Car of the future remains just that

GM's fuel-cell car is great to drive but faces many hurdles

Journalists frothed over General Motors' fuel-cell car. Hydrogen fuel! NASA technology!

The future seemed very close when GM showed off Electrovan - in 1966, only to permanently garage it because nobody could afford it.

Is it any closer now?

I gunned GM's fuel-cell version of the Chevrolet Equinox onto the Jones Falls Expressway. The retrofitted sport utility vehicle is as powerful as you could wish and, lacking pistons, a transmission or even a combustion chamber, quiet as a baby buggy.

But despite GM's aggressive push to get these cars into America's driveways, the future will have to wait a while longer.

The car is here - made available by GM so a new generation of writers can go gaga. But the hydrogen economy needed to fill it up isn't. Until the average driver doesn't have to burn half a tank of hydrogen traveling to the pump, fuel cells will be like solar panels and electric wind farms: expensive exceptions in a fossil-fuel- powered world.

GM knows this, which is why it's getting stations to install pumps and pushing Congress to grease the process.

Without a network of hydrogen tanks, nobody will buy the cars. Without any cars, nobody will build the tanks.

At next week's Washington Auto Show, the company will demonstrate a prototype like the one I drove - there are about three dozen now - and announce two local families who will get to keep and drive one for a few months. (There's a Shell station near Washington with a hydrogen pump.)

The goal of "Project Driveway" is to get as many as 100 fuel-cell loaners placed with households in Washington, New York and Los Angeles.

If anything, experts are surprised the technology has developed this fast.

Despite decades of research costing billions, companies even a couple of years ago were having trouble making fuel cells small, powerful and reliable enough to drive a mass-production car. One problem, which GM appears to have overcome, was getting vehicles to start in cold weather.

"You were driving it - that's a lot different than something in a couple of test tubes," said David E. Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., on the phone yesterday. "It doesn't mean the economics are there ... but this is moving pretty fast right now, maybe a little faster than people thought."

GM is coy about what the car might cost. But the decision to introduce the prototype as an Equinox - bearing the moderate-priced Chevrolet marque - wasn't an accident, company representatives said.