FUELING THE
FUTURE AUTOMAKERS AND CONSUMERS
WEIGH ALTERNATIVE FUEL OPTIONS
BY SCOTT SOWERS, AIADA CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
W alking through an auto show reveals where
auto manufacturers are placing their bets on
what the public will buy and where the future
of vehicles is taking all of us. A good example
of this is Toyota’s FCV Plus, which was officially
unveiled at the Tokyo Motor Show in late October of 2015. It remains
among the most conceptual of the concept cars and is still turning
heads two years later.
The car is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell and can export any
extra electricity it generates to the power grid. At its unveiling,
Project Manager Takeo Moriai of Toyota said, “We imagined what
a hydrogen-based society might look like in the fairly near future,
and decided to design a car that could be useful beyond mobility.”
Honda has been tinkering with a similar concept at its ”Honda
Smart Home” in Davis, California, where a house equipped with pho-
tovoltaic panels on the roof provides enough juice to run the house
and charge a small fleet of Honda electric vehicles in the garage.
Ryan Harty, Environmental Business Development Manager for
Honda said, “For us, the Smart Home is very much about energy
management in designing a home that needs as little energy as pos-
sible and integrating the transportation with the home in a way that
is fundamentally a good use of energy.”
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