On the Popular Mechanics website, there is a video of reporter, Ben Chertoff, taking a test drive in a Ford HySeries Edge hydrogen plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. In the video, Chertoff takes the $2 million prototype for a drive around New York City, complete with the potential of being cut-off, hit in traffic or any number of situations that may arise in real world driving.
This is a bit different from some test drives of hydrogen cars in the past that have taken place around an oval racetrack or in a large contained parking lot. Within the past year, manufacturers have allowed these types of test drives within the normal flow of city traffic to occur.
Chertoff gives out some interesting information while driving the vehicle, though he does crack the dreaded flux capacitor joke that I wrote ruefully about a couple of days back. I also need to make one correction in the video and that is that there are actually now 63 hydrogen fueling stations nationwide according to the National Hydrogen Association.
Now, this is the also same Ford HySeries Edge that the company’s CEO Alan Mulally cracked a bad joke about several days back and had to apologize to President Bush and the media for making the joke in the first place. Mulally gave the impression that it would be an easy task to plug the electrical cord mistakenly into the hydrogen nozzle, blowing up the vehicle and everyone around it, which, in reality could not happen.
The Ford HySeries Edge is one of the most technologically promising and environmentally-friendly hydrogen vehicles being shown today. Hopefully, in the near future, everyone who wants to will be able to take this vehicle for a test drive, without worry about plugging the wrong cord into the wrong outlet.