The carmakers hope to launch "the world's first affordable, mass-market fuel cell car" by 2017.
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In a hydrogen fuel cell car, hydrogen gets drawn through a catalytic membrane: an electron gets stripped from the hydrogen to power the car.
This thing is just a wee bit cumbersome: 700 square feet to create enough hydrogen to run a fuel cell car 10, 000 miles a year and supply electricity for the house.
Most of Toyota's energy is instead being funneled into its tried-and-true hybrids, with 21 due on the market by 2015, as well as plans to deliver the company's first hydrogen fuel cell car by the same year.
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Daimler Benz (which already produces an advanced fuel-cell car) recently bought 27% of Ballard, a maker of fuel cells.
But, of course, a fuel-cell car is an electric car, albeit with a complicated hydrogen battery.
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The orientation also makes for a much lower center of gravity than a typical fuel-cell car.
So, a hydrogen fuel-cell car even running ... on hydrogen derived from natural gas cuts that carbon emission by 60%.
Also a type of electric vehicle, a fuel-cell car takes hydrogen gas and converts it into electricity, while emitting only water vapor.
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Healy and Brewster dream of people someday driving a fuel-cell car up to an Enernoc meter during peak demand and pumping electricity back into the grid.
Little, a consultancy that has investigated the matter, the running costs to a driver of a fuel-cell car that gets its hydrogen from natural gas would be comparable to those of one that used clean petrol.
One is the electric car, the other is the fuel cell, or the hydrogen car.
No automaker has yet to offer a fuel-cell-powered car for sale to customers, although Honda has said it plans to lease a number of the fuel-cell cars to customers as soon as 2008.
To have a useful range of 480km (300 miles) or so, an electric car using a fuel cell instead of a battery pack would require around 9kg (20 pounds) of hydrogen.
Within a few years, nearly every big car maker plans to have fuel-cell cars on the road.
Every big car maker now has a fuel-cell programme, and every big oil firm is busy investigating how best to feed these new cars their hydrogen.
It can be used to run an internal combustion engine in a car or power one using a fuel cell, with heat and water as the only emissions.
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The other main joint venture, Ford-led Ecostar, takes the machinery from Stuttgart and fits it into electric motors, transmission and control equipment to make a fuel-cell engine that can turn the wheels of a car or a bus.
Larry Moulthroup of Proton Energy Systems in Connecticut, which lent me my fuel-cell Toyota Highlander, offers some thoughts on how the water car might work.
In the fuel-cell stack, hydrogen goes in and electricity comes out, which then powers the car.
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