Have you seen a sci-fi flick lately?  It’s a bothering sight to see that every director’s notion of a ‘futuristic car’ is a levitating suppository—a white, cigar-shaped blob that accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in a heartbeat and can rise a thousand meters up in the air.  Now, either it’s because Hollywood is beginning to lose their sense of imagination or they don’t want anything distracting the viewers from their multi-million dollar super stars; but one thing’s for certain: you won’t see flying DeLoreans anytime soon.  Oddly enough, after all the mad scientist routine of Doc Brown in the Back to the Future movies, there’s something in the DeLorean that actually makes sense and it’s not the flux capacitor.  In fact, you have to look carefully and notice the words: “Mr. Fusion”.

If you remember your physics, ‘fusion’ refers to the use of hydrogen atoms and combining them together creating heavier elements and release a large amount of energy in the process.  In a broad sense, Hollywood got things right this time.  Although fusion power is certainly something we won’t see in the near future, the use of hydrogen as a source of fuel certainly holds great potential.  Since hydrogen is present in just about everything in nature, there’s no need to drill holes or conquer some Middle Eastern country just to juice up your car.  Wind power, steam regeneration (the most common way to generate hydrogen in commercial quantities) and even the farming of algae can all produce hydrogen.  It’s easy to see why people see hydrogen as the fuel of the future—something we can harvest infinitely after all the oil wells have run dry and the sheikhs end up with a desk job.

At the forefront of such startling development is the new BMW Hydrogen 7.  We were in Berlin to sample this amazing piece of technology, and let us tell you, if this is the car of the future then things look clean and bright.  What shocked everyone, upon seeing the Hydrogen 7, is how much like a normal car it looked: it doesn’t hover, the tires are round and it doesn’t even fold into a suit case.  Granted it has a unique ‘Blue Water Metallic’ paint scheme, it looks every bit like a typical long wheelbase 7 Series.  It’s nicer and statelier than anything out of George Lucas’s imagination.  Looking normal is part of the Hydrogen 7’s job since this is the first hydrogen-powered car to complete the entire development process.  It’s a bona fides production car which means it can be registered, driven, serviced and sadly, be issued a traffic citation for.

More on the traffic citation later, in the mean time, let’s discuss where the Hydrogen 7 fits in BMW’s corporate strategy.  Hydrogen 7 is a part of BMW’s CleanEnergy effort.  As its name suggests, CleanEnergy is a vision of sustained mobility free from harmful emissions (both on the operation of the vehicle as well as the generation of the drive energy).  It’s a three-prong approach with short, medium and long-term components.  The short term comprises the current BMW range which all achieves better mileage and emission figures even with the bump in power and torque.  The manufacturing process has also been cleaned up by using more recyclable and earth-friendly components in the cars.  The medium term approach has to do with Efficient Dynamics or the use of hybrid drivetrains such as gasoline-electric or diesel-electric.  BMW is already part of a much larger consortium of automotive makers all developing and improving the hybrid drivetrain.  Lastly is the long-term component, which BMW believes to be a move away from fossil fuels and towards renewable sources of energy such as hydrogen.  Although part of BMW’s long-term CleanEnergy plans, the mere existence of the Hydrogen 7 proves that hydrogen power is indeed possible even with today’s technology.

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