This is a walk around of the limited release Honda FCX Clarity by Ron Doron and Todd Mittleman of American Honda. Sign up to lease one today at www.fcx.honda.com.
Today we’re here with todd millman from american honda hi todd good night you need to meet you and we’re here with the honda clarity the first fuel cell vehicle built from the ground up and todd’s going to tell you all about it this is the fcx clarity next-generation fuel cell vehicle it’s the first fuel cell vehicle built from the ground up meaning it’s not based
On any other platform as you can see it’s aerodynamic one thing that will differ of course from your internal combustion vehicles is that it does not have one what we have here instead is an electric motor air intake for oxygen and air filter small radiator and the source of energy is actually coming from an onboard power plant the fuel cell now a fuel cell vehicle
Is actually an electric vehicle it’s just getting its energy a different way so what we have is our fuel cell stack which is placed in the center of the vehicle under the center console between the driver and the passenger and our hydrogen tank if we open the trunk you will see where the hydrogen tank is located this tank holds four kilograms of hydrogen 5,000 psi
So the way a fuel cell car works is that the compressed hydrogen is mixing with oxygen in the fuel cell stack to produce electricity so you’ve got compressed air you’ve got hydrogen that is mixing through the fuel cell stack delivering electricity to the electric motor and powering the car forward what we were able to do with the fcx clarity building it from the
Ground up as opposed to building it on existing platform has give us the flexibility to put the hydrogen tank where we wanted to also what we were able to do is take a stack that was previously 400 pounds in a horizontal flow stack and make it a hundred and pound vertical flow stack is about the size of a large cpu and generates a hundred kilowatts of energy and
That 100 kilowatts is being delivered right to the electric motor so in terms of driving this zero emissions car our customers have been driving cars that are fueled by gaseous fuels since 1998 with the civic gx natural gas car the difference here is your feeling with hydrogen it is a safe fuel hydrogen is 14 times lighter than air so if anywhere to get out of
The fueling process it would quickly rise into the atmosphere an advantage of fueling with a hydrogen vehicle as opposed to electric battery vehicle is that it takes five to seven minutes to fuel in five to seven minutes you could get a full fuel and get 200 plus mile range this car is rated 60 60 so you’re getting 240 miles out of four kilograms of hydrogen four
Kilograms of hydrogen equals about for gasoline gallon equivalents of energy currently the fcx clarity is least only in the southern california region and the reason for that is that the most advanced infrastructure is located here in southern california we focused on three retail like stations in west los angeles irvine and the soon to be open torrents pipeline
Station for customers to sign up to a lease they go to ww fcx honda com enter their zip code an email address and the leading criteria for being eligible for a lease is proximity to one of the hydrogen stations so it’s very exciting about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is that if you get your hydrogen from a renewable source of energy such as we are from our solar
Hydrogen station you have a zero carbon footprint for example at our solar hydrogen station you’re getting electricity from the solar panels and through electrolysis you’re getting hydrogen from water and what comes out of the tailpipe of the fcx clarity is water so it’s a water to water cycle we’re very fortunate to have someone like todd mittleman here to to be
A product expert about this car i can’t even begin to explain all the things that he did but what i can tell you is what it’s like to drive this car for actually eight days two quick things about driving the clarity on a daily basis first is something called range anxiety you probably heard that term before and to be honest when i drove the equinox fuel cell which
Had a range of about 140 160 i actually had a lot of range anxiety but with the clarity and a full fill up you have about two hundred and twenty mile range and guess what you don’t have that range anxiety because i had plenty of time to go refuel the other thing is about the power what you don’t really realize is just how much power this electric motor has almost
190 pound feet of torque so what that means is you can really get up and go i don’t want to tell you how fast we got but let’s just say i do know for a fact that that speedometer goes up to three digits so this is not like a cord that he put a different shell on this is a brand new platform but it is about the same size as an accord which is different than cars
Like the prius or cars like the insight which are considerably smaller second the look i don’t know what you think but i think the car looks really good i’ve received a lot of thumbs up from people all week long who said this car looks really great looks better than than a lot of the other alternative fuel vehicles and you know what it’s not just great to look at
But it’s great to be seen in when you’re driving this thing you’ve got these gauges that come to life they got this hydrogen ball they call it i call it the heartbeat of the vehicle it starts off blue it goes to green and then it goes to yellow and as you are becoming less efficient it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it’s great because it actually it’s almost
Like it’s talking to you like hey you’re not being very efficient here and when i say not being very efficient maybe you’re getting 40 miles to the gallon instead of 60 miles to the gallon in any case it’s a lot of fun to drive let’s go around the back here you got a seat no comes out of the exhaust water can you believe this you’re putting compressed hydrogen in
This car and as you’re driving out of the exhaust comes water i’ve heard from people driving behind me they’ve had little almost like a little steam a little burst of water coming out that’s exciting stuff this car is really like driving the future you know as one person said if you took this vehicle put in the garage for five years and then took it out it would
Still be fresh then this is a great opportunity to get into something that is really futuristic and six hundred dollars a month not only covers your payment’s it also covers your insurance so if you are fortunate to live in an area where there’s a hydrogen station and you qualify go to the website check it out and maybe you too can drive one of these cars six nuts
Them up come on you can’t beat it
Transcribed from video
Honda FCX Clarity Fuel Cell – Lease One Today! By thedriversseat
