First non-polluting car now driving around in California

Beyond Gasoline: Taking the Future for a Drive -- by Danny Hakim

You would never guess that Jon Spallino drives what is probably the most expensive car in this city known for automotive excess. Or that he is the world's most technologically advanced commuter.

"When the cars pull up to me, the Porsches and the Bentleys and all that, I just sort of say, well, that's nice, but for what this costs I could buy 10 of those," said Mr. Spallino, while driving up Interstate 405, the freeway from his office in Irvine toward his home in Redondo Beach.

He was at the wheel of his silver Honda FCX, a car worth about $1 million that looks like a cross between a compact - say, a Volkswagen Golf - and a cinder block. The FCX is powered by hydrogen fuel cells, the futuristic technology that many automakers see as an eventual solution to the world's energy woes, though its real potential is a subject of vigorous debate inside and outside the auto industry.

Mr. Spallino, a 40-year-old executive at a California construction and engineering firm, and his wife, Sandy, have been leasing the FCX for $500 a month since July in one of the more unusual experiments in the auto industry's history.

The Spallinos, including daughters Adrianna, 11, and Anna, 9, "aren't just the first fuel cell family on their block," as one Honda ad recently put it. "They're the first in the world."

So grandiose is the experiment that Honda has made arrangements with a distributor of hydrogen to have a refueling station built near the Spallinos' house. Not that they can use it. The local fire department, wary of this elemental zeppelin gas, has yet to let the station open.

So the car is being refueled at Honda's American headquarters in Torrance. Putting compressed hydrogen in a car sounds more like putting air in a tire than filling up with gas.

Honda is also working on upgrading an existing station that is near Mr. Spallino's office, and California is financing refueling stations to form what is called a "hydrogen highway" in the state.

Honda has been a pioneer in bringing advanced technologies, like hybrid electric cars, to consumers. While every major automaker has built a fuel cell prototype, Honda's is the only one that has been crash-tested.

Why did Honda pick the Spallinos? Mr. Spallino was already one of a few thousand owners of a Civic that runs on natural gas; filling one up is not unlike refueling the FCX. He also lived near the company's headquarters, and its refueling station. And the normality of the Spallino family appealed to the company, which wanted to see how the vehicle held up under the stresses of family driving.

"I use it for everyday life," said Sandy Spallino, 40, who also drives a Ford Taurus station wagon. "I go to the market in it, I take the girls to school in it, I take them to soccer, just little one-mile jaunts here and there."

Ben Knight, a vice president for research and development at Honda, said making the Spallinos pay to be guinea pigs was done to make them more critical.

"The feedback from these consumers will be very astute," he said, adding, "an individual that is paying out of their own pocket for a vehicle will be very conscious of the value received, and the vehicle limitations."

Fuel cells have been around since the 1800's; they were used to provide internal power for the Apollo spacecraft, as well as drinkable water for the astronauts. Cars powered by fuel cells are electric cars that do not rely on batteries, but instead generate their own electricity. Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen from the air in a chemical reaction, with water vapor as their only emission, at least from the tailpipe.

If that sounds utopian, many think fuel cells are ill-suited to power cars.

"We're either talking several decades or never," said Joseph J. Romm, an assistant energy secretary during the Clinton administration, referring to the likelihood of fuel cells' supplanting internal combustion engines in cars. Though Mr. Romm pushed for financing of hydrogen research in the mid-1990's, he has since become deeply skeptical of its prospects, to the point that last year he published a book titled "The Hype About Hydrogen."

General Motors is most bullish on the technology.

"We're going to prove to ourselves and the world that a fuel cell propulsion system can go head to head with the internal combustion engine," said Lawrence D. Burns, G.M.'s vice president in charge of research and development.

He said that by 2010, G.M. will have designed a fuel cell car that can go as far on a full tank and is as durable as a gasoline car. Some financial analysts are skeptical that G.M. will have even staved off bankruptcy by then.

Honda comes down somewhere between Mr. Romm and Mr. Burns.

"We see this, right now, as the most promising technology to lower greenhouse gas," Mr. Knight said. He added, though, that it was "too hard to put a date on" the timing for large-scale production.

Honda's experiment started cryptically, when an executive called Jon Spallino last year and kept him on the phone for half an hour without mentioning fuel cells. Mr. Spallino was not surprised to be quizzed, because his natural-gas Civic made him a likely target of consumer research.

"I said, O.K., this is an extensive survey, but there you go," said Mr. Spallino, who has the laid-back demeanor of a lifelong Southern Californian.

He was more perplexed when the same man called him back a few weeks later with another round of questions. Then the Honda executive asked him out for breakfast at a local Chili's restaurant, and the questions kept coming about his Civic. Why do you drive it? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it?

"It's like some kind of James Bond thing," Mr. Spallino recalled thinking. "I told him, 'There has to be something else here; I've told you everything I could possibly tell you.' "

Finally, the executive leveled with him. "Very, very confidentially," he told him, "I want to talk to you about trying out a fuel cell vehicle."

In his State of the Union address in 2003, President Bush said there would be "a new national commitment" to developing hydrogen technology, which would "make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy."

Environmentalists like the promise of the fuel cell, but see it being used as an excuse for not toughening fuel economy regulations more aggressively.

"It's a long-term hope, but in the meantime we want to use the technology available today to make clean hybrids," said Daniel F. Becker, the top global warming strategist at the Sierra Club.

In the FCX, long stacks of the waferlike cells are housed under the passenger compartment, giving it a high ride, like a sport utility vehicle. It weighs in at nearly two tons, because of the heft of the technology, including added batteries. Despite having just 107 horsepower, it accelerates briskly, a feature of electric cars.

So far, the Spallinos give it a thumbs up. "You're not really making any sacrifice," said Mr. Spallino, in Ralph Lauren sunglasses and a Hawaiian-style shirt with his company's emblem. As a Californian, his interest in alternative fuels was as much practical as anything else. On traffic-choked California roads, such vehicles get coveted access to high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. He is concerned about the environment, but not militantly so.

"I'm, I would say, right of center politically," Mr. Spallino said. "I don't like our dependence on foreign oil. I think it causes us to do a lot of stupid things as a country," he said, explaining his decision to start using alternative fuel cars.

But "the H.O.V. lane is a big bonus, sure," he said.

Will a day ever come when you can roll up to a Honda dealer and order an FCX? The hurdles could be insurmountable. First, the decimal point on the price would have to move over to the left by a couple of digits. That would be no small feat. Then there is the question of figuring out how to store hydrogen in the vehicle - most likely either as a highly compressed gas in onboard tanks or in a spongelike solid state. None of these are ready for widespread use. Then the fuel cells would need to be as durable and long-lasting as conventional engines.

That's not to mention the big undertaking of reconfiguring the nation's gas stations to dispense hydrogen, or figuring out how to create and ship it.

"When you start piling miracle upon miracle, it's just really hard to believe," Mr. Romm said.

On the positive side, hydrogen can be generated in a number of different ways. It could be a solution to issues like oil dependency, and possibly cheaper than gasoline in the future. Fuel cell cars are not truly emission-free, because it takes energy, and emissions, to create pure hydrogen. But they would be an improvement in terms of global warming and air pollution, depending on how the hydrogen was produced.

One mental challenge to overcome would be the image in people's minds of a certain exploding airship filled with hydrogen, though automakers contend that fuel cell cars would be no more flammable than cars filled with gasoline.

Mr. Spallino says he hears about this a lot.

"Everybody says, 'You're driving the Hindenburg,' " he said, adding, "I assume that Honda's not going to give me a car that's going to blow up on me."