What we'll be driving in five years.
This week in Japan, Honda rolled out the future of personal transportation: the FCX Clarity, a hydrogen-powered fuel-cell car that emits only water from its tailpipe. It can go 280 miles on a tank of hydrogen—a renewable fuel that has nothing to do with fossilized dinosaurs—while getting the equivalent of 74 miles per gallon and doing zero to 60mph in less than nine seconds. The first Clarity rolled off the assembly line Monday and the Hollywood crowd is already lining up to lease it for $600 a month. Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the first. "This is a must-have technology for the future of the earth," Honda President Takeo Fukui said at the rollout. "Honda will work hard to mainstream fuel-cell cars."
Sounds great, but sadly the mainstreaming of fuel-cell cars will come much farther downstream. Honda, for all its good intentions and buzz-worthy PR, is heavily subsidizing the Clarity, which actually costs several hundred thousand dollars to produce per model. Fukui says it will take 10 years to get the price of the Clarity below $100,000. And they only plan to lease 200 Clarities over the next three years. The biggest roadblock, though, is beyond Honda's control—the almost total lack of hydrogen filling stations.
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