To explore the reasons for the dissolution of the 5-year hydrogen fuel cell cooperation between nissan, Renault, Daimler and ford

The combination of poor infrastructure, a small market, high research and development costs, and the current trend towards all-electric vehicles has led nissan, Renault, Daimler, and ford to freeze the commercialization of fuel cell vehicles (FCV).

On June 19, foreign media reported that the nissan-renault-mitsubishi alliance would freeze the commercialization plan of fuel cell vehicles (FCV) signed with Daimler and ford in 2013.

The nissan-renault-mitsubishi alliance said it decided to freeze the commercialization plan of the nissan-renault, Daimler and ford hydrogen fuel cell vehicle alliance due to the high cost of fuel cell vehicle development and the difficulty of developing multiple technologies at the same time, and focus its future business resources on the research and development of pure electric vehicles.

It is reported that in 2013, the nissan-renault alliance (mitsubishi has not yet joined the alliance), Daimler and ford launched a three-way cooperation on fuel cell vehicles. The cooperative alliance plans to launch a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle with a price acceptable to the market as soon as 2017 by unifying the system and component specifications.

However, due to the increasing trend of pure electric vehicles driven by the global market, vehicle electrification has become one of the most important directions of automobile development at this stage. As a result, nissan-renault, Daimler and ford need to concentrate their investment capital and technical personnel on the research and development of pure electric vehicles, and fuel cell vehicle cooperation projects have to be suspended.

Similarly, a joint venture between ford motor co., Daimler ag and ballard power systems inc. of Canada announced in early June that it would close.

Daimler chief executive dieter zetsche has said the company is shifting its focus to electric cars in response to the closure. In the future, Daimler will develop its own fuel cell technology for cars.

In fact, it is not hard to find from the frozen cooperation among nissan-renault, Daimler and ford, as well as the reasons for the closure of the joint venture between Daimler and ford that increasing the research and development of pure electric vehicles has almost become one of the main reasons. Suspending the cooperation related to fuel cell vehicles is almost all to make way for the research and development of pure electric vehicles.

Why are these multinationals pausing fuel cell collaboration to make way for pure electric car development?

First, fuel cell vehicles are a niche market. Although major multinational automobile manufacturers have been researching and investing in the field of fuel cell vehicles for many years, the current automotive market is still dominated by traditional fuel cell vehicles and pure electric vehicles, and fuel cell driven vehicles are still a niche market in the global automotive market.

Second, fuel cell vehicles cost too much. Unlike conventional fuel and pure electric vehicles, fuel cell vehicles have a relatively independent and complex power system, which directly leads to the increased cost of fuel cell vehicles.

Fuel cell vehicle power system

The Toyota Mirai is priced at $69,000 and the Honda Clarity is priced at $60,000, far higher than comparable vehicles in other powertrains.

Third, fuel cell vehicle development cannot be commercialized on a large scale. Because of the durability of the automotive fuel cell to reach the commercial standard, lead to large-scale commercial fuel-cell cars not impossible to achieve, to fuel cell passenger car as an example, the present stage fuel cells each running 3000 ~ 4000 h, battery performance will decline 10%, less than 10% of the fuel cell car battery performance attenuation level running under minimum standards for 5000 h.

Fourth, infrastructure hinders the development of fuel cell vehicles. When the automobile prophet visited Japan, he learned that it is not only the cost that hindering the development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but also the infrastructure construction such as hydrogenation. Actually, it is not difficult to build a hydrogen fuel cell car, but how to construct and lay out the network of hydrogen refueling stations.

It is reported that it will cost 500 million yen, or nearly 30 million yuan (including land costs) to build a hydrogen refueling station in Japan that can produce 100 cubic meters of hydrogen per hour.

Fifth, the pure electric vehicle plan forces companies to abandon fuel cell vehicle cooperation. The nissan, Renault and mitsubishi alliance, for example, plans to launch 12 zero-emission electric vehicles by 2022, as well as develop new general electric vehicle platforms and general components that can be used in multiple vehicle classes.

In the eyes of the outside world, the development of multiple models and the development of Shared platforms and parts forced the alliance of nissan, Renault and mitsubishi to freeze the cooperation of fuel cell vehicles and put researchers and capital into the research and development of pure electric vehicles.

Although fuel cell vehicle commercialization faces different problems, automobile enterprises still have not abandoned the development of fuel cell.

Toyota, for example, plans to sell more than 30,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles worldwide by 2020. In order to achieve this goal, Toyota will increase the production capacity of hydrogen fuel cell reactors and expand the countries and regions where hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are sold.

For hydrogen fuel cell vehicle research and development enterprises still have a lot of cooperation. In 2017, gm and Honda established the first joint venture to put hydrogen fuel cell systems into mass production, which will provide advanced fuel cell systems in the future. In early June 2018, audi and ballard power systems extended a 3.5-year contract to jointly develop fuel cells. Toyota is also working with Germany's BMW to develop key components for fuel cell vehicles.

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