• Honda will assemble a hydrogen-powered CR-V at its Marysville, Ohio plant.
• The company was the first to offer a hydrogen vehicle to the general public in 2008 with the FCX Clarity.
• Without a power grid in Canada, don't expect to see this vehicle on our roads.
Honda announced this week that it will launch a CR-V powered by a hydrogen fuel cell. The model will arrive in 2024 and will be assembled at Honda's Marysville, Ohio plant, where the NSX was produced. Production of that performance model ended in November.
We're not reporting this news so you can reserve your fuel-cell CR-V as soon as possible. In Canada, the network to fuel hydrogen-powered vehicles is non-existent, except for a very few stations.
In vehicles using this technology, hydrogen is combined with oxygen inside a fuel cell in a process called reverse electrolysis. The only by-products are electricity, used to power an electric propulsion system, and water, which is released into the atmosphere.
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Read more about Honda and LG's investment in building a battery factory in Ohio here.
In the CR-V with fuel cell, Honda will also install a battery that the fuel cell can recharge. A plug will also be present so that owners can plug in their vehicle at home. It’s one way to overcome the lack of hydrogen filling stations.
In this sense, the vehicle resembles a traditional plug-in hybrid, but with a fuel cell instead of a gas engine.
Honda is not a stranger to this technology, having previously offered the Clarity Fuel Cell, which arrived for 2017 and bowed out last year. Some will also remember the FCX Clarity, offered commercially between 2008 and 2014. In North America, that vehicle was sold exclusively in Southern California, where a hydrogen fueling network is present. Fewer than 50 units were leased to customers at the time.
Honda is one company that believes in this technology and sees it as integral to it strategy to reach its goal of selling only zero-emission vehicles by 2040.