Fuel cells, batteries gear up for mass production

Posted: 25 June 2008
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Honda Motor Company started production of its new FCX Clarity fuel cell vehicle in Japan last week. The new vehicle was designed from scratch as a fuel cell vehicle and is being produced at a dedicated fuel cell vehicle assembly line.

The 100-kilowatt fuel cell stack is manufactured at Honda Engineering Company, where the several hundred cells required for the fuel cell stack are being mass-produced.

Honda is not only the first major automaker to manufacture a fuel cell vehicle, but also the first to manufacture a vehicle with a lithium-ion battery pack.

Honda intends to produce "a few dozen" of the vehicles within the next year and a total of 200 vehicles in the next 3 years. In the United States, the vehicle will first be leased to the Hollywood elite.

As the FCX Clarity rolls off the production line, a number of lithium-ion battery manufacturers are gearing up to meet automakers' future plans. Toyota recently announced that Panasonic EV Energy Company, its joint venture with the Matsushita Group, will start limited production of lithium-ion batteries next year and full production in 2010, in support of Toyota's planned launch date for a plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Toyota is also establishing a new battery research department to develop an innovative next-generation battery that can outperform a lithium-ion battery. Meanwhile, Sanyo Electric will launch the mass production of lithium-ion batteries for hybrid vehicles next year and plans to begin producing lithium-ion batteries for plug-in hybrids in 2011. The company has teamed up with Volkswagen on hybrid vehicle batteries.

Hitachi announced in March that it received an order from General Motors for its lithium-ion battery systems, which it claims will be installed in more than 100,000 hybrid vehicles annually, starting in 2010.