British cult car show Top Gear is almost the television equivalent of marmite – you either love it, or you hate it and you either think of its figurehead Jeremy Clarkson as a witty, inspiring journalist or a pompous old windbag. Still, Top Gear has never really taken a conservative approach to its coverage of green cars – in its eyes they are, almost without exception, woeful and a stain on its high performance motoring world.
So it comes as something of a surprise when the show includes a segment that not only praises a green car – but actually brands one green vehicle the “future of the car” and “the most important car for 100 years”.
The vehicle in question is the Honda FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car – Honda’s breakthrough vehicle that has already earned rave reviews in the US. The problem however, is how to fill the thing up – a problem that Top Gear surprisingly takes a blasé approach to.
Though it has undermined electric cars in the past as slow and clunky the fact is that they remain a more viable alternative to petroleum and diesel vehicles at this time if only because we have a National Grid, which, while needing improvements, is in a much better position to handle a switch over to the population driving electric cars.
By contrast, building hydrogen filling stations is likely to be more complex because of the networking effect. It almost becomes a chicken and egg scenario – people won’t buy the cars until the infrastructure is in place, but people won’t build the filling stations if nobody is buying hydrogen.
Certainly it’s easy to concur with the Top Gear programme that hydrogen fuel cell cars are technological marvels. However, for now at least mass producing the vehicles remains little more than a pipe dream and ignoring more realistic alternatives may only further put the brakes on the green car movement.
