Goodbye battery, hello fuel cell

Mon, 31 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The battery-powered car has died several deaths in the last 10 months, due to a lack of range, speed and power and an acute sales deficiency. A spokesman for General Motors said the EV1, which was put to sleep this month, had been "a valuable experiment."

Meanwhile, deep in clean, green British Columbia, Firoz Rasul is revving up the power for a next-generation, environmentally hip automobile. An amiable 47-year-old Kenyan of Persian descent, with an engineering degree from the University of Hertfordshire and a McGill MBA, he's a walking ad for globalism -- and the CEO of Ballard Power Systems, the world's leading maker of automotive fuel cells. Backed by a stock price that has doubled since Christmas, he'll happily tell you why the seeming triumph of Titanic SUVs swilling buck-a-gallon gas may not be the final act in the automotive story. "The Stone Age" he reminds us, "didn't end for a lack of stone."

Salon.com > Spencer Reiss

Goodbye battery, hello fuel cell