How far will Renault's hydrogen fuel cell Scenic go?

The hydrogen fuel cell car is also electric, but it has more oomph and more range than the usual milk float. You pump some hydrogen into the car much as you’d refill your car with petrol or diesel, and the gas chemically reacts with oxygen from the air. That takes place in the “fuel cell” or stack, and the electricity generated amounts to 90kw - enough to tug a medium sized car around.

The power is stored in lithium batteries, of the kind you have in your laptop, which is both good and bad for PR, given the incidents of spontaneous combustion that were reported a while back. There is also a conventional 25kw back-up battery on board. That lot powers an electric motor and that moves you and your Scenic along at up to about 100mph. It has a range of perhaps 150 miles. Both are far in advance of anything the conventional electric car scene can provide. Your hydrogen fuel cell Scenic sometimes leaves a little trail of water from the exhaust, like an incontinent spaniel. Very clean.

So as Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Opel, and now Renault have shown, the technology is out there, and it works well. The car felt fine to me; very quiet, obviously, with the traditional engine removed. It is noticeably heavier in the handling, as the Scenic ZEV has gained some 300kg of weight in the conversion, an issue for the engineers. Yet it stopped OK, accelerated briskly and went round corners at moderate speeds in a predictable fashion. As far as the safety of the tank is concerned, this pressurised unit has apparently had grenades thrown at it and survived, so it is probably more secure than most petrol tanks of today. But such concerns as this, and vague memories of the Hindenburg disaster will, I fear, prevent the public from taking to hydrogen fuel cells without a great deal of persuasion.

Trickier though is the whole question of whether this great leap forward is actually worthwhile, on environmental or economic grounds. The technology is there; but that doesn’t mean we have to use it. For a start there’s the cost. Economies of scale would soon kick in, but it may well be that there is still a cost penalty compared with the old-fashioned petrol or diesel car. Will we want to pay that?

By Sean O'Grady

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