What Price FreedomCAR?

The Promises and Pitfalls of Trying to Put 'Supercars' on the Road

Posted: 02-Jun-2004; Updated: 27-May-2005

GM's Precept (left) and Ford's Prodigy (right), two concept cars from the PNGV program.

The Bush Administration highly-touted FreedomCAR program, designed to promote the development of hydrogen fuel cell-powered vehicles that would drastically reduce automotive emissions, is an outgrowth of the previous administration's Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (or PNGV) program. Launched with great fanfare by President Bill Clinton in 1993, PNGV was the most comprehensive effort ever by the U.S. government to work with the U.S. automobile industry to develop "supercars" that would cut fuel use, pollution, and emissions of greenhouse gases while enhancing the competitiveness of America's domestic automakers. Now, more than a decade later, the promise of supercars is still languishing on the drawing boards.

By studying the accomplishments and failures of the PNGV program, we can better evaluate the prospects of the new FreedomCAR program becoming more than just another unfulfilled promise.

A new report from Environmental Defense, Today's Promises, Tomorrow's Cars?: Lessons for FreedomCAR from the Ghosts of Supercars Past, looks back at the PNGV - what worked, what didn't - and reveals some roadblocks that the FreedomCAR program (as it is now designed) faces. The author concludes, perhaps surprisingly, that PNGV can be considered a success if judged on its own merits, even though it figured prominently in the broader, failed transportation energy policy of the 1990s. While highlighting what the program did accomplish, the report puts its finger on a number of crucial pitfalls that could also doom FreedomCAR, such as the distortion of research priorities; public vs. private ownership of research results; the role of advanced technology cars within a broader automotive policy; and the lure of a technological "quick fix" in shaping environmental strategies for fuel use and emissions controls.

The author of the report, Barry Lynn, is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, where he is currently writing a book on the global industrial revolution of the last two decades. A business journalist and former executive editor of Global Business Magazine, he spoke about the failed promise of the PNGV program and the future of advancements in the auto industry.

Hydrogen fuel cells are being touted as a cure-all for today's gas-guzzling automobiles. But does the technology live up to its promise?

Barry Lynn: Technology itself is not a solution. You really have to reshape the marketplace in order to provide a pull to get that technology into position to have any real effect on actual energy usage.

Despite the engineering advances made by the PNGV program in the 1990s, those cars did not make it to the marketplace. Whose fault is that? Is it shared equally by industry, government regulators and consumers?

Lynn: I think PNGV was a sort of "one-two" program that never had the second step. The first part of the program (which was successful) was the transfer of technology from the public sector to the private sector, and to create a consensus within the industry about how to carry these technologies into the market, and that was successful. None of the people who were really involved in that were to blame for the fact that it didn't come to market.

There are a number of reasons for this, not least was the Republican-controlled Congress (which did not mandate higher fuel economy standards), and the fact that there never was a reshaping of the market.

To make a program like this really work, the only way you can really judge the value of a technology is in the application. The only way you can value the application is, is it working toward some social good? Is it reducing energy consumption overall - not just in a single car but within the market as a whole? Is it reducing the amount of carbon dioxide that is being put into the atmosphere? So far, those technologies essentially have been of low use or not successful whatsoever.

Was the PNGV program - by design or default - an example of greenwashing by the auto industry, to make them appear to be environmentally conscious?

Lynn: I can't say for certain what was on the minds of the auto industry at the higher levels, though the program was put forward by the industry - they thought that this was something that would be a good idea to do. Certainly the people that were involved in the program were really committed to it, and they expected it to yield something tangible. I think there's a lot of disappointment by the people that took part that these cars they worked on did not end up on the road. Actually, Toyota and Honda put out hybrid gas-electric cars that they thought initially were not as good as what PNGV had come up with, yet they got to the market first.

I think these corporations probably expected with a Democratic administration that there would be a much more progressive effort to really reshape the market and ratchet up CAFE standards or reduce emissions. The administration never really pushed for any serious ratcheting up of those regulations.

How does the Bush administration's FreedomCAR initiative differ from the PNGV program?

The Hy-wire's interior. Hydrogen fuel cells used to power this latest concept are the main driving force behind the FreedomCAR initiative, but questions remain about the efficiency of the entire fuel chain. (General Motors)

What exactly does FreedomCAR promise? That hydrogen will somehow be used in some way someday in a car?

Lynn: That's another problem with this whole idea. Even if they had a target - we're going to put X number of cars on the road running on hydrogen-powered fuel cells by X date - and they managed to do that, the other side which people often do not look at closely enough is, where does the hydrogen come from?

If you look at what specifically the Bush administration says in terms of what the road map should be for the commercialization of hydrogen, it's very clear that all of their investment on the fuel side is all based on technologies that are designed to extract hydrogen from hydrocarbons. If you get to this vehicle on the road that's fuel cell powered, it's actually just oil by another name, or natural gas by another name. Or it may even be coal by another name. If you look at the full efficiency of the system, running a fuel cell car on hydrocarbons is probably by most measurements a less efficient use of hydrocarbons than our present internal combustion engine.

Simply transferring the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from individual cars to facilities that extract hydrogen from fossil fuels is not a goal that serves society in any particular way. Unless there was a simultaneous push to develop technologies to allow for the creation of hydrogen from water using renewable energy sources where basically you're creating electricity by solar or wind power, and then putting it into a car. But the question then is, are there better places to be putting that electricity - wouldn't it be better to simply put that in house that are now served by coal? If you're taking electricity and turning it into hydrogen, and then you're taking the hydrogen and turning it back into electricity! Even if you're looking at the fuel cell as a way to get renewable energy into a vehicle, it's not necessarily the most efficient way to do so.

The Report

Today's Promises, Tomorrow's Cars? Lessons for Freedom Car from the Ghosts of Supercars Past (901 Kb)     Author: Barry C. Lynn

Other Links:

• FreedomCAR and Vehicle Technologies Program (U.S. Department of Energy)
• Article: Hydrogen's Dirty Secret by Barry Lynn, Mother Jones Magazine (May/June 2003)

To learn more about how government, industry and consumer efforts can improve the environment while advancing automotive technology, visit our Cars and the Environment page.