders for that month alone! More than this, the price gap between hybrid and gas models is narrowing – making more sense for consumers to move to the green alternative vehicle and this gap is only going to get narrower and probably will be extinguished altogether as mass production and volumes bring with them economies of scale.

So far, Honda and Toyota are the only car makers who are achieving the pricing levels with the fuel performance and this underlies the huge sums and efforts they have already tied up in R&D; something Capitol Hill is desperately trying to make good and bring US manufacturers to heel.

They have a long upward struggle to match the foreign car makers lead but with Chrysler marrying Fiat (or being adopted) this will start giving US manufacturers access to the green technology reserves while the Government and bankruptcy courts sort out the debris of these huge companies, wallowing like sulky hippopotamii.