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Jeremy Bass23 Mar 2013
NEWS

Volkswagen cool on hydrogen power

No go for fuel cells at Wolfsburg, but the next big thing in air-conditioning is CO2

Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn has taken a swipe at a number of rivals with a blunt assessment of the future of the hydrogen fuel cell: forget it, for some considerable time at least.

Fronting media for a Q&A at the company’s Wolfsburg head office last week, Dr Winterkorn said that while his company will continue looking at the technology, he can’t see how fuel cells can even approach cost-effectiveness any time soon.

“I do not see the infrastructure for fuel cell vehicles, and I do not see how hydrogen can be produced on large scale at reasonable cost,” he told Automotive News.

“I do not currently see a situation where we can offer fuel cell vehicles at a reasonable cost that consumers would also be willing to pay.”

He added that the technology had manifestly failed to live up to the promises contained in rival companies’ trumpeting about getting fuel cell powered product to market as early as 2012.

This was taken as a none-too-veiled poke at Daimler, which has been road-showing its B-Class F Cell prototype amid such claims for several years. Daimler has revised its rollout, signing a deal in 2012 with Ford and the Nissan-Renault Alliance to push a joint fuel cell platform to viability by 2017.

Volkswagen’s official line is that it’s not shutting the door definitively on fuel cell technology. It can’t afford to with Honda, Toyota and Hyundai all announcing plans to bring fuel cells to market by 2015. But it sees PHEVs as most viable in the near-term.

For the time being, then the company is committing a hefty portion of its resources to plug-in technologies. This was the purpose of the XL1 diesel PHEV reveal at the recent Geneva show – to trump competitors at one of the world’s key new-tech showcases with what Dr Winterkorn described on the day as “a technological spearhead” setting “new long-term standards in the automotive industry”. 

The super-light two-seater boasts an official 0.83L/100km and 21g/km CO2 combined. He confirmed that the technologies used in the XL1 will find their way into street product pitched against the likes of GM’s Volt and Toyota’s Prius Plug-In.

While Dr Winterkorn wasn’t so complimentary about his competitors’ efforts with hydrogen, his company is right with them on the future of mobile air-conditioning systems.

Following research with the SAE, Daimler and BMW, Volkswagen has announced it will remodel its air-conditioning systems to allow the replacement of fluorine-based refrigerants (aka R134a) with something it calls R744 – better known as carbon dioxide.

Despite its demonisation as the cause of so many environmental ills, CO2 is comparatively benign alongside the CFCs and other fluorine gases long used as refrigerants in mobile air-conditioning (MAC) systems.

On the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Global Warming Potential (GWP) scale, CO2 scores a value of 1, putting it 99.3 per cent below the EU specified ceiling of 150. By comparison, the commonest current refrigerant, tetrafluoroethane (aka R134a), has a GWP of 1300. Whatever damage CO2 wreaks on the environment hails from its sheer volume rather than its potency.

R134a found popularity in the early 1990s with confirmation of the damage chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases were doing the ozone layer. By current estimates, a car running an R134a-based air-conditioning system generates emissions greenhouse gas (GHG) equivalent to 7g/km CO2. MAC systems are the single biggest source of such GHGs.

The idea of using CO2 for such purposes isn’t new – it’s been mooted since the late 1990s and, along with other alternatives to R134a, has been under investigation by Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW. CO2 found favour when others revealed flammability risks.

Volkswagen is the first maker to confirm the move to CO2. The company reiterated at Geneva that part of its Strategy 2018 roadmap to usurp Toyota’s position as the world’s number one car-maker was to assert itself as the most environmentally sustainable.

Such a move doesn’t come cheap or easy, as International Council on Clean Transportation researchers spelled out in a 2011 working paper.

“A transition to a new refrigerant is not easy,” they concluded. “Auto-makers must change the design of the refrigeration system and the vehicle, expect new training of service technicians, explore changes to design standards, and seek regulatory approval in the United States and Europe.”

It’s a relatively small part of a program that will cost Volkswagen about 70 per cent of its total investment capital, boosting the efficiency of its drive systems, vehicle ancillaries and production processes.

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Written byJeremy Bass
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