Fuel Cell Development Agreement Signed

The BBC News has a report that a new agreement to develop fuel-cell technology has been reached by three major auto manufacturers: Ford, Daimler AG, and the Renault-Nissan alliance.   The aim of the joint project is to speed up the development of fuel cells as an automotive power source, and also to encourage the development of supporting infrastructure (e.g., hydrogen filling stations).

Ford, Renault-Nissan and Daimler have agreed to jointly develop a fuel cell system to try to speed up the availability of zero-emission vehicles.

The carmakers hope to launch “the world’s first affordable, mass-market fuel cell car” by 2017.

Fuel cells, which produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, are an environmentally attractive technology because their “exhaust” product is water.  To date, though, they have not seen widespread use, except in specialized applications like the space program, because the cost of manufacturing the devices is too high,  But Daimler, at least, has been interested for some time; back in 2009, I wrote about the development of prototype fuel-cell vehicles by Mercedes-Benz.  Work on the project will be carried out at several locations around the world.  The partners hope that their combined global presence will also increase the visibility and impact of the project.

The companies have issued a joint press release.

Update Monday, 28 January, 21:55 EST

Wired also has an article on this development, focused especially on the infrastructure issues involved.

A Black Box for your Car, Revisited

About a year ago, I posted an article here about the possibility that the US government, specifically the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], might soon require all new automobiles sold in the US to be equipped with event data recorders [EDRs]. the so-called “black boxes”.  Similar devices have been used for years on commercial aircraft. and the data obtained from them has been of great value in understanding crashes and improving safety.  As I mentioned in that earlier post, many newer cars already have electronic data recorders of some sort.  These have proved to be useful in accident investigations, although how they work and what they record has been, until quite recently, pretty much up to the automaker.

A recent article at Wired provides an update on what’s happening in this area.  At present, although there is no mandate to equip cars with EDRs, the NHTSA’s regulations do specify that, if an EDR is installed, it must collect a specified set of data.

Since 2006, NHTSA has required that consumers be informed when an automaker has installed an EDR in a vehicle, although the disclosure is typically buried on the car’s owner’s manual. More recently, NHTSA mandated that vehicles manufactured after September 1, 2011 that include the devices must record a minimum of 13 data points in a standardized format.

Congress is now considering legislation that would require EDRs to be installed on new vehicles.

[US Senate] Bill 1813 that mandates EDRs for every car sold in the U.S. starting with the model year 2015 has already passed the Senate. The U.S. House of Representatives is expected to pass a version of the bill with slightly different language.

There are privacy concerns about the collection of this data.  At present, the proposed rules say that EDRs can only collect data related to vehicle safety; but it is not hard to imagine that some security agencies might think that recording GPS coordinates might be a useful little enhancement.  Then there is the question of who owns that collected data.  The pending legislation says that the data belongs to the owner or lessee of the vehicle, which is good.  But it’s likely that the devil is in the details, and the ownership rules will need to be carefully drawn.  For example, the article points out that, if a car is “totalled” in a crash, it typically becomes the property of the insurance company.  The company might, in some cases be tempted to declare the car a total loss in order to own the EDR data for use in legal proceedings.

There is a strong case, on safety improvement grounds, for collecting this kind of data.  WE just need to do our best to ensure that it is not misused.