Instead of designing a new vehicle, Ford’s first fuel-cell car will be a Focus compact sedan, chosen because it is sold worldwide and because Ford wanted to meet the challenge of finding room for the fuel-cell stack, electric motors, hydrogen fuel tanks and other hardware head on.
“If we can put it into a Focus, we can fit it into just about anything,” said Mark Sulek, a program planning analyst on the Focus fuel-cell project.
Ford plans to sell a hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle in 2004 in small numbers–dozens instead of hundreds or thousands–about 10 years after the company began working on fuel cells.
Sulek says the size of fuel-cell components is coming down along with the development costs. Ford’s first fuel-cell prototype, completed in 1998, cost about $6 million, and the second came out two years later at a cost of about $4 million. Sulek estimates that the latest version, completed this year, cost “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
When will fuel cells be on par with internal combustion engines for cost?
“The internal combustion engine wasn’t built in a day,” Sulek said. “Give us some time.”
