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The show "Don't Forget!" premieres May 19th, 2004, The online videois available below. Also be sure to take a look at related stories from the Frontiers Archive:

				Why Cars Must Be Green Car companies look ahead to making environmentally sustainable ars that use less oil and produce less exhaust.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: On July 3, 1886, Karl Benz introduced to an astonished public in Mannheim, Germany, the world's first automobile. That same year, Gottlieb Daimler also put an internal combustion engine into a vehicle. And for the remaining years of the 19th century, Benz and Daimler independently designed and built several other what were, in essence, "horseless carriages." Among European aristocrats, it soon became fashionable to race their new automobiles in events such as the Tour de Nice in the south of France. The winner of the first Tour de Nice in 1899, Emil Jellinek, encouraged the Daimler-Motoren- Gesellschaft to build for him a bigger, more powerful automobile for the following year's race. At a stroke, the horseless carriage was transformed into what is still, a hundred years later, recognizably a car, complete with an internal combustion engine under a hood, a radiator, wheels with inflatable rubber tires and a slanted steering wheel. Jellinek was so taken with the car that he put an order in for 36 more of them, worth 550,000 gold marks-- that's almost $3 million today. But Jellinek added two conditions: first, that he be made the sole agent for the car in Austria-Hungary and France and the United States; and second, that the car be named after his then 12-year-old daughter, Mercedes. But if Germany was where the car was born, it was in America that it came of age-- where it went from being the plaything of the rich to a vehicle for the common man, reshaping the country and the century in the process. And this is the car that did it, Henry Ford's Model T. The first Model T was built in 1908, in much the same way that all cars were built at that time-- by a small group of workers assembling everything by hand. But Ford had a different vision, and so he invented a different way to make cars-- the moving assembly line. In the years that followed, both the time it took to make a Model T and the price it could be sold for fell and fell again. By introducing, in 1914, the then startling wage of five dollars a day, Ford also ensured that for the first time in history, the workers who built a complicated machine were among those who could afford to buy the thing they were making. And buy it they did. Over 15 million "Tin Lizzies" were built before it finally went out of style. But for all the design refinements since, cars still have an internal combustion engine up front that burns gasoline; they have a steering wheel and controls linked mechanically to the wheels; and they're not only among the most useful machines ever invented, they're also among the most dangerous and dirty. A century after Gottlieb Daimler built the first Mercedes and Henry Ford founded his car company, the car industry has finally realized that the technologies it's relied on for those 100 years are as quaintly outdated today as was the Model T back in 1927. ALDA: A vision of the car of the future was first unveiled-- with all the glitz and glamour of a Hollywood premiere-- at the Detroit Motor Show in 2002. Called the AUTOnomy, it does away with almost everything that's characterized a car for the last 100 years: it has no engine; it doesn't use gasoline; there are no mechanical links between the controls and the wheels. It doesn't even have a steering wheel, and its tailpipe emits only a few drops of very clean water. General Motors is placing a billion-dollar bet that this is the prototype of the car of the future. It's the brainchild largely of two men. Now, this is called the Innovation Zone? It is-- this is where we do a lot of brainstorming about coming up with new ideas to help the vehicles. These look like... ALDA: Chris Borroni-Bird doesn't fit the stereotype of a Detroit auto engineer. Well, this is the most profound, in terms of what it can do for society and the customer, but it's the furthest out in time as well. ALDA: He's English, educated as a physicist, and he's an avowed environmentalist. He wants to do nothing less than to reinvent the car. How did you get a chance to do this? I mean, you're obviously doing something that you love doing. It's very exciting to you personally. How did you get this chance? Well, I have to thank Larry Burns, who is the vice-president of R&D for General Motors. He hired me three years ago when I approached him with this idea of design and technology fusion-- looking at how we can take technology and enable new design. And he liked that idea a lot. Chris had this vision of bringing design and technology together almost as if we could genetically reengineer the car, and I thought that was a great opportunity for us. We have to do something because only 12% of the people in the world own a car today. The other 88% aspire to. Now, what's going to happen? If the other 88% of the people in the world buy cars, or if half of them do, what... How are we going to manage? I think that's a critically important question. That's where the environmental issues really come in. Environmental sustainability is absolutely central to the future of the auto industry for business reasons. It's the right thing to do from a societal standpoint, but it's also the right thing to do for the business. ALDA: Achieving environmental sustainability means making cars that consume less oil and produce less pollution. Parading across the Golden Gate Bridge last September and winding its way through the California wine country was a motorcade of vehicles from around the world. They're here to show off their manufacturers' latest environmentally friendly technology at an event called the Challenge Bibendum. The star of the Challenge Bibendum is a drivable version of the AUTOnomy concept car General Motors unveiled with such fanfare in 2002. Now called the Hy-wire, it's been heavily promoted for the past year to the automotive press. But not everyone here is convinced. ALDA: People here are lining up to get in that car. They seem excited by it. Well, it's a great vehicle, obviously. It's a technological tour de force, it's a Buck Rogers 21st-century vehicle, and it's tremendous technology. But we have to ask ourselves the question: Is this a reality or is this some sort of smokescreen? HWANG: What we're talking about before this kind of vehicle might be in widespread commercial use, we're probably talking... 20 years. It's not just that there are 300 million gasoline cars and trucks that are going to be sold before that kind of vehicle can be purchased by you or me, it's also that those vehicles, in the current trend, are getting worse in terms of fuel economy and global warming pollution performance. We're going backwards! ALDA: That's because while today's engines are actually cleaner and more efficient than ever before, they're also bigger and more powerful. In fact, while GM's Larry Burns dreams of more environmentally friendly vehicles, his and every other car company is building and advertising cars that are larger and faster. Hiccups gone? BURNS: We're in business, and we have to generate a sufficient return on our investments to earn the right to invest the capital in the next generation of products. And if we don't compete in the segments of the market where we can sell products, we're not going to be able to earn that kind of return and we're not going to be a viable company. So that's quite important. We believe that removing the automobile from the environmental debate is going to open up opportunities for our industry beyond what we have today. ALDA: We explored this disconnect between today and tomorrow here at the Challenge Bibendum with a car that's among the first real production vehicles to break with the last 100 years of convention. The Toyota Prius is the most radical of a new generation of cars that supplement their gas engines with electric motors-- so-called "hybrid" vehicles. Beneath the hood there's a small internal combustion engine connected to an electrical generator. There's also a cluster of control computers... an electric motor... and a large-capacity battery. When you first get in, the most obvious difference between a Prius and a conventional car is the start button. And I press the button. ALDA: This sends an electric current from the battery via the control computers to the electric motor, which, when I press the accelerator, obligingly turns the wheels. At this low speed, the gas engine isn't even running. In effect, I'm driving an electric car. Except for these controls, I wouldn't know I wasn't driving... any other kind of car... except that it's very quiet. ALDA: But as I speed up, the gas engine-- almost imperceptibly-- kicks in. So now it looks like energy is coming in from the engine because I have my foot on the accelerator. ALDA: The gas engine is now powering the car both directly-- to the front wheels-- and indirectly, powering up the generator and supplying extra current to the electric motor. MAN: Now you have a combination of gas and electric providing drive up this hill. ALDA: And as the hill gets steeper, the battery also starts feeding power to the electric motor. At this point, I'm drawing on all the car's resources. But as I turn around and start back down the hill, not only does the gas engine quit, but I begin getting back some of the energy I used going up. Now the engine's off and it's regenerating, filling up the battery again. So it's not expending any energy? No, it's actually converting vehicle motion that would ordinarily be lost as heat in the brakes and putting it back in the battery so you can use it as free energy the next time you want to accelerate. ALDA: Toyota claims that the Prius gets about 55 miles per gallon, thanks to its ability to recapture braking energy, a low drag body and, above all, its ability to get the best out of both its gas engine and its electric motor. MAN: Gasoline and electric have operating ranges that are different from each other and are not efficient in some areas but very efficient in others. So when you can ideally mix the gas and electric, you can get an overall system that's more efficient. Because gasoline is less efficient... At low load. at low speeds. Right, and electric is less efficient at high speed. I see, I see. So it allows you to switch back and forth to pick the best combination. So you could probably get really great efficiency out of a gasoline engine, great mileage, if you could just get into it when it was going 60 miles an hour. That would be great. They're very efficient in that operating range. In the 40 to 70 mile-an-hour range, gasoline engine is actually quite an efficient machine. It's just trying to make it run in all the other speed extremes that compromise its efficiency. ALDA: The Prius costs perhaps $1,500 more than a similar sized conventional car, but its much better gas mileage is likely to save money in the long run. Toyota is planning to sell over 40,000 in the next year-- but that's out of a total fleet of almost two million. ALDA: If this is so good, why don't you just say to them, "Here's the car for you. "And this is the one you're going to get "because this gets the best mileage, "it performs just like the car you've been driving, "only this is better... costs about the same, and so now that's the car that you can buy." Why offer them these other cars that are not as good? Well, in the U.S., sad to say, folks don't largely value fuel economy. Most of the population of the U.S. is not convinced that global warming is real or that cars have anything to do with it. Isn't it just a question of explaining it to them, of educating them, advertising it? Why are we still advertising... Why do we have commercials where you can't even tell what the car is being advertised, all you know that's being advertised is speed? These cars are zipping through these mountain roads at speeds that would kill a normal driver. Why are we advertising that instead of explaining what you've got to sell here? Well, you have to strike a balance. Right now in the U.S. market, customers value performance. They will actually pay premium money for performance, whether or not they ever use it. And so if you don't... But that's what you're selling them. You're selling them these pictures. I'm not blaming you personally. You seem like a nice guy. But why do we have these ads that are only selling speed when the speed is costing them money? You could do... you could do them a big favor with this car. I agree with you. However, those that do market research say that customers value performance. If I don't... If I, as a manufacturer, don't market performance, then I'll lose market share. Yeah, let's go check this out. Okay. I think you'll really be impressed. ALDA: And speaking of marketing performance... Okay, this is the new, uh, Touareg from Volkswagen with a V10 diesel. ( engine starts ) It's quiet, and it starts right up. Starts right up instantly. You don't have to wait. Yeah, see, the last time I drove a diesel, I had to have a sandwich before the car would go. Yeah, that's all gone now. Basically instantaneous start. Okay, here I go; watch yourself. Watch out for this power, though. Whoa! This is... this is a pretty heavy S.U.V., so this is, uh... Now we're going uphill, and you can really feel that torque from a diesel engine. Go ahead, step on it. Straight uphill. Not the diesels of yesteryear, huh? No, you're right. I mean, this is very responsive. ALDA: Here I am driving too fast in a car much bigger than most of us need. But at least I'm wasting less gas than I might be. In the last few years, new cleaner-burning, more-powerful diesel engines have taken over 40% of the car market in Europe. Diesels get about 30% better mileage than gasoline-powered cars. And we'll get about 15% to 20% less carbon dioxide, which most of us feel contributes to greenhouse gases. So you're doing something good for the environment and you're saving some money. ALDA: But while diesels are more efficient and emit less carbon dioxide, they also put out more smoke than gas-powered cars. The new diesel engines are cleaner, but they still don't meet the United States' emission standards, which are stricter than Europe's. Here at the Challenge Bibendum, some half dozen diesel-powered cars are being put through their paces, and several European car companies are planning to market diesel cars in the U.S. in the next few months. Among U.S. manufacturers, Ford has hopes for a diesel version of its Focus model. We visited the emissions-control lab at Ford to see how a diesel's exhaust can be cleaned up. It turns out that the plan is to employ a modified version of the device most of us already use in our car every day and take for granted. This is a way of testing the efficiency of a catalytic converter? Yeah, yeah, you're right-- testing the efficiency of different components of a catalytic converter. The main component is the so-called catalyst. This is the material which is on the surface of these ceramics. Can you show me a catalytic converter? All right, I'd like to do it. This is a ceramic, and you can look through. All these small chambers are coated with a mix of platinum, rhodium and palladium. So is that all it is? Really, this is one of the breakthrough innovations of our century. This brings down emissions from combustion engines by, uh, two magnitudes, a factor of hundreds, sometimes a factor of a thousand, even. This is really a magical thing. Therefore it's a key explanation why combustion engines are so successful. In diesel engines you have a little different type of combustion in the engines. Therefore you create some... some soot or particulate. And this is a different device. This is a diesel-particulate filter. And if you try to look through, again you are able to look through, but every second channel is closed. ALDA: The idea is that the soot particles in the exhaust will be trapped. As they accumulate, they'll be burned off with the aid of a catalyst. The hope of diesel enthusiasts like Gerhard Schmidt is that devices like those being tested here will allow diesel cars to meet U.S. emissions requirements. So is Ford going to start making diesel cars? Yeah, actually, we are working hard to make it happen. ALDA: Between them, the clean diesel cars favored by European-based manufacturers and the gas-electric hybrids being pushed mainly by the Japanese car companies, could save their owners money at the pump and reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide-- the principal greenhouse gas produced by cars. But at the Challenge Bibendum, the car on its way to capturing most of the environmental awards is a little sports car called the tzero. Powered entirely by batteries, it produces no emissions at all and it can rocket from zero to 60 in under four seconds. I took a ride in the tzero with a big fan of electric cars, Dan Kammen, of the University of California, Berkeley. What's the problem in... in getting electric cars to be the standard? Well, one thing is that battery technology for a long time didn't evolve very quickly. And there's important discussions about the degree to which that was just... There was a hard technology to work on, and that there was a little bit of collusion by big auto manufacturers to slow down battery work. So batteries didn't evolve. Was that true? You get multiple stories. I... I have one version on pretty good faith that looks like there was a little bit of patenting, not to advance the field, but to basically keep others, notably Volvo, out of some technologies they want to get into. That aside, with the advent of new battery technologies for cell phones and all manner of electronics, there's now been a whole revolution in batteries. So this now has a lithium-ion battery in it, which more than doubles the range, which makes it go zero to 60 considerably faster, and so lighter, faster, much higher power densities. So how far could you go in this before you have to, you know, recharge it? Well, this guy has got now a 300-mile range, so they drove up from L.A. with one stop at an RV park and they plugged in. And so this is really getting, in a very interesting way... it's plugging into the normal economy in ways that the older electric ones really couldn't do. ALDA: One of those older electric vehicles was built by General Motors in collaboration with a man more famous for making electric-powered airplanes than cars. We got to see the EV1 a few years ago when we visited Paul MacCready at his company, AeroVironment. Bigger and heavier than the tzero, the EV1 was a showcase for all-electric power. It doesn't have to measure pressures and decide which gears to change into in an automatic transmission. You just put your foot down and zip. You feel the pressure against your back. I've never seen anyone get out of it without a big smile on his or her face. ALDA: But although the EV1 was introduced with great fanfare five years ago, General Motors actually built only about a thousand-- the great majority being leased to drivers in California. In the last few months GM has been demanding the vehicles back, much to the distress of their temporary owners, most of whom love the car passionately. ( "door open" alert beeping ) I'm smiling. ALDA: While the EV1 proved to many electric-car enthusiasts that Detroit could have been building zero-emission, high-performance cars for over a decade now, the weak point remained their limited range. So even as newer battery technology has apparently solved this problem for a small, light car like the tzero, General Motors and the rest of the industry has all but abandoned storing energy in batteries, and has instead turned to the onboard generation of electricity using a new fuel-- hydrogen. BORRONI-BIRD: The car industry as a whole has come to the conclusion that battery-powered vehicles just don't get the range that people want, and that the only chance we have to provide zero emissions, completely renewably, is to use hydrogen as an energy carrier, as opposed to electricity. I think everybody in the car industry now is beginning to converge on the idea that hydrogen is the long-term fuel-- the fuel of the future. ALDA: And so we're taking a trip to visit one of the pioneers of hydrogen-powered vehicles here in the German countryside, just a few miles from where the automobile was born. If the visionaries in the auto industry are right, we're going to see a technology that will not only change what you drive, but also the future of the planet.

				Goodbye Gasoline Learn how fuel cell technology has become an increasingly more viable option for powering cars.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: This was the very first car we built. ALDA: We're just outside Stuttgart in Germany with DaimlerChrysler's director of fuel-cell development, Andreas Truckenbrodt. TRUCKENBRODT: So they started with fuel cells in... in the spacecraft application, and then it was decided to go into the car. And this was the very first car in 1994 where we put a fuel-cell system on wheels. ALDA: Fuel cells make electricity from hydrogen and oxygen. Typically fuel cells are arranged in a stack. Each individual cell consists of a membrane between two plates, with hydrogen fed to one side and oxygen to the other. Hydrogen molecules-- pairs of atoms-- give up their protons to the membrane, while their electrons stream off as an electric current. Their work done, the electrons reunite on the other side of the membrane with the protons that passed through and with an oxygen atom to form water. The power of a fuel-cell stack depends on the size and number of individual cells. With oxygen free from the air, all that's needed to make electricity is a supply of hydrogen. This is the fuel tank-- hydrogen tank. So with this type of tank it could go 150 kilometers, roughly, but it only had 50 kilowatt, which is not a lot for this type of car. And of course all the... There was no... There was just the two passengers in there, but there was no cargo space anymore, what is not a great idea for a delivery van like this. ALDA: 50 kilowatts, by the way, translates to about 67 horsepower-- about the power of a motorcycle engine. ALDA: That is a gigantic piece of machinery. People didn't really care about minimizing space. They just made it that it worked. And just looking at a big tank of hydrogen like that, you think, "I don't know if I'd want to be in here if this gets hit by a truck." Am I right to be worried about that? Well, that's of course one of the big issues, one of the concerns people often raise about safety of hydrogen, that's for sure. So we have a lot of hydrogen sensors in there, so whenever something goes wrong and hydrogen is starting to leak-- well, it never happens, but if it would leak-- then of course we shut it off. And the hydrogen has one advantage. As it is so light, it just... when it, uh, starts leaking or exploding, it just goes up there in the air and nothing stays where you are. So there were some tests-- just intentionally made tests-- where they ignited hydrogen and they ignited a gasoline car. And the hydrogen car burned, but it went off and then it was done, whereas the gasoline car burned and kept burning and burning and burning. So that's why we feel very comfortable with the safety of hydrogen. ALDA: Parked nearby is another delivery van, built just a couple of years ago. So just have a look, maybe, how it developed. Oh, wow! Where did it all go?! ( chuckles ) Oh, all the technology is just here underneath the floor, and that's how it really... In eight years we really could compress the technology to make it fit in there. So this is the development from filling the whole cargo bay of the trunk to where we are today. The other one had 50 kilowatts. This is a 70-kilowatt system. This is made for our A-class, and the A-class has a nice design, anyway. This is... this is a production car, so it's not specifically designed for the fuel-cell system to fit in. But we have a double floor in here, so you see the fuel-cell system is fitting in this part of the car from underneath. We also have the fuel tanks underneath. So for today we are taking normal production cars to fit the fuel-cell system in, because that's for... for us the most efficient way to make a car running. And then once you sell a lot of those, you have a market for them, then you'll start designing a different kind of car around the fuel cell. Yeah. Yeah. But that's an interesting question. We think that it is also important to demonstrate to the people that this is a normal car. So the car doesn't need to look very fancy and specific. It's just a car. This is going to be fun. ALDA: The A-class Mercedes is a popular small car in Europe, normally powered, of course, by an old-fashioned internal-combustion engine, unlike this one. Just push this all the way down to drive? Like in your normal car. It's nice and smooth, huh? Yeah. How about the range of this car? Well, this range is 150 kilometers. We didn't want to have any impact on the passenger space here, so that's why we only put two bottles of hydrogen. If you would like to increase the range... Be careful, there's a camera there-- a speeding camera. Oh, yeah. ( chuckling ) I have one back here, too. You can be so fast, and you can really try. The most amazing feature here is acceleration. You can try a little bit once we've left this village here. ALDA: Running on its electric motor under the hood, the F-Cell is certainly peppy enough. But of course its most dramatic feature is trailing behind us-- a trickle of water and water vapor and nothing else coming from the tailpipe. Andreas Truckenbrodt plans for DaimlerChrysler to be selling fuel-cell vehicles to commercial-fleet operators by 2010, with the first private vehicles going on sale a few years later. TRUCKENBRODT: And that's interesting. We are just thinking... defining what would be our customer profile ten years from now, and we would certainly expect some... some technology freaks. Here we are back home. Nice-- nice drive. ALDA: Most of the major manufacturers have similar plans to DaimlerChrysler's, moving cautiously toward offering fuel-cell vehicles to the public five or ten years from now. And most of them also see these first fuel-cell cars being based on existing models, retrofitted with fuel cells and hydrogen tanks. But this approach doesn't satisfy General Motors' Chris Borroni-Bird. Fuel cells in a conventional vehicle I associate with a rational approach. You know, there's a certain number of people who will want to buy those vehicles because they care about the environment, but it's not enough to really help the environment. To really help the environment we've got to create vehicles that people, you know, lust over. So we said, "What if we design a vehicle around the fuel cell? "We're taking this technology, "and let's really take advantage of it "from a styling standpoint "and create a vehicle that is safer, "looks more beautiful, it's got more interior space, more comfort, greater performance." And we can do all that when we design a vehicle around the technology. ALDA: It took Chris Borroni-Bird and his new design and technology team just two years to come up with the AUTOnomy concept car that made such a splashy debut in Detroit early in 2002. Its key feature is what its designers call its skateboard, a six-inch-thick platform that contains all the car's systems-- its fuel cell, electric motors, computers and controls. This is the AUTOnomy skateboard. ALDA: So the idea is to make a lot of these. Yes, millions of these, mass-produce them, and get the costs right down, and then be able to ship it to plants all over America and all over the world, in fact, and put different bodies on using local labor, local materials, local design, local engineering, and really have customized bodies on a mass-produced chassis. ALDA: The body design they produced for the auto show was strictly for bragging rights only. We're conveying two messages-- one a very futuristic, exciting-looking vehicle, and that fuel cells in the future aren't just going to be appliance-like vehicles. They're going to be exciting vehicles that people can get emotional about. And secondly, the design is such that it communicates the fact there's no engine in the body itself. ALDA: Since the AUTOnomy's public unveiling, Chris and his team have been hard at work trying to make the concept a reality, or at least to build a drivable version. They've got the skateboard down to about 11 inches thick-- on their way to their goal of six inches-- and they've developed a body that can be simply dropped into place on top of it. Making this separation of guts and body possible is the fact that there are no mechanical links between the driver's controls and the wheels. It's all done electronically-- so-called "drive-by-wire." Sitting behind what we used to call the wheel with no engine in front is a slightly unnerving experience, especially with the company vice-president who's responsible for the car riding in the passenger seat. Most people would've hit the pole by now. ( chuckling ) I don't think you'll let people hit the pole. ALDA: With no mechanical links to constrain them, the Hy-wire's designers have come up with controls that are more like those of a Nintendo game than a car-- no foot pedals, and the brakes and accelerator in the hand grips. We suspect that the best implementation of by-wire technology will be with more of a conventional interface with the vehicle, but to give you a sense of what might be possible, we put everything in your hands. I see my right foot is... is driving a phantom car here. I'm going to pull into this parking space. Oh! Oh! Well, I can see the feedback system got you a little bit. ALDA: Let me see what it's like to go backwards. ALDA: One simple little trick is having video cameras in place of rearview mirrors. There's one mirror here, and there's a mirror over there, too. BURNS: So this doesn't feel like those jeeps you used to drive on MASH, huh? Oops! That does! ( both laughing ) BURNS: The by-wire system is going to give us a chance to do some pretty exciting things in our future cars. We'll be able to distinguish our brands-- a Cadillac versus a Chevrolet-- because of the way in which we tune the steering, the braking and the accelerating just with computer algorithms, rather than having to change mechanical parts. Wouldn't everybody want to drive a Cadillac if you could give them software that made it feel like a Cadillac? I think that's a very important observation. The things that will differentiate the brands will become very important. I'm not necessarily saying that the Cadillac feels better, but it could feel different. Oh, right, now I've got one hand for acceleration, the other hand for the brake. I'm driving like a million bucks. Well, you must be relieved I didn't crash this. Oh, you did a wonderful job. ALDA: For the last 12 months, the Hy-wire has been everywhere on the public-relations circuit, including here at the Challenge Bibendum, where I got a second shot at its unconventional controls. Ironically, these have tended to eclipse the real revolution the Hy-wire represents-- that it doesn't burn oil and that it doesn't pollute. The Hy-wire certainly scores points for novelty. The challenge Larry Burns and his team now face is to make its technology commonplace. BURNS: If we invent this great technology but it's too expensive and only a few people can afford it, it's not going to solve the energy and emissions issues that we all want to solve. So you have to get to very, very low cost and very, very high volumes in order to realize the benefits from fuel-cell vehicles and from hydrogen. That will only happen if the car is compelling, affordable, environmentally sustainable and gives companies an opportunity to generate a yield on their investment. That's really what we're driving to. ALDA: It's a destination all the car companies would dearly like to reach before either skyrocketing oil prices or stricter environmental regulations stop them in their tracks. We'll look at what has to happen along the way to the car of the future, next.

				Hydrogen Ahead Hydrogen is a clean, efficient fuel found in abundance in Iceland Learn about plans to gather, store and distribute it.
		Select text to jump ahead in the clip: SCHMIDT: This is an engine test lab. ALDA: While most of the major car companies are looking ahead to hydrogen's replacing gasoline, not all of them are waiting for fuel cells to be perfected. Here at Ford's research center, for instance, is a car undergoing emissions testing that looks exactly like an everyday car... even under the hood. ALDA: Is this a regular internal-combustion engine? It looks like a regular engine, but it's much more sophisticated because this uses hydrogen. Therefore the base engine is, or was, designed to use for gasoline, but this is now equipped with hydrogen. So this burns hydrogen instead of gasoline? Yes, you're right. This is a bridging technology, finally, which will enable us in the future to go to the next step, to fuel-cell-powered cars. Because this has one significant advantage. We can use existing manufacturing facilities. We can partially use existing parts-- ignition systems, injectors. How much do you have to change? I mean, is it very costly to switch to this kind of motor from a regular internal combustion? Um, actually it's more expensive but significantly less expensive compared to a fuel-cell-powered car. So you'll take it out, huh? Yeah, I'll take it out. ALDA: Bob Natkin is the engineer in charge of the hydrogen internal-combustion engine. He and his team have spent months tweaking and tuning a regular Ford Focus engine to run on hydrogen instead of gasoline. ( engine revving ) So I guess you're demonstrating the fast pickup? Well, the idea is that... Or is this just the way you drive? ( chuckling ) A little of both. ( chuckling ) Eventually the idea is this should be relatively transparent to a normal customer. This should act and feel like a regular car that you're used to driving every day. ALDA: With one significant difference. It smells good, you know? Really, it smells like a laundry room. Fresh laundry is what we call it. And like some moist air. Yeah, it's really nice. That'll turn out to be like a... a thing that people do-- you know, smelling each other's tailpipes. ALDA: The car I was sniffing is actually a hydrogen-powered car that's also equipped with hybrid technology. Like regular hybrids, it has an electric motor to supplement the engine, so when the car stops, seconds later the engine does, too. Okay, now I'm going to stop. ( engine humming ) 1,001... 1,002... ( engine stops ) Wow. This silence is wonderful. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a little disconcerting. Boy, and it's ready to go immediately. Yeah, we have races to see who can take their foot off the brake and get to the gas pedal before the engine starts, and nobody's been able to do it yet. We've got hybrids on the road now that use gasoline and electricity. But here electricity and hydrogen, that... that seems like... it seems like we're standing next to a car of way in the future. I mean, how far in the future is this... is this car? The technology here is all conventional technology utilizing a new fuel. If we had fuel available, this car would be out in a very short period of time. ALDA: If we had the fuel available-- in other words, if hydrogen was as easy to create, distribute, dispense and store in the car as gasoline is today. I can do things like hooking up... ALDA: It turns out that dispensing hydrogen is the easy part, though here at Ford, the guys at the pump have to wear special suits to reduce the risk of sparks. This car, like most of the hydrogen-powered research vehicles we've seen, uses hydrogen gas stored in high-pressure tanks under the floor. High pressure isn't necessarily... it's... it's a storage answer. It's not necessarily the only or the best. It's the one we're using currently. And there's a lot of other people that have ideas about unique or different storage capability or storage technologies, and they're developing them. And as one clearly becomes better than all the rest, what'll happen is what happens in every free market, is people will migrate to whatever one's the best. If I keep having to buy these cars I'd have to get a bigger garage. I'll take it! Okay. ALDA: Back at the Challenge Bibendum, we ran into a husband-and-wife team who believe they already have the best way to store hydrogen-- as a solid. What exactly did you work on with regard to this? The whole thing. In other words, the... our batteries... ALDA: 20 years ago Stanford Ovshinsky invented the nickel-metal hydride rechargeable battery used today in everything from computers to the Toyota Prius hybrid he and his wife Iris are so proud of. Normally, this runs on gas. Normally, this runs on gas, but we've converted it to run on hydrogen. We've converted it to run on hydrogen, and instead of getting hydrogen from a high-pressure tank or liquid hydrogen, both of which are not really going to make it in terms of volume production... then we put our hydrogen as we do in our batteries in a solid form. So hydrogen goes into... You fill it up, we fill it up at a station with a pump that's got our hydrides in it, fills it up in less than five minutes if you like and you then take that and it feeds into the engine and you have an all-hydrogen car with solid hydrogen. Now, what's Iris getting? I brought a piece of your solid... ALDA: The sample Iris has brought over is a proprietary metal alloy that soaks up hydrogen gas like a sponge soaks up water. And we met the production... ALDA: How do you get the hydrogen out of this, into the car? Very easily, because we put it into a tank which is back here... ALDA: Stan and Iris claim their Ovonics tank can store twice as much hydrogen as a typical high-pressure tank containing hydrogen gas. ALDA: What's keeping us from having these either in our cars or at the gas station to produce hydrogen? What's the roadblock? I think... we're the best-kept secret. Now that we're on television... ( Alda laughing ) maybe that will change. ALDA: In fact, Stan Ovshinsky had already unveiled his solid hydrogen car to the press a few weeks earlier, and Ovonics is also already in partnership with one of the big oil companies, ChevronTexaco. What's more, they are far from the only group exploring the storage of hydrogen as a solid rather than as a gas or liquid. BURNS: Why is that ideal? Well, first of all, if there happened to be any rupture at all in the tank and if it was stored solid state, it's bonded in the material, so it's not going to escape. I think more importantly for the auto industry, the structure of our vehicle is oftentimes made out of hollow tubes, and we could fill those hollow tubes with this solid-state material perhaps someday. Or you could use that spongelike material as an energy-absorbing material in the front of the vehicle and it could serve the purpose of absorbing energy in a crash as well as storing the hydrogen. So it's... you're cushioning your crash with your gas tank. ( chuckling ): That's right. Isn't that an interesting turnaround? That could be a possibility. Now, you have to keep in mind now, I'm a scientist, I'm head of an R&D laboratory. I'm paid to be optimistic about technology and to think about the future and to think about the possible opportunities for the world. Solid-state storage of hydrogen, if that breakthrough comes through, this game is going to change very, very fast. ALDA: Nowhere is the dream of hydrogen's becoming the fuel of the future more alive than here, perhaps one of the last spots on earth you'd expect such a revolution to unfold. We're in Iceland, whose tiny population of less than 300,000 is entirely dependent on imported oil-- oil that provides the fuel for its large fishing fleet as well as its cars, trucks and buses. But if Iceland has no oil of its own, it does possess another underground resource-- hot magma from the earth's mantle welling up beneath a surface that is itself the product of volcanic oozings in the not-too-distant past. ( steam hissing ) In many places, the magma comes close enough to the surface to heat the groundwater to well above its boiling point. We're walking in one of those spots now, where a borehole was recently drilled to test the potential of the geothermal energy just under our feet. ALDA: This is just one of many boreholes in the country? Yeah. And you could make many more? You could put one pretty much anyplace? Well, I wouldn't say anyplace. It's more or less around the crack where the Atlantic Ridge goes through the island. It's remote control. You can open the borehole from the... away. Just push the red button and we'll see. ( steam hissing ) ( steam roaring ) ALDA: The noise is shattering and a dramatic reflection of the power Iceland is sitting on, power in the last 50 years it has increasingly tapped, first to provide hot water for heating homes and more recently to produce electricity. In fact, one of the country's major tourist attractions-- the Blue Lagoon, packed year-round with bathers-- is actually the waste pond for one of a half-dozen or so geothermal power plants in Iceland. SKULASON: We have tapped a very small fraction of the geothermal resource. We estimate, actually, we have only used about one or two percent of the geothermal source for both heating or electric production. And this is more or less 100% renewable power, and then we can actually use that to make hydrogen. So we have a big resource to make a lot of hydrogen to power our own vehicles, our own ships and then in the future, maybe vehicles and ships in some other countries. You'll be able to transport the hydrogen, which is a way of transporting... Electricity. Electricity, and in turn that's a way of transporting your geothermal resource. ALDA: In the last few years, Iceland as a nation has committed itself to this vision of becoming the world's first hydrogen economy, freeing itself entirely from imported oil. Jon Bjorn Skulason heads a venture jointly owned by the government and several major companies with an interest in hydrogen. It has as its symbolic beginning a rather lonely fuel station on the outskirts of the country's capital, Reykjavik. So it looks like it's all set up for a car to pull up and fill up. It's actually ready. You can actually... It's... it's... the station is full of hydrogen. If we had vehicles here, we could actually fill up vehicles right now. So it's ready for use. Watch where you point that thing. It's fully safe and fully automatic. Now, I saw them putting hydrogen in a car someplace else, and they were wearing anti-static suits and they were kind of careful about it. You mean anybody can just pull up and jam this in their tank? That's... well, of course you need a little bit of training-- we have to think about how to use this. But in the future, you will just drive your vehicle up here, you will plug this into your car, you'll push the button or put your credit card in or whatever, how it's used today, fill your vehicle with hydrogen, put it back again and drive away. There will be no difference whatsoever. Now, where is this hydrogen coming from when it comes out of here? Well, we've got to go inside and show you where all the machinery is. So inside here you have all the major components of the electrolyzer, actually the mother of the station as we can call it. ALDA: The electrolyzer is actually simply a reverse fuel cell stack, producing hydrogen from electricity and water instead of electricity and water from hydrogen. This is right next to, or part of, a regular filling station where they sell gasoline, right? And you can add a little building like this and produce hydrogen at a filling station and sell it. Yeah, that's what we think actually will be part of the future, is actually on-site production of hydrogen. You can see all these oil tankers driving around all over the world. If we design the future like this, we don't need oil tankers driving around anymore. We just need... we still need the wires in the air with the electricity, and of course, the water system or pipeline system for the water system, but the distribution is on site. ( speaking Icelandic ) ALDA: A few weeks after our visit to Reykjavik's hydrogen filling station, it had a customer-- the delivery van we'd seen in Germany, loaned for the ceremonial opening of the station by one of the partners in the venture, DaimlerChrysler. But while Iceland is bullish on becoming a hydrogen economy, it does have unique advantages most of the rest of the world lacks: a small, politically cohesive population and above all, of course, an abundant, cheap, clean and renewable source of electricity that can be made into hydrogen on site in stations like this one. In the United States, the questions surrounding both where the hydrogen will come from and how it will be distributed-- so-called "infrastructure issues"-- are much more difficult to solve. But hydrogen can be made directly from natural gas, or from coal or even petroleum. And of course, as in Iceland, it can also be made with electricity-- which itself can be generated in many different ways. That's the beauty of the hydrogen-- it comes from so many different sources. Today we're 98% dependent on petroleum for automobile transportation; that's not a good position for our industry to be in. We're pretty much held hostage to whatever is going to happen with petroleum in the future. ALDA: Larry Burns has stakedhis future-- and maybe the future of his company-- on developing a car that breaks free of its historical dependence on oil. BURNS: If we can create this vehicle that we envision-- we call it a "compelling vehicle"-- one that you're going to want to buy because it's so exciting to own, it's affordable, and it's sustainable environmentally, and we can make money off of it... So you combine those four together and that sets up this basis for this change. We're targeting to have that type of vehicle developed by 2010. Then it's kind of like that movie Field of Dreams-- "If you build it, they will come." And I think the infrastructure will come, Alan, because the vehicle is so compelling and the entrepreneurial spirit of people will be so strong that they're going to want to make this transition happen. ALDA: But before that transition happens, and with gas still costing less than two dollars a gallon, we are all going to be tempted by vehicles that are compelling for reasons other than their environmental friendliness. We're at an unused airfield near Stuttgart in Germany, watching something curious about the weaving approach of DaimlerChrysler's F400 Carving concept car. ALDA: Ah... now, I see one thing that this did on the way up here-- I saw the wheels go out like that when it was swerving from side to side. The wheels go out like that if you are cornering. You are able to have much higher lateral forces. You can drive cornerings very fast. Fast? You can take a corner... Faster than before. Oh, so this would make a good getaway car. That's right-- it's a very sporty car. ( both laughing ) ( engine starts up ) ALDA: Every year the car companies show off their concept cars, cars unlikely ever to be put into production, but that explore new designs and technologies. The F400 Carving, along with its tilting wheels, has a lightweight, carbon-fiber body and drive-by-wire steering and brakes that require as much onboard computing power as a high-end PC. And as the industry confronts the need to discard much of the technology that has sustained it during its first 100 years, cars like this are a reminder that when we customers choose what future car to buy, reason will still have to compete with raw emotion. Well, you know something, I am emotional about this. This is nice; it's fun. Yeah, it's much more fun if you had the opportunity to drive faster. Yes, well, I've got to get to know it better. We're not, you know, we're not on close terms like that yet. ALDA: How do you turn it off? Ah. Just like a computer. You have to press "start" to turn it off. ( laughing )