Nihon Car is proud to present the world's first HDTV 720p video of the Honda FCX. The British car show Fifth Gear claimed the first test of this car last week, but that honour was in fact for National Geographic about a year ago, and these shows were aired and recorded in SD (Standard video mode/definition). This is a high-tech car though, and we give it a high-tech treatment by offering this review in a high-tech format, HD 720p!
We were quite surprised in March to see this car present in Honda's press garage amidst the other press vehicles. Such a rare car, right at the cutting edge of the newest technologies when it comes to environment friendliness, right there before our eyes. We popped the question to Honda instantly whether we could take this car for a spin, and they agreed immediately! We had to postpone the test days several times due to bad weather conditions, but the clouds lifted last week (at last), and we rushed to the garage to test this very futuristic car straight out of a comic book.
So why were we so eager to test this vehicle? The FCX is the world's first Fuel Cell car on the road, and this revolutionary car is already owned by the city council in New York and Los Angeles (they even have a few of them) but you can also see it on Japanese roads.
Honda Fuell Cell FCX
(WMV9HD 720p Torrent "Right click, Save As...")
Music by Patch-Work
The FCX is a unique and very futuristic vehicle that has everything to become our future car. It does not use fossil fuels like almost every car on this planet but it's powered by hydrogen. In this car, hydrogen is used to fuel the car with energy/electricity, and as a result, this car doesn't emit any polluting gasses but just a bit of water comes out of the exhaust pipe. Quite amusing to see that hydrogen is made out of water by seperating hydrogen molecules (H2) from the oxygen (O) molecules in water (H2O).
There are very few Fuel Cell cars available to the press (and general public), so it's quite hard to compare the performance of this FCX to other cars, and honestly that's not important at these early stages of the Fuel Cell era... an era in which Fuel Cells will not only power cars but also other products like laptops.
What we can say is that this FCX is and remains a car, it accelerates and it brakes (English speaking readers, please excuse my French in the video
). Due to speed limitations we were not able to pass the 80 km/h mark in the FCX, but know that it pushes on to a good 140 km/h. Depending on your driving style (and use of the aircon for example) this FCX has a range of about 200km.
We were quite surprised during the test drive by the acceleration of this FCX, really impressive for a "green" car! The noise of the engine cannot be compared to a V12, but instead you could imagine being in a spaceship if you close your eyes (ask your passenger to do this while you're driving for obvious reasons), and this noise becomes louder the harder the car is pushed. It remains within very acceptable limits though, and we can say that this is a very silent car, it's just fun to hear to noise change depending on the way you drive. It's a noise that is very difficult to describe, so please have a look at the video and you'll understand us when we say that it can be somewhat compared to the noise of the vessels in the WipeOut game on the Playstation.
This FCX cannot be started like a regular car either. You have an ignition key for sure, but you have to "boot" your car first, just like a PC. Main difference with booting a PC are:
1) this car boots faster than a PC
2) you don't have the Ctrl+Alt+Del option
So what's the bottom line from Maki and myself? Well, we won't forget the time spend in this FCX. When you hop on board of this car, you will step into the future and forget everything you have driven so far! Its looks are strange, you don't get a boot to store your stuff, but this FCX is an incredible technical achievement, and what Honda offers in this first version is just amazing. The team of Honda engineers shows the world that it masters this technology (the first prototype dates from a few years back already), and Honda presented a vehicle that is adapted to a more veryday use. They showed their new FCX at the Tokyo Motor Show, and you can find more pictures of this Honda FCX Concept
over here.
Posted on 29/05/06 By G-A.G
