A comparison of battery, hybrid and fuel cell vehicles

Abstract 8 The hydrogen era is foreseen following the European research programme in a time horizon of 2020–2040. But there 9 will be clearly a choice to be made between an electron economy (direct use of the produced electricity) and the so called 10 ‘‘hydrogen economy’’ which leads to the introduction of an intermediate hydrogen production, transport and distribution 11 process before the final use in an electrical process. 12 This paper considers only passenger car and delivery vans applications. In this field a big time gap is to be filled between 13 the situation today, the occurrence of oil shortage in a quite short future and this time horizon 2020–2040. Today’s inter- 14 mediate solutions are clearly based on hybrid electric vehicles and battery electric vehicles. The performances of these solu- 15 tions are putting a lot of questions on the necessity of a hydrogen economy for future transportation. The paper discusses 16 performances of hybrid electric vehicles and battery electric vehicles in comparison of the future hydrogen fuel cell based