Living with Hyundai’s ix35 Fuel Cell

More than one industry bigwig has set themselves against the idea of hydrogen-fuelled cars.

For Wolfgang Zeibart, technical design director of Jaguar Land Rover, it’s the ‘well to wheel’ inefficiency of hydrogen as a fuel that makes no sense. Other key players have expressed more basic safety misgivings about the H in H2O.

At a more local level, the chap who first showed us how to fuel up our Hyundai ix35 Fuel Cell had a well-polished quip all ready for delivery. "Get it wrong and you won’t be around to worry about it.”

This sort of gallows humour seems to crop up quite a bit when folk are discussing hydrogen cars like ours. 80 year old images of airships going down in balls of flame have embedded themselves into the public consciousness of people of a certain age, and of course these more mature motorists are an important part of the hydrogen-potential demographic. Plus, if you dig around on YouTube it’s not that hard to find footage of hydrogen buses aflame.

Hydrogen does burn, but it does so very quickly. In fuel cell vehicles, energy is created via a combustion-free chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen rather than through a continuous succession of explosions, as happens in ‘normal’ internal combustion engines.

As far as safety goes, the consequences of a hydrogen leak are indeed greater than for other conventional car fuels, but then again hydrogen tanks are considerably tougher and better protected. They undergo extreme testing, not just enduring multiple crashes, but also being dropped into a burning pit with scientists firing all sorts of ballistic material at them, to no avail. Hydrogen tanks are strong. In addition, you have many failsafes to shut off the hydrogen flow in the event of an accident.

On top of all that, filling a car with hydrogen is no more difficult than filling one with petrol or diesel. All in all, we reckon we’re as safe in our hydrogen-powered Ioniq as we are in any of the other conventionally powered cars we drive.