BERLIN: The new upcoming technology in automobile world named as fuel cell technology will commercially available for mass use by 2025, which will be cheaper than other technologies in the world, head of automotive division Robert Bosch’s said.
By 2025, fuel cell production will be more industrialized, bringing down costs thanks to greater economies of scale, Henning Scheider told the Automobile woche conference in Berlin.”They are not out of the race. They are possible alternative to other zero-emission vehicle technologies,”
Scheider said fuel cell cars (non-polluting) have failed to gain extensive acceptance because of high-priced development costs, even though they can run five times longer than electric cars and take far less time to refuel. Fuel cell power trains are still likely to be two times more expensive to produce than those for electric cars in 2025, but he expects the higher operating range of fuel cell cars to make them a possible alternative.
Nissan, Ford, Hyundai, Toyota, Daimler, Honda and General Motors are all developing fuel cell vehicles. Honda and Toyota plan to start selling production vehicles next year.
Combines hydrogen with oxygen in the air to generate electricity is fuel cell technology. The only emissions are water steam and heat, but the technology has been held back by high costs and lack of infrastructure.
The price of the first fuel cell cars on the market are expected at about 56,000 Euros ($70,000), but analysts say that does not cover manufacturers’ development costs, or the expense of building filling stations at more than $1 million each.