Volkswagen Passat HyMotion 2015 Review

So, where is Volkswagen, a company that’s contending to be the world’s biggest car-maker? The answer is here, in Los Angeles, and it’s at once complicated and uncomplicated.

The Passat HyMotion (Hydrogen Motion) is an electric car that generates its energy via a front-mounted fuel-cell stack and sends it to an electric motor to turn the front wheels.

It’s more or less production-ready, too, but Volkswagen hasn’t gotten to where it is by dumping tens or hundreds of millions of dollars filling showrooms with cars people don’t want. Even if governments are screaming for them.

And, Volkswagen insists, customers aren’t out there begging for fuel-cell cars.

“The electric car will decisively shape the future of individual mobility,” Volkswagen’s Head of Development, Dr Heinz-Hertog Neusser, said in Los Angeles.

“Everyone should be clear about one fact today: the path towards the electric car is not a sprint, but a marathon and we were working on this long before the starting gun sounded.

“We don’t just want to deliver, but deliver at precisely the time point when the systems become cost effective for consumers and are fully developed.”

Still, the Passat HyMotion is a very strong pointer to the Volkswagen’s future as a car-maker when fossil fuels become unsustainable.

It’s very much like the fuel-cell concept from sister brand, Audi, but it’s cheaper, easier to build and lighter.

It’s lighter because it’s only front-wheel drive and eschews Audi’s devotion to plug-in hybrid ability. Where Audi stuffed the back-end of the A7 Sportback h-tron full of the A3 e-tron’s battery pack and gave the rear axle its own electric motor, this is where the two brands diverge.

The HyMotion uses a lithium-ion battery pack, but it’s far, far smaller than the one in the Audi and it’s only there to do two main things: to help recuperate energy whenever the car brakes and to wipe out the slight lag fuel-cell cars have when they produce their energy, giving the car instant throttle response.

“The HyMotion is a hybrid whose electric motor can be powered directly by the fuel cell or the battery,” Dr Neusser explained. “It can also help deliver the total system power by working with the fuel cells at the same time.”

That’s how the Passat HyMotion delivers its 100kW of power and 270Nm of torque to the front wheels. Its lithium-ion battery pack is only 1.1kW/h, a far cry from the 8.8kW/h unit in the Audi, and it uses the same four fuel tanks sitting below decks to carry the hydrogen.

The NEDC fuel economy cycle shows 4.5kg of hydrogen delivers a 500km-plus range, all of which are delivered as a zero-emission vehicle (if you don’t count water vapour) and it will even reach 100km/h in 10 seconds on its way to a limited top speed of 160km/h.

We didn’t get near 160km/h on our test of the HyMotion Passat, but we did touch 100km/h at one point. It’s a very quiet car, obviously, and while it’s demonstrably slower than the Audi, it’s cheaper in every respect and lighter, too.

It has a lightness of touch the Audi lacks, though the location of the 57kg battery pack means its roll centre is very low, so it corners well.

There is no real noise generated by the 300-cell fuel stack as you push the throttle to force the hydrogen onto an anode, where each atom is broken into protons and electrons. The protons migrate through a polymer cell membrane to get to the cathode, while the electrons supply the electricity, giving up to 0.8 volts per cell.

And this all happens every time you push the throttle, at the time you push the throttle. It’s like being driven by a science project at school.

But there’s nothing complicated to learn. You just pull the gearlever into Drive and go, quietly. While 10 seconds is nothing special in terms of speed, the instant torque (filled in by the battery pack while all that chemistry is going on) means it feels more responsive than the pure numbers suggest possible.

The Passat HyMotion is definitely feasible now, judging by how it looks and drives and how few compromises it asks in terms of packaging, yet it’s not here.

“The primary focus is the fuel cell system itself, not the car. The fuel-cell system was always engineered into the MQB architecture, so there are no concerns there,” Dr Neusser said.

“The challenges are primarily related to increasing its life and reducing its cost, but many components are already very close to the production components.

“When the infrastructure is ready, we at Volkswagen will flip a switch and produce bumper to bumper with fuel cell and electric, starting the final phase of the marathon replacing internal combustion engines with electric drive.

“We have to bring the pressure losses as far down as we can. Second, the key is the membrane technology and the coating with the platinum. That’s the important factor because we need as high a surface as possible for proton transfer.”

Platinum is, HyMotion engineer Dr Armin Sue explained, an enormous part of the cost of the car.

“The main cost challenge is to reduce the platinum content of the fuel cell. The fuel cell needs platinum and it’s very expensive. It’s more than 1000 euros a car just in platinum by weight.

“As car manufacturers we have got access to plenty of platinum. We recycle it a lot and have it in our diesel exhaust systems and we recycle that and use it again.

“We are trying to get it down to half what we have, but we would like to reduce it by 30 or 40 per cent, realistically.”

In the meantime, Dr Sue and Dr Neusser and their cohorts are already driving around in fifth-generation fuel-cell cars.

But, if they were readily available and cheap, you’d probably think fourth-generation fuel-cell cars worked a lot better, a lot more sensibly and with a lot less range anxiety than battery-electric cars.