Automotive Market - Fuel Cell Cars

The Rise of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles

The automotive industry is undergoing extraordinary transformation, driven by electrification, shared mobility and autonomy. These trends will fundamentally change passenger car utilization rates, with much longer daily range requirements and longer hours of operation. Hydrogen fuel cell passenger vehicles provide zero-emissions, low noise and smooth acceleration while also meeting long daily range and rapid refueling requirements.

As of May 2020, there were 15,000+ hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on roads worldwide, with existing government targets aiming for that to increase to 10 million by 2030.

Advantages of Fuel Cell Electric Cars

Hydrogen fuel cell electric cars convert hydrogen from the fuel tank into electricity to power the vehicle’s electric motor. Key advantages include:

• Similar performance and acceleration to gasoline or diesel cars	• Rapid refueling in in less than 5 minutes
• Long range of up to 700 kilometers	• Well adapted to high vehicle utilization and long duty cycle use cases such as taxis and car sharing applications

Ballard’s Experience

Our extensive collaborations with automotive OEMs have driven enhanced product durability and performance while rapidly reducing product costs. Ballard’s fuel cell stacks are fully validated, with more than 6.5 million MEAs produced and 850MW of products deployed with customers around the world. Ballard automated and continuous manufacturing processes ensure high quality, low cost production to meet customer demand.

Ballard has partnered with the world's leading automotive manufacturers, including Volkswagen AG, Audi, Daimler AG, Ford Motor Company and Honda Motor Company, to advance the development of fuel cell passenger vehicles.

Proven Solutions for Passenger Cars

With the design tools and core technologies available at Ballard, we can tune each of the layers of the fuel cell stack for a given application to improve function, durability, life cycle cost and power density. We have a range of our own proprietary anode and cathode catalysts, electrodes, sublayers, membrane additives, seals, and plate materials from which we can quickly design and build new products.

Ballard tailors product development programs to our automotive customers' specific requirements as part of our Technology Solutions portfolio.